Lucy Biggers' Speed Round on Climate

Lucy Biggers appears to be the next up-and-coming influencer in the climate space. She presents herself as a former a climate activist suffered from extreme anxiety over climate, and so she advocated for policies and viewed other activists like Greta Thunberg as her hero. However, she says she was uninformed about the scientific evidence supporting her "doomer" anxiety. Then she read a couple books by Shellenberger and Koonin that caused her to stop being a climate activist, and now she is employed by the Free Press to share her newly found liberation from doomerism with the world.

In reality she never stopped being a climate activist; she just changed her politics. Her appeal to her viewers appears to be that she (unlike many of her thought leaders) usually doesn't pretend to be an expert in science or policy. Instead, her approach appears to be that since she converted from doomerism to contrarianism, she has cured herself of her anxiety.[5] She was once filled with climate anxiety when she was an activist, but now that she's seen the light given to her by her new thought leaders (Lomborg, Martz, etc), she no longer feels this anxiety. Now she wants you to join her in leaving her "climate doomer" past and embrace her newly found freedom in climate contrarianism.

Back in July, Biggers made a video short for the Free Press in which she shares her "take down of climate doomers." Her "speed round" of take downs is essentially just a series of graphs and charts that are either made by or misinterpreted by her new thought leaders. Every single one of her points is misleading. But to be clear, I don't think Biggers is trying to mislead people. My guess is that she honestly believes what she's saying. If I take her at her word, she naively embraced "climate doomerism" in the past, and her new thought leaders have medicated her anxiety, and now she honestly believes what she's saying because it helps her with her anxiety. She believes these points because she finds them beneficial to her wellbeing, not because she's done her homework on climate science. I'd like to respond to each of her 14 points. Most I've written on before, and for those my explanations contain links to other posts.

1. Climate-related Deaths (from Lomborg)

Climate-related deaths are not down 97%. They have likely decreased because of increases in technologies and warning systems, but Lomborg's graph is deeply misleading, since he counts many deaths that simply are not climate related. And he didn't even plot his graph correctly, as I demonstrate here. Hot weather remains the top cause of death among weather-caused fatalities. Neither Biggers nor Lomborg will show you this graph.

2. Economic Losses from Catastrophes (from Pielke Jr)

Pielke Jr's analysis of economic loss from catastrophes has been heavily criticized by economists (see here) as being "appallingly bad" as well as by scientists (see here), who argues that reductions in losses have to mostly with better warning systems, better building codes and other factors, and Pielke Jr does not control for this in his analysis (see here).

3. Drought Levels (from Multiple Influencers)

Biggers' claim is that drought levels are not increasing globally. This is a deeply misleading claim fed to her by multiple thought leaders in the climate space, but it depends on graphs that are accurate. If you look only at the fraction of land covered in drought, it will appear that droughts are not getting worse. In reality, though, there are two dynamics in play. First, since warmer air holds more water, we'd expect a net increase in wet weather (water vapor increases at about 7% per 1 C warming). Second, in more arid areas, warming increases water vapor deficit (VPD) meaning that the atmosphere gets "thirstier" and pulls more water from streams, plants, and soils. This increases risk for drought and wildfires. This creates areas with opposite trends - for instance, In the US, the West is getting drier and the East is getting wetter. So even though global trends appear flat, regionally droughts are getting worse. Here's how droughts have changed in the Western US since the 1940s.

Global trends show drying conditions are increasing along with drought severity. This is nicely stated in Gebrechorkos et al 2025[1]:

On the basis of the mean of the four high-resolution SPEI datasets (HRSPEI) datasets, the quasi-global average (50° S to 50° N) 6-month SPEI shows a decreasing trend, indicating drying conditions during the period 1981–2022 (Fig. 1). The 6-month HRSPEI shows a significant (P < 0.05) decreasing trend of −0.0055 ± 0.002 yr−1 (Fig. 1a). The quasi-global area in drought (SPEI < −1) shows a commensurate significant increasing trend of 0.36 ± 0.03% yr−1 (Fig. 1b). For severe (SPEI < −1.4) and extreme (SPEI < −1.8) droughts, the area in drought shows a significant increasing trend of 0.17 ± 0.02% yr−1 and 0.047 ± 0.022% yr−1, respectively. On the basis of CRU-TS and ERA5, the period from 1950 to 1980 shows significant increasing trends in 6-month SPEI of 0.00120 z-units yr–1 and 0.012 z-units yr–1, respectively. A summary of the 6-month SPEI trend is provided in Extended Data Fig. 1f.

