 We're like the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. To avert the worst consequences of climate crisis, we have nine years left. We're going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to 10 years. You've probably heard the claim that we have a dozen years or less to stop climate change from inflicting permanent damage on the planet. We've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can't wait any longer. President Biden cited the deadline when announcing that the U.S. would rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, an international agreement to curb greenhouse gases. I'm signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration's ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change. It is an existential threat. And we're told by all the leading scientists in the world, we don't have much time. I read the report that the people claiming a 2030 deadline are relying upon, and they have misread it. Aaron Brown is a mathematician and statistician who was taught at NYU and UCSD. He's also the former Chief Risk Officer at the Hedge Fund AQR Capital Management. Brown says that activists and politicians are misrepresenting the science in a rush to implement unwise solutions. I'm here to say our house is on fire. We must change almost everything in our current societies. Rather than protecting the most at-risk ecosystems and populations, these proposals are likely to backfire and cause further harm both to the environment and to the most vulnerable people on the planet. Whether you think climate change is an existential issue, or merely one of several important threats we face in the future, is a completely separate issue from how quickly we should act. People pushing a 2030 deadline are committing us to very risky solutions that could backfire. Based on all the evidence, I think we have more time. We can consider reasonable solutions that don't risk the economy and don't risk the planet, and the people will actually stick to for the long term. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. So where did the claim that we have until 2030 come from? Among the first to popularize it was teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, who in speaking before the UN chastised world leaders for their inaction. People are suffering. People are dying. And all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you? Thunberg took the 2030 deadline from a 2018 special report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, authored by the world's top climate scientists and widely considered the gold standard in the field. This is a report that was actually asked for by governments under the Paris Agreement. They're going to get together in Poland later in the year to talk about the next steps. And our report is the only named input into their negotiations. Many politicians, activists and journalists like Thunberg have cited the report as the basis for their claim starting in 2018 that there were just 12 years to save the planet or that 2030 was a cliff. Reports that came out from the leading scientist in this world who told us that we have 12 years. The scientists are absolutely unanimous on this, that we have no more than 12 years. Scientists tell us a thousand times all of us could be at a point of no return. But after the IPCC report was released, prominent climate scientists, including some of the report's authors, publicly raised doubts about the 2030 deadline. The panel did not say that we have 12 years left to save the world. IPCC working group co-chair James Schia told the Associated Press. The hotter it gets, the worse it gets, but there is no cliff edge. Please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030, wrote fellow leading report author Miles Allen. The IPCC does not draw a planetary boundary at 1.5 degrees Celsius, beyond which, like climate dragons, all the time limited frames are bullshit, NASA's Gavin Schmidt told Axios. We are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. These numbers aren't anyone's opinions or political views. This is the current best available science. Did climate activists misread the report, or was it a purposeful attempt to mislead the public? That's not clear, but the IPCC report does use vague language that made it susceptible to misinterpretation. The foreword, for example, states that without a, quote, sharp decline in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, there will be irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people and societies. The fall off a cliff idea is not supported by the IPCC report. It's true that risks increase as temperatures ratchet up, but there's no sudden tipping point where climate change becomes irreversible. Properly read, the report is actually an argument for predictable, sustainable solutions over several decades using experimentation and ovation, not a rush toward risky short-term solutions that focus entirely on warming to the detriment of general environmental stewardship. So what does the IPCC report say about the year 2030? The most specific claim it makes is that, quote, global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. There isn't a scientific consensus that reaching 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels will mean global catastrophe. But let's assume that the activists are correct that staying under that level should be the goal of public policy. When will we hit 1.5 degrees of warming under the author's assumptions? By calculating the current rate of global warming and plotting it out along a graph, we see that the answer to the question they pose is the year 2052. But remember that they gave a 22-year range starting in 2030 and ending in 2052. How did they get there? The 2030 date that activists have trumpeted appears in this chart in the report. In the worst case scenario, or the top of the shaded area, we see that warming hits 1.5 degrees by the year 2030. In the best case scenario, or the bottom of the shaded area, we see that warming actually never hits 1.5 degrees. But what most commentators haven't paid attention to is that this is not a measure of actual warming. This chart is actually showing estimates of anthropogenic warming, or warming that the authors hypothesize is caused by humans. The gray line shows the actual changes in the planet's surface temperatures, and the orange shaded area represents the author's estimates of what humans are contributing to the overall warming trend. So the worst case scenario that gets us to 1.5 degrees by 2030 does not represent actual temperature increases, but the upper limit of how much the authors think humans could possibly be contributing if our activities were happening in isolation. So what explains the difference between actual global warming and the global warming caused by humans? The authors believe that if anthropogenic warming is up here, there must be a naturally occurring cooling