One of the key attributes of the global warming movement, like
any cult, is that it posits a doomsday scenario if we don’t follow
their dangerous prescriptions. Whether it is cyanide-laced Kool Aid
or the economic equivalent (were we to follow the cap-and-trade
crowd), the “cure” is not only worse than the so-called problem but
premised on the idea that people are stupid.
The warmists say that we’ll have more disease and death if
the planet warms even though studies by actual scientists
frequently conclude otherwise.
This week’s five-alarm fire (literally) comes from the
NY Times which
warns us that “Across millions of acres, the pines
of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many
types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.”
The article, which implies that the earth will die if we don’t stop
climate change from killing trees, is at least honest enough to use
“if” six times, “might” three times, “may” seven times, and other
qualifiers of their doomsday view such as “not sure,” “possible,”
and “could.”
While this particular Times story concerns North
America, an actual study
of African rainfall, done by scientists from NOAA
and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (both
hotbeds of climate change alarmism), concludes that changes in
rainfall levels in both northern and southern Africa are due to
changes in sea surface temperatures, and that those temperature
changes are not human-caused. Furthermore, when the UN’s IPCC tried
to model the change in African rainfall based on human causes, they
failed: “The ensemble of greenhouse-gas-forced experiments,
conducted as part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, fails to simulate the
pattern or amplitude of the twentieth-century African drying,
indicating that the drought conditions were likely of natural
origin.”
But if you really want to scare people into wasting their
lives on public transport or sleeping in uncomfortably cold houses
during the winter or subsidizing Solyndra, you have to make them
think that human life is directly at stake.
One such example regards malaria, long the bogeyman for
those warmists who, in the interest of scaring us about what the
evil rich are doing to the southern hemisphere’s poor, claimed for
years that warming will cause a massive increase in the prevalence
of and deaths from malaria.
However, a
2010 study led by scientists from the
University of Florida concluded that “widespread claims that rising
mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide
malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed
decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic
extent.” Furthermore, they said that any increase in malaria cases
from warming would likely be two orders of magnitude smaller than
the reduction in cases due to “control measures” taken by humans,
such as bed nets and anti-malarial drugs. (Two orders of magnitude
means 100x, so 10 is two orders of magnitude smaller than
1000.)
It’s also worth noting that the lead scientist, whom
I
interviewed, was a full member of the
cult of Algore. It was fascinating to hear him claim that when it
comes to warming, people like me who think it’s somewhere between
an exaggeration and a hoax (and closer to the latter) are “bucking
a broad scientific consensus.” Yet when it came to his
study’s different results from other people’s claims, he suggested
that “Science is intrinsically adversarial, and we get at the truth
through critical thought. That means scientists should question
every single study they read.” You don’t say.
The key point is not that malaria cases won’t increase,
but that they won’t increase because humans are smart and
adaptable.
Malaria isn’t the only case of warmists trying to scare us
with disease and death: Every few years, it seems someone claims
that global warming “is
to blame for cholera bacteria becoming more
widespread.” (And
here is another example from 2002.) But you know
things aren’t going well for the cult when even that same “the
forests are burning!” New York Times has to tell us, as
they did just one month ago, that “Cholera outbreaks seem to be on
the increase, but a
new study has found they cannot be explained by global
warming.” (Study link here.)
Perhaps you will not be surprised by a comparison between
the two articles (at least their web versions): Last week’s article
about supposedly dying forests contained over 4,100 words, while
the August 29th article saying that cholera outbreaks are not
increasing due to climate change was — wait for it — a grand
total of 230 words. And if that’s not enough, the forests article
was on the paper’s front page, whereas the cholera article was on
page D6.
Humans live in deserts and in the Arctic. We live in
places like Denver and Chicago, each of which will see temperatures
over more than a 100-degree (F) range in the course of a year —
and routinely a 30 or 40 degree range in a day (or 20 in an hour)
in the mountains and deserts. And these aren’t even the records.