Spatially, the 6-month HRSPEI shows a drying trend across large parts of the world such as in Europe, Africa, western North America and South America during 1981–2022 (Fig. 1c), with a drying trend of up to −0.08 z-units yr−1. Conversely, regions such as South and Southeast Asia, the Guyanas in South America, central Southern Africa and eastern North America show an increasing wetting trend over the same period. The trends for individual datasets that constitute the HRSPEI and CRU-TS and ERA5 datasets are provided in Extended Data Figs. 1 and 2, respectively.

Projections continue to show increasing threats from droughts as warming progresses from 1.5 C to 3 C above current levels under SSP2-4.5,[2] which concludes:

Projections based on meteorological drought indices such as SPI, SPEI, and PDSI indicate regionally variable changes in drought frequency, duration, severity, and spatial extent. SPI-based projections primarily reflect changes in precipitation deficits, whereas SPEI and PDSI also capture the influence of warming-driven evaporative demand and moisture-balance changes. These indices therefore show broad regional contrasts, including increasing drying risk in regions such as the Mediterranean, southwestern North America, parts of South America, Africa, and Australia, and wetter or more mixed conditions in parts of northern North America, northern Europe, and some Asian regions.

4. Hurricane Levels (from Maue)

Biggers shows a graph from Ryan Maue that she claims shows that hurricane levels are steady. In point of fact, it shows that major hurricanes (Cat 3+) are an increasing proportion of the hurricanes that form. Hurricane frequency overall is largely unchanging, and both of these trends are consistent with theoretical expectations (more information is here).

5. Polar Bear Populations (from Multiple Influencers)

Polar Bear populations may well have increased due to bans on hunting since the 1970s, but populations are still threatened, and more populations appear to be in decline than increasing currently. Threats to polar bears are expected to ramp up as more areas experience summers free of sea ice, and that is not expected to happen across the arctic until about mid-century (see here for more information).

6. Greenland Ice Sheets (from Multiple Influencers)

Biggers shows a graph confirming that the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is losing ice, but she seems confused about the significance of this, which has to do with Greenland's contribution to sea level rise. Sea level rise is driven by two factors, thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of land ice. Quantifying mass loss from  the GrIS helps quantify the sources of sea level rise in response to warming. To distract from this, Biggers changes the subject to the fraction of GrIS that has melted, which is still quite small. This of course is just a distraction; it's not a meaningful rebuttal or take down of anything. All she's showing is that there's a great deal of ice on the GrIS that can still melt in response to AGW and contribute to sea level rise. In fact, the GrIS contains enough ice to raise sea levels over 7 meters. More information on mass loss from the GrIS is here.

7. Food Production (from Multiple Influencers)

Food production is up, but food production has to keep up with a growing population. AGW is creating extra challenges to this (bibliography is found in 2.3 here). We know crop yields have increased. What her graph doesn't show is that crop yields would be higher without AGW, and global population is rapidly growing such that we're going to need those extra crop yields that we're missing to feed 10 billion or more people in the future. But the evidence so far is that climate change should produce a mixed bag of results, with negatives outweighing positives when considering increased temperatures, threats from pests, disease, weeds, and significant disruptions of the hydrological cycle. We can't just look at CO2 fertilization as if it's the only significant variable affecting crop yields.

8. Global Greening  (from Multiple Influencers)

Biggers oversimplifies the fact that greening has occurred as a result of CO2 fertilization. Of course greening has occurred, and this is one carbon sink that offsets a fraction of our emissions (another significant carbon sink is ocean acidification). Since 1750, humans have emitted about 750 GtC from fossil fuel combustion and land use change, but of that amount only about 42% (310 GtC) has stayed in the atmosphere. The carbon cycle has taken the rest (440 GtC) in the land and ocean sinks, resulting in greening, ocean acidification, etc. The airborne fraction of our emissions increases with continued emissions, meaning the land and oceans will remove a progressively smaller portion of our emissions. Greening is becoming less efficient at removing our carbon emissions as we continue at current emission rates. This can be seen in data from the 2025 Global Carbon Budget.

This trend is likely to continue, with the IPCC expecting that by 2100 about 46% of our emissions will remain in the atmosphere if we follow SSP2-4.5 and about 56% of our emissions will remain in the atmosphere if we follow SSP3-7.0. And the IPCC's estimates for this appear to be somewhat conservative (for more information on this, see here).

