Climate change: good for the planet, good for human beings.
That’s a sentence guaranteed to make the Climate Cult’s heads explode. But, on all the actual evidence, as opposed to dinky computer games, it’s undeniably true.
But what about the “climate emergency”? Yeah, about that…
One thing that always seems to stump the Climate Cult is asking them: what exactly constitutes a “climate emergency”? After much indignant spluttering, they’ll usually blither something about “people are dying!”
Well, yes: people die all the time. But far fewer than ever of them are dying because of the climate.
Climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.
Ask yourself: would you rather live on New Zealand’s Hibiscus Coast, or Invercargill? Hawaii or Murmansk?
Heat is typically easier to mitigate than cold. Heat advisories, drinking fluids and access to shaded, cooler areas help protect people from the hottest days of the year. Heat deaths in rich countries have generally declined in recent decades because of air conditioning.
Cold is much harder to deal with. Heating a home well all through the winter can be prohibitively expensive for poorer households, even in developed nations.
Wall Street Journal
But… but… the hurricanes! Well, to ironically quote Bill Nye the Not-Science-Guy: hurricanes, shmurricanes.
Despite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900.
Airplanes and satellites have dramatically increased the number of storms that scientists can spot at sea today, making the frequency of landfall hurricanes—which were reliably documented even in 1900—a better statistic than the total number of Atlantic hurricanes.
And there aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down. A July Nature paper finds that the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are “not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.”
Wall Street Journal
The damage bill from big storms has gone up — but only because more and more people are living on vulnerable coastlines. The most effective way to protect lives and property isn’t the ruinous path of de-industrialisation, but simply building better infrastructure. To do that, you need a wealthy, technologically-advanced civilisation, not one crippled by the ineffectual pursuit of “net zero emissions”.
Another “extreme weather event” the Climate Cult like to fixate on is flooding. A spate of flooding in NSW and Queensland in recent years has spurred much shrieking and wailing of “this is climate change!”, despite: 1) “Climate Commissioner” Tim Flannery famously predicting the exact opposite trend, and, 2) 200 years of records showing that the long-term trend of flooding in the region is a slight reduction.
It’s much the same story around the world.
Flooding costs as a share of gross domestic product declined almost 10-fold since 1903 to 0.05% of GDP, while annual flood death risk—fatalities per million—dropped almost threefold. World-wide data are sparser, but flood research shows costs relative to GDP and deaths relative to population have decreased globally from 1980 to 2010 […]
Though it hasn’t been well publicized, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it has “low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale.”
Wall Street Journal
Additionally, the global incidence of wildfire has plummeted. At the same time the planet has grown measurably greener, in no small part due to the increased carbon dioxide that the Climate Cult freak out about. Indeed, atmospheric carbon dioxide remains at historic lows, compared to the Earth’s long history. In fact, prior to the Industrial Revolution and those human emissions, atmospheric CO2 was approaching the level at which plants would starve and die.
All in all, we’re entitled to demand of the loonies glueing themselves to roads: Emergency? What emergency?