Imagine being in Spearfish, South Dakota, in 1943 when the
temperature reportedly rose 49 degrees in two minutes! Or Loma,
Montana, which in 1972 reported a 103-degree temperature rise in 24
hours? We scuba dive and mountain climb. We invent air conditioning
and efficient heating systems. We have nearly eliminated
smallpox and polio, two of the greatest scourges of eras past. In
other words, we adapt to our environment — in those cases when we
can’t adapt our environment to us.
For that reason, it defies common sense to believe that
man-made global warming, even if it were real, would have the
devastating impact that its anti-capitalist,
wealth-redistributionist proponents claim.
Now we have the results of a much broader
study, commissioned by the Reason
Foundation, which points in exactly this same direction of
adaptability. The study, entitled “The Amazing Decline in Deaths
from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900-2010” is
summarized thus:
Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme
weather events globally has declined by 98% since the 1920s, in
spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete
reporting of such events.
Other
highlights from the study’s
findings:
• “Droughts were the most deadly extreme weather category
between 1900 and 2010, responsible for over 60 percent of extreme
weather deaths during that time. The worldwide death rate from
droughts peaked in the 1920s when there were 235 deaths a year per
million people. Since then, the death rate has fallen by 99.9
percent. The study finds that global food production advancements,
such as new crops, improved fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides,
along with society’s better ability to move food and medical
supplies, were responsible for reducing the number of deaths in
times of severe drought.”
• “Floods were to blame for 30 percent of the deaths
during the timeframe studied, making them the second most deadly
extreme weather category. The death rate for floods topped out in
the 1930s at 204 deaths a year per million people. Deaths from
floods have fallen by over 98 percent since then and there was an
average of approximately one flood death per year per million
people from 2000 to 2010.”
• All of this while the advent of storm-finding and
storm-reporting technologies have massively increased the number of
reported extreme weather events. (This is not to say that the
actual number of such events has increased, just the reporting
thereof.) Of course, the same technology which allows storms to be
reported allows them to be prepared for.
If people adapt, as we manifestly do, to almost anything
thrown at us, it is difficult to take seriously the doomsday
scenarios proffered by the UN’s IPCC and their grant-chasing
“scientists,” supported by radical environmental leftists whose
motivation is more to impoverish the west than to “save the
planet.”
That is why their “solutions” all involve two things:
Curbing energy usage and production (which is to say, curbing
humans’ standard of living), and redistributing wealth from richer
people and richer nations to poorer people and poorer nations. But
if they really cared about the impact on people, rather
than satisfying their own self-loathing as members of the human
race, or even worse as Americans (gasp!), they would focus on
aiding and speeding adaptation rather than trying to do the
atmospheric equivalent of stopping continental drift.
For example, Denmark’s Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of
environmental economics, is a believer that global warming is
man-made yet still argues that massive wealth-destroying policies
are the wrong way to go. Instead, we should focus on much
cheaper and more effective projects such as
increasing clean water supplies in the third world.
People are becoming skeptical of man-made global warming
not just because the warmists’ mathematical models can’t explain
the lack of warming since 1998 and not just because Climategate
proved how utterly corrupt “climate science” has become. But it’s
also because the solutions proposed, i.e. to stop using energy, are
based on an obvious, even if never-ever-ever-ever-stated by the
left, premise that people who live on 21st century Earth are too
stupid to adapt to a changing environment — even though we have as
a species, even without the benefit of modern technology, done just
that for millennia.
Reason’s new study is just confirmation of what we all
know in our gut: that “climate change,” even if it were partially
caused by man, is not the threat the left claims and not to be
responded to by cutting our own economic throats, whether by
cap-and-trade policies or by incinerating billions of dollars on
the altar of “green energy” as our savior. Indeed, actually
incinerating the money may have generated more energy for our
nation than Solyndra and the like have, proving perhaps that while
humans are not inherently stupid, bureaucrats and politicians may
be a special case.