9. Global Wildfires (from Lomborg)

Globally, burned area rates are down due to fragmentation of burnable lands from development and reduced burning related to agriculture. The dominant cause is the reduced burning in cropland management areas.[3]

From Hall et al 2024

However, forest fires now burn about twice as much land each year than they did just 20 years ago or so, and this is typically what we mean by wildfires. Lomborg is not showing the statistics that show that the acres burned in wildfires in our forests are not an increasing problem.

From World Resources Institute

I have a whole lot more to say about this in another post that I'm currently working on, so I'll link to it when I'm finished. It will have a much more extensive bibliography than what I'm showing here.

10. Extreme Heat is in the US has gone up (from Martz)

Martz's graph showing a decrease in extreme heat is clearly disingenuous. He's using raw, biased data that is strongly affected by changes in time of observation, instrumental changes, etc. I go into more information about this here. Globally, extreme heat is clearly increasing, and even in the US extreme heat is currently worse now than it was during the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s.

11. Great Barrier Reef (from Ridd)

The graph she shows appears to come from Peter Ridd, who appears to have just averaged three graphs from AIMS for different sections of the Barrier Reef. The "recovery" of the GBR in recent years has been driven largely by growth in extent of one genus of corals. Biodiversity in the GBR continues to be a problem, and AIMS does not share Ridd's opinion about the state of the GBR. Meanwhile, a mass bleaching event that affected over 84% of corals globally just ended last year, and a new El Nino is developing that may well initiate another before current corals have had a chance to recover. Globally coral cover continues to be threatened by warming ocean temperatures and ocean acidification.[4]

12. Violent Tornado Rates (from Multiple Influencers)

Climate scientists are not expecting AGW to have a strong impact on violent tornado rates, so this is a bit of a strawman. Biggers (and her influencers) like to pick this one because it's easy to show no trend (or decreasing trend) as if this is some sort of argument against AGW.  AGW appears to be affecting where tornadoes are likely to form in the US, but not their frequency.

13. Extinction Rates (Wrightstone)

This is another strawman attack. Other factors outside of climate change have been dominant in extinction rates from human activity, and environmental protections for species have done a lot to reduce extinction rates. That has no bearing on the evidence that AGW is disrupting habitats and increasing threats to biodiversity.

14. Temperature-Related Mortality (from Lomborg)

I go into a lot more detail on this point here, but the short response is that what these studies are showing is that more people die at temperatures below minimum mortality temperature (MMT) than above it. The vast majority of these deaths occur during mild weather, when temperature is not a strong factor. When you look specifically at deaths caused by hot vs cold weather, things look a bit different. Biggers won't show you this, because she's not looking for this kind of data. She's just promoting graphs that her new thought leaders are showing her.

Unfortunately for her, Lucy Biggers appears to have swung her pendulum from one extreme of "climate doomerism" to the other extreme of "climate denialism." She hasn't realized (yet?) that there's a middle ground that accepts facts and good data while at the same time finding reasons to have genuine hope. What climate science is actually saying is that our carbon emissions are a very real but also very solvable problem. We're solving it too slowly, and so the likely impacts of AGW are becoming more and more significant. But progress is being made, and neither doomerism nor denial will make the problem get any smaller. We need to acknowledge the actual facts and evidence and respond with action and hope, rather than anxiety and despair.

References:

[1] Gebrechorkos, S.H., Sheffield, J., Vicente-Serrano, S.M. et al. Warming accelerates global drought severity. Nature 642, 628–635 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09047-2

[2] Bhardwaj, K., Mishra, A. Droughts in a warming climate: projected changes, sectoral impacts, and adaptation challenges. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 40, 160 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-026-03296-x

[3] Hall, J. V., Argueta, F., Zubkova, M., Chen, Y., Randerson, J. T., and Giglio, L.: GloCAB: global cropland burned area from mid-2002 to 2020, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 16, 867–885, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-867-2024, 2024.

[4] Tadea Veng, Ole B. Andersen. Consolidating sea level acceleration estimates from satellite altimetry. Advances in Space Research 68.2 (2021): 496-503. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2020.01.016.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772030034X

[5] Strangely, Biggers still seems to suffer from anxiety, though rather than from the climate, she identifies the following as her "top 5 horror films": "net zero," "lab-grown meat," "solar panels plastered over farmland," "wind turbines in the ocean" and "blowing up nuclear power plants to 'save the environment.'" None of the first four are actually scary at all, and in fact they are clearly beneficial. And I doubt anyone will ever just "blow up" a nuclear power plant if its decommissioned.