Climate change doesn’t amount to ‘existential threat’

At the Glasgow climate conference, President Joe Biden declared climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.” No, it’s not. Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity. Rather, it is a chronic, manageable condition humanity can live with.

So argues Bjorn Lomborg, author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” A recent poll found almost half of young Americans believe “humanity is doomed” because of climate change. This is not true. “Climate change is a problem, but not the end of the world,” Lomborg says. In fact, “things are a lot better than you think.”

For example, he points to estimates that climate change will increase deaths from malnutrition. But malnutrition has plummeted over the past three decades and is expected to continue plummeting in the next three. “In 1990, 7 million children died from malnutrition,” Lomborg says. “Today we’re down to about 2.7 million children dying from malnutrition. And in 2050 … we’ll be down to about 600,000.” Why? Dramatic reductions in global poverty. Climate change doesn’t reverse this progress, Lomborg argues, “it makes progress go slightly less fast.” But much stronger climate measures, he says, will slow development. A global carbon tax, for example, could increase the number of people in poverty around the world by as much as 80 million, causing far more malnutrition deaths than climate change.

Or take deaths from climaterelated disasters. Lomborg notes that in the 1920s, natural disasters killed almost half a million people per year on average. But “in the last full decade, the 2010s, only 18,000 people died every year” even as the global population quadrupled. In 2021, he says, the number of disaster deaths will be just about 6,000. That’s because better infrastructure does more to save lives than cutting emissions.

What about temperature-related deaths? We are seeing more heat waves but fewer cold waves. According to a study in the Lancet, over the past two decades, there were 490,000 heat-related deaths worldwide, compared with 4.6 million coldrelated deaths. While about 116,000 more people died from heat last year because of climate change, roughly 283,000 fewer people died from cold — which, he calculates, means global warming saved about 166,000 lives.

What about rising sea levels? Lomborg points to arguments that rising oceans could make 187 million people homeless by 2100. That is true only if you assume that humanity does nothing during the next 79 years to adapt. Lomborg says the number of people displaced when you take into account adaptation is probably in the tens of thousands, not in the hundreds of millions.

Even if we do nothing to reduce emissions, the world will not end. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “the impact of climate change is equivalent to 2.6% of GDP by the end of the century. Instead of being 450% as rich in 2100, we’ll ‘only’ be 434% as rich,” Lomborg saysBy contrast, he says, a

study finds that even if we fall short of Biden’s plan for net-zero American carbon emissions by 2050, and reduce emissions by 95%, we would end up losing 11.9% of U.S. gross domestic product — or $11,300 per person per year — to avert a 2.6% loss in global GDP.

The way to address climate change is to unleash the free market to increase prosperity and innovation. But climate alarmists are trying to scare people into adopting policies that will have destroy economic growth and increasing global poverty. We need to push back on the panic and recognize that Biden is wrong — climate change does not threaten human existence.