Every time some scowling teenage doom-goblin, celebrity eco-crite or Climate Cultist politician starts gibbering about a ‘climate emergency’, challenge them: Well, where?
Is it in increasing desertification? No: even NASA admits that the world has undergone a remarkable ‘Global Greening’ over the past quarter-century, as a direct consequence of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. Food shortages? Nope: along with all that greening, we’re growing more food than at any time in human history – and using less and less land to grow it on.
Rising sea levels! Nope, again: most islands are either stable or growing in size. Hurricanes! Nope, and double-nope: the long-term trend is hurricanes decreasing in both frequency and intensity.
Wildfires! screeches our hypothetical desperate cultist, convinced they’ve got to be on a winner at last. Hey, they saw it on the TV news, after all.
Except…
The population directly exposed to wildland fires increased 40 per cent globally from 2002 to 2021 despite a 26 per cent decline in burned area.
Note that: more humans exposed to wildfires, even though the extent of wildfires decreased dramatically. That’s because more humans are living in places that are prone to fire, not that fires are spreading.
Increased exposure was mainly driven by enhanced colocation of wildland fires and human settlements, doubling the exposure per unit burned area. We show that population dynamics accounted for 25 per cent of the 440 million human exposures to wildland fires.
The Climate Cult’s obsession with wildfires is also very much a first-world problem’s phenomenon.
Although wildfire disasters in North America, Europe, and Oceania have garnered the most attention, 85 per cent of global exposures occurred in Africa.
Cultist grumbles and mutters for a while, then suddenly their well-fed little face lights up. Heat! We’re all gonna die from the heat!
Yet again, that’s a big ol’ nope.
There’s a critical flaw in this grim overheating narrative. The dire predictions presume a direct mechanical relationship between rising temperatures and human mortality that does not exist.
That’s not to deny that extremely hot weather can pose serious health hazards, although considerably less than extreme cold (which kills nine times as many people as extreme heat, according to a comprehensive 2021 study in The Lancet Planetary Health). But, here’s the thing: humans, especially humans in an industrialised society, can adapt remarkably well to high temperatures. Thanks to technology.
Research shows that human adaptation to rising temperatures has considerably weakened, if not broken, the link between high temperatures and mortality over time. A landmark study by economists showed that the mortality impact of extremely hot days fell by 75 per cent in the United States between 1960 and 2004, driven primarily by the adoption of residential air conditioning (AC). Another study found that the number of deaths per 1,000 deaths attributable to each 10°F increase in same-day temperature decreased from 51 in 1987 to just 19 in 2005.
The effectiveness of AC in combating heat-wave impacts becomes obvious when comparing different areas. Even in the hottest parts of the USA, where AC is common, the rate of heat-related deaths is 10.3 per 100,000. In Europe, on the other hand, even much lower heat-wave temperatures (a whopping 18°C lower!) resulted a heat-related death rate of 11.4 per 100,000. In the hotter Mediterranean regions of Europe, the heat-related death rate was two to three times higher than in the hottest parts of the US.
In the United States, the residential air conditioning rate of adoption exceeds 90 per cent nationally, with rates exceeding 95 per cent in hot-climate states such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida. In contrast, air conditioning use in European countries remains around 19 per cent overall, with much lower rates in specific countries – only about five percent of homes in the UK have cooling systems, and just three percent in Germany.
Which makes the Climate Cult’s ‘Net Zero’ policies even more lunatic than ever. When renewables destabilise grids to the point of collapse, especially during heatwaves, they are literally turning off the one thing that will immediately save lives.
These people are not just dementedly ignorant: they’re positively evil.
