FREEDOM RESEARCH PODCAST. Professor Roger Pielke Jr. Real and Imagined Climate Threats.

Environmental studies and science policy expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. says that portraying climate change as an immediate existential threat is not accurate and harms the needed climate policies.
“It's almost 20 years ago now that environmental advocates decided to associate advocacy for climate policy with extreme weather. There is a theory of change underlying that if we make people alarmed, that if we scare people, if we associate climate change with some sort of immediate existential threat then people will be more likely to support climate policies,” says Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of the University of Colorado Boulder. But the problem here is, according to Pielke, that there is no science to back up this scare. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges in their reports that while there are more heatwaves and some more rain, tropical cyclones or hurricanes that can cause huge damage have not seen an increase. “And they have not become more intense. The IPCC has not detected or attributed the change in those. The same goes for floods, drought, winter storms. The IPCC does not assess wildfire, because that involves many processes besides climate processes,” Pielke notes.

Urging people into believing something apocalyptic that is not true, is not the best strategy, according to Pielke. “Be careful into trying to scare people into action, is my advice, particularly because successful climate policy – and I think we should be successful in climate policy – is gonna take many decades. And you cannot keep people in a state of fear for decades,” he says.

In the podcast, Pielke discusses the state of climate and explains why he thinks we need a successful climate policy and what should this policy take into account. “As a risk management problem, I am not going to bet on the apocalypse. And as a risk management problem, I am not going to bet on a premise that climate change is a hoax or it doesn't exist,” he explains his position.

Roger Pielke Jr. has academic degrees in mathematics, public policy, and political science and for decades already he has been researching and writing about environmental and climate policies. Currently, he is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder Environmental Studies Department. Recently Pielke announced that he is retiring from the university to work on his other projects. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and has his own publication The Honest Broker (Substack).

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