Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”
The Trump administration’s effort to audit international commitments through the lens of fiscal discipline and national interest is forcing a reckoning for global institutions. While some of these bodies may struggle to justify their continued funding under rigorous scrutiny, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserves a reconsideration.
Here is the inherent dilemma: The IPCC has long been the world’s most effective bulwark against climate alarmism. By rigorously summarizing the underlying science — which remains largely unalarming — it has restrained extreme narratives and forced policy debates back to evidence. Activists may scream “climate collapse” or “global boiling,” but those phrases appear zero times in the most recent IPCC synthesis report.
The core physical science report, known as Working Group I, confirms that climate change is real and concerning but far from the apocalyptic catastrophe that makes headlines.
Unfortunately, other parts of the IPCC have drifted, and some have been captured by activists who hype worst-case scenarios and downplay adaptation and policy costs. They were responsible for claiming that Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035, an assertion that has proved spectacularly wrong. Likewise, the “Summary for Policymakers” that is released ahead of the actual science often skews the IPCC analysis in an effort to be media-friendly and attention-grabbing.
The United States faces a choice at this pivotal moment. Withdrawing completely, as the Trump administration has said it will do, means surrendering influence over the IPCC’s direction — ceding control to alarmists, adversaries and less rigorous voices. The result will be more politicized exaggeration, more scare stories and more global alarmism.
Instead, the U.S. should remain, engage and wield outsize leverage as the IPCC’s largest funder. This would be remarkably cheap. In 2024, the U.S. paid around $1.9 million to cover more than a quarter of the IPCC budget, dwarfing China’s paltry $23,000 contribution the same year.
One useful change would focus the IPCC on reinstating rigorous cost-benefit assessments, which show a need to address climate change — but far less aggressively than many internationalists demand.
Getting the world’s attention back onto both the costs from climate change and also the trillions of dollars lost to climate policy would allow better global decision-making. Crucially, optimal policies prioritize innovation, adaptation, and green research and development.
Staying in the IPCC could also avoid an even worse barrage of scare stories. For example, IPCC reports have long shown little support for the recurrent claims about surging hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires. Yet, the selection of authors for the next major report — due in 2029 — tilts toward “extreme event attribution” advocacy, which yields not scientific insight but narratives better suited for media impact and litigation against fossil fuel companies. One of the new lead authors has pushed her own politics by linking climate change to issues like inequality, colonialism and racism.
Such a shift can only make the world’s climate advice worse. Attribution analysts essentially look at bad weather phenomenon — a hurricane, flood or drought — to see if it can be tied to global warming. They do this by running climate models with and without warming to test whether a bad phenomenon is more likely in a warmer world. While this works well as news fodder, it neglects all the places and times that bad weather does not happen. Climate change is cited in areas of increasing drought without noting that it also makes drought less likely in other places. Deaths due to greater heat waves are highlighted without accounting for the reduced cold waves that save many more lives globally.
Reforms could fix this bias. The White House could make sure the IPCC does not waver from its previous, invaluable methodological rigor, ensuring that Working Group I stays evidence-based while pruning alarmist excesses elsewhere.
Successive U.S. administrations have failed to insist upon reforms. But making sure the IPCC remains sensible and science-based would advance U.S. interests by countering the climate obsession that distracts from urgent global priorities, including security, energy, poverty, hunger and disease. A reformed IPCC would help foster realistic global priorities, weakening partisan divides at home and bolstering alliances abroad.
Of course, outright withdrawal always remains an option if the IPCC proceeds down an irredeemable path. But for less than $2 million, the U.S. can harness its leverage for good. By insisting on honesty, cost-effectiveness and balance, America can support the IPCC to provide rigorous climate science. That’s influence worth keeping.
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