Physicist and former CalTech provost Steven Koonin’s superb 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, busts many popular myths about climate change. Koonin is clear that global temperatures are indeed rising, and that some of this rise in temperatures is caused by human activity. But Koonin warns – and he marshals much data to justify his warnings – that what we really know about the details behind and beyond these large facts about climate change, and about efforts to arrest it, is surprisingly tentative. Indeed, such knowledge is often so skimpy as to be non-existent.
Our relatively meager amount of knowledge about climate change, as well as about the likely consequences of different policies to deal with it, is surprising not because of any recent discoveries that cast new-found doubt on what was once legitimately believed to be ample knowledge. No, our relatively meager amount of knowledge about climate matters has always been meager, yet this ‘meagerness’ has been consistently ignored by prominent politicians, journalists, and other ‘elite’ molders of public opinion.
A public frightened into believing that some collective calamity is in the offing is a public more eager for, or at least more docile in the face of, authoritarian efforts marketed as necessary to prevent the calamity.
With the turn of almost every page of Unsettled? I was struck by the ominous parallels between the mainstream narrative on the climate and the mainstream narrative on COVID. Pointing out such parallels wasn’t at all Koonin’s purpose; in fact, I suspect that he himself took no notice of these parallels. And, of course, I’d earlier been alerted by other writers to these parallels. But the length and reality of these parallels weren’t driven home to me until I’d read Koonin’s tract. Each and every one of the following attitudes – which I distill from my reading of Koonin’s book and from my immersion over the past 30 months in all things COVID – is prominent in matters of COVID as well as in matters of the climate.
Humanity is doomed to suffer gravely unless the government takes drastic, indeed, unprecedented corrective action and does so immediately!
Nothing – no other goal, aspiration, hope, or concern – nothing is as important as doing all that we can to reduce as much as is physically possible our exposure to the toxic substance that poses an existential threat to humanity! Therefore, there’s no need to account for the ‘costs’ and other collateral harms that might arise from drastic corrective action, for none of these costs and harms, even if they’re real, can possibly compare to the costs and harms that will befall us if we don’t take in full measure the prescribed drastic action!
The present emergency demands decisive interventions that are neither delayed nor diluted by trifling concerns, such as the sanctity of private property rights or the desire to avoid overreach by the government’s executive branch!
The problem is one that can be correctly diagnosed only by scientific experts. Fortunately, such a diagnosis has been confidently made. And so to save humanity we must put aside our petty individual self-interests and for the greater good do as we are instructed by the experts! Humanity’s very survival demands that we all obey the Science, for only the Science can light the path from a dark and dangerous today into a shining and safe tomorrow!
The Science reveals that there is one and only one path to our salvation. Everyone must follow the One Path! Those who insist on other paths would not only destroy themselves but all of humanity!
Fortunately, the Science is clear, complete, and settled! Therefore, anyone who challenges the Science – anyone who dares to challenge the prediction that catastrophe will occur unless government overhauls society and the economy as instructed by the Science and the Scientists – is a slack-jawed ignoramus, a sociopathic apologist for plutocrats, or a dangerously benighted ideologue! And so there’s nothing to be gained by allowing these dissenting voices to speak! Indeed, dissenting voices must be silenced lest they lure the unsuspecting masses into a self-destructive skepticism of the Science!
To keep to a minimum the number of anti-social renegades who insist on acting contrary to the counsel of the Science, the Scientists and their champions in government and the media must, sad to say, routinely simplify or exaggerate – and occasionally, alas, even to falsify – the public messaging. Taking such liberties with the strict, literal truth is, of course, not to lie; only a rube would think it to be so. The taking of such liberties with the strict, literal truth furthers the higher Truth. Taking such liberties is a necessary means of promoting the greater good by ensuring that the noble masses, simple-minded creatures that they are, aren’t misled by pointless doubts and irrelevant nuances to behave self-destructively.
These parallels of public discussions about the climate and public discussions about COVID are indeed real and ominous.
The passage in Koonin’s book that, more than any other, drove home to me the reality of these ominous parallels appears on page 171:
Creating alarming headlines through highly uncertain projections of the future is one thing, but promoting the specter of climate-related deaths by distorting existing data is quite another. A 2019 article in Foreign Affairs by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, was titled “Climate Change Is Already Killing Us.” Yet the text doesn’t deliver on the catchy title. Astoundingly, the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air pollution (which cause an estimated 100 per 100,000 premature deaths each year, or about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to human-induced climate change. The World Health Organization itself has said that indoor air pollution in poor countries – the result of cooking with wood and animal and crop waste – is the most serious environmental problem in the world, affecting up to three billion people. This is not the result of climate change. It’s the result of poverty. That pollution does indeed affect the climate … but pollution deaths aren’t caused by a changing climate; it’s the pollution itself that kills. Such brazen misinformation by the WHO’s leadership is particularly upsetting for its potential to diminish confidence in the organization’s public health mission.
Readers might recall that Dr. Ghebreyesus, seated in his high perch, has a habit of predicting calamity from COVID, even well into the virus’s decline in lethality. This dishonest or incompetent (I’m not sure which) performance by one of the world’s supposed leading public-health officials is, obviously, part of a longer pattern. The pattern is ominous.
Science is an especially sweet and nutritious fruit of the Enlightenment. But an even sweeter and more nutritious fruit is the recognition that truth – including, but not limited to, scientific truth – is only reliably approached without ever being absolutely and forever secured, and approached only through open inquiry, discussion, debate, and tolerance for dissenting opinions and perspectives.
Too many elite intellectuals and public officials today – and, I fear, also too many ordinary men and women – have lost sight of the fact that science and reason are tools for improving our understanding and for supplying us with some information that’s useful for making the complicated and inescapably value-laden trade-offs that, in this vale, we must make. The belief that science is a source of complete and godlike knowledge is not merely mistaken, it’s a toxic fuel of authoritarianism when it’s combined with the false understanding of social problems as being a science project to be ‘solved’ by persons in power.
About the Author
Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He is the author of the books The Essential Hayek, Globalization, Hypocrites and Half-Wits, and his articles appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, US News & World Report as well as numerous scholarly journals. He writes a blog called Cafe Hayek and a regular column on economics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boudreaux earned a PhD in economics from Auburn University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.
Article cross-posted from AIER.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Yep, if you want to know what it’s all about, just look at their proposed solutions.
The fact is that the Earth’s average temperature has been consistently changing since the beginning, due to Milankovitch Cycles, changes in the Sun’s energy, changes to the magnetic field, and other natural reasons. When they tell you a change of a couple of degrees over a long period of time would be catastrophic, you automatically know they’re lying through their teeth. When they tell you they can stop it from changing, you automatically know they’re insane megalomaniacs.
As they esteem themselves to be supremely advanced, imagining lesser advanced peoples supposedly cowering in fear every time there was a solar eclipse or other explainable phenomena, they are, ironically and simultaneously, no different. Cowering in hysterical paranoia over phenomena they do not understand.
That’s what happens when you reject the first sentence of God’s Word. From there, it can only get worse. They perpetuate turmoil, misery, unrest, and irrational fear that is 1000x more destructive than any gradual changes of temperature could ever be.