No need to panic on climate change
As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet, the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked, and the proposed policy responses could be more effective.
Heat waves are clearly made worse by global warming. But saturation-level media coverage of high temperatures in summertime fails to tell the bigger story: Temperaturedriven 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 increasing half a degree Celsius in the first two decades of this century have caused 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.
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 very poorly.
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’s rational reforms that included mandatory air conditioning in care homes reduced 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 12,500 lives yearly. Climate policy, which inevitably makes the most energy more expensive, achieves the opposite.
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. The reality is that since NASA satellites started accurately recording fires across the planet’s entire surface two decades ago, there has been a strong downward trend. In the early 2000s, 3% of the world’s land area burned annually. Last year, fire burned 2.2% of the world’s land area, a record low. Yet, you would struggle to find that reported anywhere.
Fires have burned much more in the Americas this year than over the past decade.
This has constantly been reported. But fires have burned much less in Africa and Europe compared to the last decade. Cumulatively to Aug. 12, the Global Wildfire Information System shows that the world has actually burned less than the average over the previous decade.
While the media constantly focuses on Greece, which has burned much more, it omits to report that most of Europe has burned much less. Indeed, by Aug. 12, Europe has cumulatively burned less than it has at the same time in any of the last 10 years. This has scarcely been reported.
The fire in Hawaii is deeply tragic. Yet, it is lazy and unhelpful for pundits to use the tragedy to incorrectly blame climate change. They claim it was tinder-box dry, but through most of the past 23 years, Maui County was drier than the week it burned. The drought is blamed on climate, but the most recent scientific study shows no climate signal.
Pointing wrongly to climate change is dangerous because cutting 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 fuels that could otherwise result in wildfire, improving zoning and enhanced forest management.
Floods are similarly routinely ascribed to global warming. However, the United Nations Climate Panel’s latest report has “low confidence in
nally take climate change seriously. Swedish savant Greta Thunberg began her relentless campaign as a teenager. At age 16, Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in the world, and, still just 20, she has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Our house is on fire,” Thunberg told the World Economic Forum in January 2019.
New economic powerhouses such as China and India protest that they are being asked to burn less fossil fuel, release fewer greenhouse gases and take other remedial steps that the United States, Japan, Germany and other industrialized nations did not have to take in earlier decades.
China and India are right: The evolving requirements of responsible global stewardship are unfair. Their economies happen to be booming in a more perilous era, one in which the very future of life on Earth hangs in the balance for the first time.
Such inequity is no excuse for inaction on their part.
There have been signs of growing international resolve against the ravages of climate change. The Paris Agreement, an international treaty adopted in 2015, has been signed by 193 countries plus the European Union, pledging to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and give developing nations money to fight global warming. The historic accord aims to limit the global temperature increase this century to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) while pursuing efforts to hold it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Even those relatively modest temperature hikes would cause more wildfires, hurricanes and other destructive climate events.
Disgracefully, former president Donald Trump pulled the United States from the Paris Agreement. His successor, President Joe Biden, restored U.S. membership on his first day in office.
More ambitiously, the European Union has joined the United Nations, China and 69 other countries, which combined emit three-quarters of all greenhouse gases, in pledging to reach zero net emissions by 2050. More than 1,000 cities worldwide, including Los Angeles and Houston, are part of the same initiative.
Not surprisingly, even such a dangerous threat as climate change, one that should be uncontroversial, has been politicized in our deeply polarized era. Conservative commentators blame environmentalists’ longstanding opposition to nuclear power for contributing to climate change. Nuclear power production does not emit greenhouse gases, but it entails other risks involving the storage of spent fuel rods and the cataclysmic, if rare, danger of nuclear meltdown.
France has gone against the grain of most other industrialized countries in obtaining more than two-thirds of its energy from nuclear power, compared with just one-fifth in the United States.
While we’ve picked up the pace in mitigating climate change, however belatedly, it’s still far from enough. If we want to save our grandchildren and their grandchildren from even worse natural catastrophes, we will have to do far more.
James Rosen is a former political reporter and Pentagon correspondent for Mcclatchy Newspapers. He received awards from the National
Press Club, Military Reporters & Editors Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, which in 2021 named him top opinion columnist. He wrote this for Insidesources.com.