force that has brought temperatures down. If human-caused warming is down here, that means there's been a naturally occurring warming effect that has brought temperatures up. They aren't sure which is happening, which is why they're not sure whether global warming caused by humans is up here or down there. The point is that the 2030 date, as it appeared in the IPCC report, was the worst case scenario not in terms of actual global warming, but in terms of warming caused only by humans, independent of what's actually happening in the environment. People making the sky as following claims probably haven't read the report and think that it's saying actual temperatures will increase by 1.5 degrees in 2030. The range of dates the report discusses are actually about human contribution to global warming. If you think the problem of global warming is higher temperatures, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, then you care about the date the report projects actual temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees, which is 2052 if things continue at the current rate. Is it possible that actual warming could result in baseline temperatures above 1.5 degrees by 2030? The rate of global warming would have to speed up to about three times what we have observed in past decades, which no serious climate scientists, including the authors of the IPCC report, claim is likely to happen. So why did the IPCC report focus on a date, which is the worst case scenario not in terms of actual global warming, but of human contributions to warming, as if they were happening in a vacuum? After the report's release, co-chair of the working group Deborah Roberts justified their presentation of the data and conclusions as an effort to project a line in the sand and what it says to our species that this is the moment and we must act now, and I hope it mobilizes people and dense the mood of complacency. But Brown says that distorting the science is the opposite of what the IPCC authors and other climate scientists should be doing. It's a very dangerous game if you want strong, sensible long-term solutions to climate change to scare people into them by making wild short-term predictions. That can backfire in one of two ways. You may scare people into doing short-term irrational solutions that do more harm than good, or 2030 might roll around and it's not as much warmer as you said it was going to be, and you could take a lot of steam out of the movement to do anything at all. If we were to accept 2030 as a meaningful deadline, the only path forward is politically unfeasible, economically devastating, and immensely risky. According to the IPCC, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities, all taking place in under a decade. Emissions reductions as currently envisioned won't work. Supporters of the Paris Climate Accord acknowledged that if fully implemented, it still won't come close to keeping warming under its goal of 1.5 degrees. Even if we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris, we would see a rise in the Earth's temperature which is catastrophic. Just reducing emissions is not enough. Our greenhouse gas emissions has to stop. Zero in 2050 means nothing if high emission continues even for a few years. They're not thinking through the implications of what they're calling for. If we need a solution by 2030, that means geoengineering and other dramatic untested strategies with unpredictable effects. Investing millions of jobs and wind, solar, and carbon capture. The supposed 2030 deadline has become a justification for diverting massive resources into largely unproven direct carbon capture and geoengineering projects, and at the same time for shutting down much of the global economy. People who really believe 2030 is a disaster year have to focus on geoengineering, scattering beads to reflect sunlight, injecting aerosols in the stratosphere. Rushing these things through without proper testing has entirely unpredictable consequences and could backfire to much worse environmental damage than the problem they're intended to solve. The only other thing that works on this horizon is bans. We ban coal, we ban air travel, we shut down many electrical power plants, and mainly we have to do it in China and India. This has unpredictable economic effects, except we know it will cause a considerable decline in gross domestic product. That means we reverse the rise out of poverty for much of the world, and we create economic problems larger than we got in the great financial crisis of 2008 and they're permanent. But what if, as the reports underlying data suggest, we actually have more time to limit global warming to below catastrophic levels? If we have 30 years to address climate change, then we have much more palatable options. First of all, the economy and technology are naturally moving away from fossil fuels, then we can give entrepreneurship and bottom-up innovation a time to work. We can adopt policies that gently nudge the economy in the right direction without creating the disruption and misery of sudden bans. If we have more time, we can get away from the pure focus on temperature. We can consider balanced solutions that consider all environmental issues and all economic issues. We can try to reduce the total human environmental impact. Sensible solutions can build a better world for our grandchildren. Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade. We no longer have time to leave out the science. Activists, politicians, and journalists who trumpet 2030 as a meaningful deadline may be doing so in a desperate attempt to get the public to take the threat of global warming seriously. This is our World War II. I feel a need for all of us to breathe fire. After New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked the 12-year deadline, she responded to critics by tweeting, you'd have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it's literal. But the best way to address climate change is not to mislead people and stoke panic, but to rationally assess the science and chart the best course for both the planet and the people living on it. There's a partisan divide on this issue between people who think it's a very serious problem with a short fuse and people who think it's not much of a problem with a long fuse. I think most sensible people should regard it as a serious problem with a long fuse. There isn't much place for this in the media and on campaign trails. The key factor is for the last 50 years we have been reducing the amount of energy it takes to create a dollar of wealth. If that trend continues and can be accelerated, it means we can have a booming economy, we can have prosperity for all, we can bring people out of poverty all over the world without using a lot of energy and therefore without a big environmental footprint. We don't have to choose between prosperity and a good environment. We can have both.