Many people think climate change is increasing the frequency of natural disasters but they actually declined by 10% over the last two decades, the best-available data show
“The period since 2000 is viewed as the most reliable for data reliability, but it is safe to say that even since 2000, coverage has improved. So the 10% decline is possibly an underestimate.“ @RogerPielkeJr
Much of what people think about climate change is wrong
Deaths from natural disasters have declined dramatically but more people think they increased than think they decreased
The cost of natural disasters has declined as a share of GDP but more people think their cost went up than down
Neither the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) nor any other scientific body predicts climate change will reverse the declining disaster death toll and yet 3x more people believe it will than believe it won’t
US CO2 emissions declined 14% over the last decade but 3x more people believe they rose
Carbon emissions *globally* *declined* over the the last decade and yet 62% of Americans surveyed said they went up and just 10% said they didn’t
Climate change has been one of the most-discussed and most-covered news stories of the last two decades and so much of the responsibility for the public believing things that simply aren’t true comes not from lack of information but rather the constant barrage misinformation.
It is common to hear journalists lament declining overall trust in the news media, particularly among Republicans, but the massive gulf between basic climate facts and what people believe suggests such distrust is warranted & indeed should have declined not risen among Democrats.
This is particularly true because Dems are more likely than Rs to believe false information about many aspects of climate change, as the Google surveys show. (I was a Democrat until April when I changed my party affiliation to “No party preference)
Forty-two percent of Democrats and 35 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “More people are dying from natural disasters.”
Seventy-one percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Climate change is increasing the cost of natural disasters as a percent of GDP.”
76 percent of Democrats and 34 percent of Republicans agreed that “Deaths from natural disasters will rise in the future due to climate change.”
67 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans agreed that “Carbon emissions have risen in the United States over the last 10 years.”
In reality, carbon emissions declined by 14 percent between 2011 and 2020.
But haven’t disasters hammered banks? Nope. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” asks the title of a recent report by three NY Fed economists. “Not very,” they answer in the first sentence of the abstract.
The reason is because “weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance.” The study looked at FEMA-level disasters between 1995 and 2018, at county-level property damage estimates, and the impact on banking revenue.
While scientists expect hurricanes to become 5% more intense they also expect them to become 25% less frequent
What about floods? It’s true that more people are being exposed to them but that’s because cities along rivers are growing. Flood deaths & damages are declining
What about droughts? They’re not increasing in US or globally
What about fires? Warmer temperatures dry out the wood but they don’t increase fuel load, and fuel load determines fire intensity. Forest management not climate change thus determines whether you have high-intensity, crown-burning, forest-destroying fires.
What about shrubland fires in places like Malibu in Southern California? “Ignitions explain more than temperature … One hundred percent were human caused, … powerline failures have been the dominant cause”
What about food production? Technology (eg fertilizer, irrigation, & tractors) will continue to outweigh temperature increases. We produce food in many climates around the world, including very hot and dry ones.
What about sea level rise? We can handle it
How does climate change rank compared to wars, disease, asteroids, super-volcanoes, and tsunamis? Much lower. There’s no *scientific* scenario for climate change posing an existential risk. By contrast, consider an asteroid.
Is there some place you can see an overview of the best-available science, complete with references? There is!
Is there some easy-to-read book you can read that lays out the science on climate change, plastics, meat, species, energy, and food told through fun stories? There is!
Climate alarmism is harmful to mental health and is increasingly used as an excuse by politicians. They blame climate change for bad disaster preparedness and management. We see that with fires, flooding, and hurricanes. That’s bad for many reasons:
Fifty-five percent of people on the Left justify the murder of Trump, five times more liberals than conservatives defend political violence, and not a single high-profile Democrat has called for @jonesjay to drop out. The Left truly can not make its intentions any clearer.
The person whose legacy is most being destroyed by this is @BarackObama . He must demand that @jonesjay step down. Now. And he should take extraordinary efforts to demand the Left back down from its utterly crazed support for violence. This building should not open until he does that.
Mind-blowing. In 2014, VP Biden attacked corrupt developer in Romania who owned land around US embassy. In 2015, Hunter goes to work for the corrupt developer, lobbies US ambassador to pressure Romanians to drop case, then proposes to settle case by cutting in his China client 😳
This appears to have been a straight-up mob-style shakedown by the Biden family done under the auspices of Obama foreign policy and in a way the directly jeopardized US national security.
The lawyers for Hunter’s corrupt developer client first threatened to jeopardize the land upon which the embassy sat, and then proposed a deal whereby prosecutors dropped the case in exchange for the corrupt developer selling nearly half his stake to a state-owned Chinese energy company, that was also Hunter’s client.
Good god. The Swiss people just approved digital IDs. Australia implemented them in Dec. UK last week. In all 3 nations, deep state-allied politicians are behind them. This is a digital ID/censorship emergency. Please share and reply below with info about other nations.
The deep state swamp creatures know that digital IDs are unpopular and so they are trying to rush them through before anyone realizes what they are doing. The good news is that the more people learn about them the more alarmed they become.
Polling in Switzerland showed 60% backed digital IDs which both houses in parliament had already approved. The final vote was just 50.4%. It almost lost. I hope the Swiss people are carefully scrutinizing the vote count.
Same dynamic in UK. Opposition to digital IDs is low and will rise. Digital IDs can and must be killed.
From a Swiss source: "Palantir and Mercator sponsored the Yes Campaign. Palantir is a member of Digital Switzerland, alongside other tech companies. Digital Switzerland lobbied for the E-ID/digital ID in Switzerland in this vote.
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
Ellison: We need to unify all of the national data. Put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.
Blair: So you're really through the use of this, you're revolutionizing the way government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates.
Why bother having democracy at all? Why not just let Ellison and WEF and AI run things? What could possibly go wrong?
And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.
The idea that our rights are natural is Christian Nationalist misinformation, say the media and Democrats. But it's not. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. Behind the Left's dehumanization of conservatives is an ignorant denial of America's spiritual foundation.
To his credit, Senator @timkaine reversed his position on natural rights a few days after the hearing. “Of course, I embrace the view, expressed so clearly in the Declaration of Independence authored by Virginian Thomas Jefferson, that all people are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I accept the Senator Kaine's change of mind, but he misrepresents the hearing by saying "Of course..."
Nobody who watches Kaine pedantically lecture State Department official Riley Barnes and walk away thinking Kaine agrees with the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
Notably, Kaine placed his oped describing his change of mind on natural rights at Fox where no MSNBC viewer is at any risk of reading it.
@timkaine According to the New Atheists the New Atheists failed like all scientism fails. They couldn't explain reality or deliver a positive vision or affirmative program. Their entire project rests on really dumb assumptions about reality and nature.