The UN climate summit is underway in Madrid, and activists are sounding their usual calls for world leaders to achieve carbon neutrality as fast as possible. It’s a fool’s errand. From California to France to Chile, environmentalists laud leaders for already making the promise, and sometimes even passing legislation, to stop putting more greenhouse gases into the air than they take out.

The latest alarming news about climate change is that huge swaths of densely inhabited land will be underwater by 2050, with their cities “erased.” These reports – which appeared in The New York Times and many other media outlets – are based on a good research paper by scientists at Climate Central, but they get the story wrong. This is part of a damaging pattern. Climate change is a man-made problem that we need to tackle, but many of the news stories about its purported effects are scaring us without justification and misleading us about how to act.

Political crises, scandals, and dysfunction continue to dominate the global news agenda. Unsurprisingly, therefore, many people missed the United Kingdom’s announcement last month that it will spend £600 million ($779 million) to provide 20 million more women and girls in the developing world with access to family planning. But the UK government’s decision – based on research by the Copenhagen Consensus Center that shows family planning is one of the smartest possible development investments – is a vitally important one. Currently, hundreds of millions of women are unable to choose the number...

As it is becoming obvious that political responses to global warming such as the Paris treaty are not working, environmentalists are urging us to consider the climate impact of our personal actions. Don’t eat meat, don’t drive a gasoline-powered car and don’t fly, they say. But these individual actions won’t make a substantial difference to our planet, and such demands divert attention away from the solutions that are needed. Even if all 4.5 billion flights this year were stopped from taking off, and the same happened every year until 2100, temperatures would be reduced by just 0.054 degrees...

Many western donors love the idea that instead of dirty, coal-fired power-plants, poor nations should ‘leapfrog’ straight to cleaner energy sources such as off-grid solar technology. The World Bank is at the forefront of these efforts, no longer funding coal energy projects. Off-grid solar projects begin with grand intentions, but too often end with recipients barely better off. We can see this in the small Pacific island nation of Fiji, where the government – advocates of strong global climate policy – teamed up with a Japanese technology company to deliver off-grid solar power.