Modest global warming is real. NASA data show that in 2021, the earth’s average temperature declined from 2020 and fell below the 2019 level and back to the 2018 level but has risen by 1.01 degrees Celsius since 1880.
On the other hand, the scientific facts show that the rest of the Green Left’s claims about global warming – on which it bases its demands toremake the American and world economies and impose draconian regulations and restrictions that would kill economic growth and impoverish millions, especially in the Third World – are a litany of lies and fearmongering.
The scientific facts, indeed, instead show that global warming is beneficial.
The Green Left’s biggest lie is that global warming is an “existential” danger – in other words, that it will kill vast numbers of people. The data instead show that cooler temperatures kill many more people than warmer temperatures.
Groups of scientists from around the world have analyzed millions of deaths in numerous countries over recent decades and have reported in The Lancet on July 25, 2015, July 1, 2021, and August 21, 2021 that cooler temperatures kill several times more people that warmer temperatures. As environmental statistician Bjorn Lomborg wrote onSeptember 16, 2021, “Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.”
With these kinds of scientific facts, it should be no surprise that in 2017, a group of eminent scientists – such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton – wrote that “[o]bservations [over the last] 25 years … show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.”
The Green Left has been fearmongering about global warming for decades. In 1989, for example, “the head of the UN’s Environment Programdeclared we had just three years to ‘win — or lose — the climate struggle.’” Accuracy and honesty in its statements have not been its main concerns. In 1988, Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider, for example, stated that “each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
And the Green Left knows that its doomsday assertions lack foundation.On pages 88-91 of his book, “Unsettled,” Obama administration Department of Energy chief scientist Steven Koonin shows that the models relied upon by the Green Left to predict future global warming are so poor that they cannot even reproduce the temperature changes in the 20th century.
Models that cannot reproduce past temperatures already known when the models were developed cannot reliably predict temperatures decades into the future.
The Green Left has recklessly claimed that global warming will increase the number of people killed by natural disasters. Instead, since 1920, the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent, as the planet’s average temperature has risen by 1.12 degrees Celsius and world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to almost eight billion.
Global warming, moreover, has neither resulted in more hurricanes, norincreased the area burned by fires, nor produced more flooding, norresulted in more air pollution deaths.
A 2021 EPA report found that “[t]he total number of hurricanes(particularly after being adjusted for improvements in observation methods) and the number reaching the United States do not indicate a clear overall trend since 1878.”
In 1926-1952, U.S. forest fires annually burned millions more acres than in the seven decades since then. As Bjorn Lomborg wrote on August 5, 2021, “in 2021 the burned area to date is the fourth-lowest of the past 11 years. The area that burned in 2020 was only 11% of the area that did in the early 1900s. Contrary to climate clichés, annual global burned area has declined since 1900 and continues to fall.” And worldwide, the area burned has declined from over 4 percent in the early 1900s to about 2.5 percent now.
Lomborg’s August 5, 2021 article also reports that a “a new study of more than 10,000 rivers around the world shows that most rivers now flood less.”
And the data show that the global air pollution death rate has declined by almost 50 percent, from 111.28 to 63.82 deaths per 100,000 people.
The Green Left’s assertions that global warming will cause economic doom are likewise full of hot air. A 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper indicates that regardless of any negative impact that global warming may have, U.S. income per person in 2100 will bedouble to triple today’s level. The same is true for world income per person.
On pages 177-183 of “Unsettled,” Steven Koonin documents that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own analysis similarly indicates that any negative economic impact that global warming eventually may have will be so modest that it warrants no action.
On the other hand, climate change regulations that the Biden administration demands will reverse decades of progress and increase extreme poverty – a major Third World killer through malnutrition and inadequate protections against disease.
From 1950 to 2015, the planet’s average temperature rose by 1.07 degrees Celsius. Economist Max Roser in Our World in Data has reported that the share of people living in extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1.90 per day – fell from 67 percent in 1950 to less than 10 percent in 2015.
But a 2020 study by three Japanese scientists shows, in the words ofBjorn Lomborg, that the regulations that the Biden Administration demands will “keep 11 million more people in poverty come 2030 than otherwise would be.” And if “the Glasgow climate conference … leads to the adoption of much stronger climate measures, policy makers will raise that total to 80 million additional people in poverty by 2030.”
These facts show that it’s long past time to reject the Green Left’s lies and fearmongering and instead embrace the benefits of global warming. As Dr. Scott Atlas puts it regarding COVID data, “that’s the science.”
