Bjorn Lomborg: Don't panic about global warming
“As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmists serve up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods all blamed squarely on global warming”
Bjorn Lomborg: Don't panic about global warming
Amid the hottest summer on record, some farmers have turned to night harvesting to avoid extreme heat and maintain crop quality. Picking crops in cooler temperatures helps preserve freshness, but it comes with low visibility and an increased risk of accidents. One worker told the Washington
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As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmists serve up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods -- all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet the data is often cherry-picked.
Heat waves are clearly made worse by global warming. But saturated media coverage of high temperatures in summer fails to tell the bigger story: Temperature-driven deaths are overwhelmingly caused by cold.
Globally, a recent Lancet study found 4.5 million cold deaths, nine times more than global heat deaths. The study also finds that temperatures increased half a degree Celsius in the first two decades of this century, causing an additional 116,000 heat deaths annually. But warmer temperatures now also avoid 283,000 cold deaths annually. Reporting only on the former leaves us badly informed.
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Across the world, governments have promised to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions at a cost beyond $5.6 trillion annually. Scared populations will, of course, be more likely to clamor for the perceived safety of such policies. But these policies help tackle heat and cold deaths poorly.
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Even if all the world’s ambitious carbon-cutting promises were magically enacted, these policies would only slow future warming. Stronger heat waves would still kill more people, just slightly fewer than they would have. A sensible response would focus first on resilience, meaning more air conditioning and cooler cities through greenery and water features. After 2003’s heat waves, France required air conditioning in nursing homes, reducing heat deaths 10-fold despite higher temperatures.
Avoiding both cold and heat deaths requires affordable energy access. In the United States, cheaper gas from fracking allowed millions with low budgets to keep warm, saving thousands of lives.
Along with temperature spikes, alarming images of forest fires share the front pages this summer. You’d quickly get the sense that the planet is on fire. But since NASA satellites started accurately recording fires across the planet’s entire surface two decades ago, the amount of land area burned annually has fallen.
Fires have burned much more in the Americas this year than over the past decade. But fires have burned much less in Africa and Europe compared to the last decade. While Greece has burned much more, most of Europe has burned much less.
The fire in Hawaii is deeply tragic. Yet blaming it on climate change is lazy and unhelpful. While the Associated Press reported that Maui County was tinderbox dry, it has been drier in past years.
Cutting carbon emissions is one of the least effective ways to help prevent future fires. Much faster, more effective and cheaper solutions include controlled fires to burn away vegetation, improving zoning and better forest management.
Floods are similarly routinely ascribed to global warming. But a report for the United Nation's climate panel indicates “low confidence in general statements to attribute changes in flood events to anthropogenic climate change.” The experts emphasize that neither river nor coastal floods are statistically detectable from the background noise of natural climate variability.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres's claim that “an era of global boiling has arrived” is entering ridiculous territory. The reality is more prosaic. Global warming is a real problem, but not an end-of-the-world catastrophe that justifies the costliest policies.
The commonsense response would be recognizing that both climate change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs. We should carefully negotiate a middle path, aiming for effective approaches that do the most to reduce damages at a reasonable cost.
To do better on climate, we must resist the misleading, alarmist climate narrative. Panic is a terrible adviser.
Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.