Responding to climate denialism in large newspapers
Ben Leffel
I must respond to several writings of Review Journal columnist Victor Joecks related to climate change: Joecks recently argued that the lead culprit of the summer 2024 Las Vegas heat wave, peaking at 120℉, is the 2022 volcanic eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano. This is a misattribution: As explained in a 2023 study by Jenkins and colleagues in Nature Climate Change, the eruption increases the chance of a temporary increase in surface temperature. But Joeck’s piece spins this observation into an argument that natural disasters, rather than human-driven activities, are to blame, dismissing the well-established role of fossil fuels as a leading culprit of our present emergency. Both in this piece and in others titled "Las Vegas and global warming hysteria" and "Heat wave is your fault, according to climate alarmists", Joecks also dismisses heat-related death as tied to climate change. Not so. Katharine Hayhoe and colleagues show that climate change-induced heat waves of the sort that killed hundreds in Chicago are projected to become more frequent (Journal of Great Lakes Research), findings even more relevant for desert cities like Las Vegas, which just set a heat death record in 2024. Joan Ballester and colleagues show similar conditions killed tens of thousands across Europe in 2022 (Nature Medicine). Van Daalen and colleagues link rising temperatures to the spread of climate-sensitive infectious diseases, including those that are flesh-eating—bacteria leading to necrotizing fasciitis (The Lancet Public Health).
Joecks also wrote in 2023 “Don’t blame global warming for Maui wildfires”, sentiments also echoed in a more recent Opinion editorial “Blame California, not global warming, for wildfires”, attributing wildfires to policy failures and dismissing the role of climate change. Research, however, points out that we are becoming more flammable every year due to climate change, from forests to infrastructure to fuel itself. A study by Marco Turco and colleagues in Climatic Change shows that historically, wildfires driven by climate change alone would have significantly increased were it not for wildfire management practices in place. Policy efforts moving forward also face an uphill battle: Climate change will continue to drive more frequent and intense wildfires, in turn releasing more emissions and further deepening global warming in a vicious cycle, as shown by Giovanni Di Virgilio and colleagues in their Geophysical Research Letters study.
Joecks claims that scientists demand "blind faith". We do not. We are responding to a national security threat by studying it and deriving strategies to mitigate it. This threat is shared by all other nations, and nations alone cannot succeed in fighting it. This is why my own research, published in Energy Research & Social Science, WIREs Climate Change and other journals, shows powerful strategies by which cities and businesses globally can deliver promising results. Las Vegas and Clark County, as well as businesses like MGM Resorts and Caesars, are part of this—not least MGM’s historic solar mega-array. These innovations are generating societal, environmental and economic benefits, something to live up to, not live down. Our burning of fossil fuels has weaponized our planet, and a fossil fuel free future is the only one in which we can continue to enjoy the lifestyle we have thus far.
 | Benjamin Leffel, Ph.D. |