Rupert Murdoch has a solution for global warming: “Stop building vast houses on seashores.”
That was probably the most sensible thing the media mogul had to say in a Sunday interview with Australia’s Sky News, during which he demonstrated astonishing ignorance about climate science. “We should approach climate change with great skepticism,” Murdoch said. Considering that his media empire is the animating force behind climate denial, this isn’t a shocker. Still, his comments illustrate how the right has hardened its position on global warming—or, as in Murdoch’s case, simply reversed it. This is the same Rupert Murdoch who, seven years ago, warned that global warming “poses clear, catastrophic threats,” and argued, “We certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction. We must transform the way we use energy.”
His comments also reveal how deeply into the bucket of shoddy science skeptics are willing to reach in order to support their claims. Here are the three most egregiously inaccurate statements Murdoch made:
1. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here, and there will always be a little bit of it. At the moment the North Pole is melting, but the South Pole is getting bigger.”
Though it’s true that the earth has previously experienced changes in average temperature, never before has such a large shift happened so quickly. A 2013 study by scientists at Stanford found that climate change is occurring ten times faster than any time in the past 65 million years. It took thousands of years for the earth to emerge from the last ice age; now, the time scale is in decades.
A study finding a 7.5 percent increase in the volume of sea ice in Antarctica is the skeptics’ weapon du jour, promoted recently by the Murdoch-owned Daily Mail as a blow to climate science. But that’s compared to a 75 percent decline in Arctic sea ice. Currently the Arctic is losing ten times as much ice every year as the Antarctic is gaining, so modest gains in Antarctica won’t do much to counter sea level rise. Meanwhile, two separate studies published in May concluded that the Antarctic ice sheet has in fact “gone into a state of irreversible retreat,” suggesting that the accumulation in Antarctica is a temporary phenomenon that will yield to melting ice and sea level rise on a scale even greater than predicted by the IPCC.
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2. “In terms of the world’s temperature going up, the worst, the most alarmist things have said…3 degrees Centigrade in one-hundred years. At the very most one of those will come from man-made, be man-made.”
It’s not clear where Murdoch got his numbers, but they don’t match up with serious scientific assessments of climate trends. The most recent IPCC report predicted a temperature increase of about 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and accounts virtually all of that warming to human activity. At that threshold, the IPCC warned, the risks are “high to very high,” meaning “severe and widespread impacts on unique and threatened systems, substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional food security, and the combination of high temperature and humidity compromising normal human activities.”
One degree of warming attributable to human activity is actually the best-case outcome predicted by the IPCC. Achieving it is only possible with significant reductions in carbon emissions worldwide.
3. “If the sea level rises six inches, that’s a big deal…but we can’t mitigate that, we can’t stop it. We’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores and go back a little bit.”
Again, it’s not clear where Murdoch’s figures come from. Oceans have already risen by eight inches since 1870, according to the IPCC, and they’re on track to rise another one to four feet by the end of the century. That should certainly discourage people from purchasing luxury coastal estates like the $9 million beach house in Oyster Bay that Murdoch sold in 2011. But what about the vast cities on seashores—like Miami, which is already under pressure as seawater seeps up from below through the porous limestone that underlies the city? How should they go about getting “back a little bit”?
Most people in the world can’t afford the luxury of thinking about climate change as a simple real estate challenge. And rising sea levels are only one facet of the looming global crisis. Shrinking glaciers threaten water supplies. Crop yields have already begun to decline, and the global food supply is in jeopardy. Scientists predict intensified heat waves and heavy rains, and the spread of infectious disease as mosquitos and other hosts move into new territory.
