Columnist ignores real climate science
Michael Barone’s column uses a familiar move: point to a cold winter, cite a few recalibrated opinions and suggest that concern about climate change has been overblown. But weather anecdotes and selective examples don’t overturn decades of accumulated evidence.
Cold winters and polar vortices don’t contradict climate science. In fact, they’re consistent with it. A warming Arctic can disrupt the jet stream, making extreme cold snaps more likely in certain regions. That’s not a failure of climate models — it’s part of what they’ve been warning about.
Mr. Barone highlights comments from Bill Gates and Ted Nordhaus as if they represent some great “never mind” moment. But saying climate change won’t wipe out humanity is not the same as saying it isn’t serious. Most real-world problems don’t require extinction-level stakes to matter. Rising sea levels, heat stress, agricultural disruption, insurance withdrawals and infrastructure strain are already happening and already costing money.
Yes, some early rhetoric — Al Gore’s included — was overly dramatic. Science corrects itself over time. That’s a feature, not a flaw. The core findings haven’t gone away: the planet is warming, human activity is a major contributor and the risks increase the longer we delay addressing it.
The column also blends together unrelated issues — the replication crisis in psychology, COVID-era policy mistakes, even lab-leak debates — to imply that climate science itself is suspect. That’s a stretch. Climate conclusions rest on multiple independent lines of evidence: surface and satellite measurements, ocean heat content, ice loss, and long-term climate records. These findings don’t hinge on a single study or model.
Reasonable people can disagree about policy responses. But dismissing climate risk by pointing to a cold winter or past exaggerations doesn’t help readers understand what’s actually going on.
The real question isn’t whether humanity will survive climate change. It’s how much avoidable damage we’re willing to tolerate before acting like adults about it.
Dan Doviddio
Wheaton