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Climate-Related Deaths Are at Historic Lows, Data Show | Marlo Lewis Jr. fee.org/articles/clima… via @feeonline
The doomsday interpretation of climate change is a political doctrine, not a scientific finding, as Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg shows in a recent series of tweets and atmospheric scientist John Christy explains in a new paper titled “Falsifying Climate Alarm.”
In the aforementioned tweets, Lomborg rebuts an op-ed by Nobel economist Joseph Stigletz, who advocates spending trillions of dollars annually to combat climate change, which he calls “our World War III.”
As evidence, Stigletz claims that in recent years weather-related damages cost the U.S. economy 2 percent of GDP—a figure for which he gives no reference.
Lomborg deftly sets the record straight. Aon Benfield reinsurers estimate that during 2000-2017, weather-related damages cost the United States about $88 billion annually, or 0.48 percent of GDP per year, not 2 percent.
More importantly, extreme weather is a natural feature of the Earth’s climate system. The vast majority of those damages would have occurred with or without climate change. “Does Stiglitz believe there is no bad weather without climate change?” Lomborg asks.
In the United States, hurricanes are the biggest cause of weather-related damages. Hurricanes have become more costly over the past 120 years but not because of any long-term change in the weather.
Once historic losses are adjusted for increases in population, wealth, and the consumer price index, U.S. hurricane-related damages show no trend since 1900.
The past three decades are generally agreed to be the warmest in the instrumental record. Yet during that period, damages due to all forms of extreme weather as a share of global GDP declined.
In other words, despite there being many more people and lots more stuff in harm’s way, the relative economic impact of extreme weather is decreasing. It is difficult to reconcile that trend with claims that ours is an “unsustainable” civilization.
Lomborg provides an even more telling rebuttal point in a previous Tweet. Since the 1920s, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations increased from about 305 parts per million to more than 400 ppm, and global average temperatures increased by about 1°C.
Yet globally, the individual risk of dying from weather-related disasters declined by 99 percent.
Stigletz claims we cannot afford not to spend trillions to mitigate climate change because “our lives and our civilization as we know it is at stake, just as they were in World War II.”
Lomborg notes that in the peer-reviewed literature, unchecked climate change is estimated to cost 2-4 percent of global GDP in 2100. That “is not the end of the world,”
.... especially considering that, despite climate change, global per capita incomes in 2100 are expected to be 5-10 times larger than today.
Statements like the following are increasingly common in popular media, academic journals, and political discourse: “The evidence that anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to our way of life is incontrovertible.” Not so—not even close.
