Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 6, 2022 28 tweets 12 min read Read on X
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

rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/global-weath…
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)

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/democrats-mo…
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.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-thr…
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”

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
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!

environmentalprogress.org/the-case-again…
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!

amazon.com/Apocalypse-Nev…
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:

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-rea…
Q: If apocalyptic thinking is so easily debunked, why is it so powerful?

A:

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More from @shellenberger

Nov 22
The Australian PM @AlboMP wants global censorship to counter misinformation. But only free speech can counter misinformation. Please share this to affirm your opposition to his awful bill!
Was the censorship bill a head fake to jam through Digital ID? 🤔
👀 Image
Read 6 tweets
Nov 21
I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 18
Lovers of free speech just scored victories in the US, EU, and Ireland. But now we’re in pitched battles in Britain & Australia, which is at dire risk of trying to censor the entire planet. This is about all of us, so I’m flying down. Share this to show solidarity. LFG!!! Image
I am headed directly to Canberra to meet with other free speech lovers and the wise and just representatives of the Australian people, who I am confident will kill the @AlboMP governments aggressive and hostile assault on the freedom that enables democracy and all other freedoms.

Australia belongs to its people and it is up to them and their representatives to decide whether they want to remain a liberal democratic nation or instantaneously become a totalitarian one.

But it is the duty of friends of Australia to bluntly warn that @AlboMP is pushing a censorship law that would not only end free speech for Australians but also be viewed as a hostile assault on the free Internet worldwide by people in other nations, including in the US, its best ally.

x.com/shellenberger/…
@AlboMP Here is the text from the law that makes clear that the @AlboMP censorship law would apply to the entire global Internet.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 17
Trump's nominees are weird, say elites. But it was the elites' weird ideas that caused wars, addiction/OD crisis, Covid lockdowns, trans madness, censorship, and worse. Trump's nominees trigger the covert narcissism of elites who are rightly defensive at their appalling record.
Democrats act like they’re starting to get it, but they’re not. Their problems are all much worse than they realize. It’s not just that the Party is leaderless. It’s that the Party and the establishment institutions upon which it relies are discredited with half the country and are about to become more discredited with even more Americans as the truth fully comes out about censorship, Covid, weaponization of government, the transgender medical mistreatment scandal, and much else that the media and elites have lied about over the last 20 years. The media isn’t what people thought it was. It was never a reflection of reality. It was a reality distortion machine and propaganda industry in service of maintaining the narrow interests and power of a tiny group of decadent and psychologically disordered elites and their deeply deformed, dishonest institutions. Some might be reformed but others are too far gone to be saved.

x.com/RNCResearch/st…
This is the kind of unAmerican garbage that Democrats made pervasive. It will take many years to root it all out from our institutions.

Read 5 tweets
Nov 16
The media says Trump's nominees are dangerous, but they're not. Their positions and priorities are well within the mainstream. The threat they pose isn't to the American people, it's to the pathocrats who created and worsened our border, public health, and foreign policy crises. Image
Over the last few years, the American people have come to believe that our establishment institutions are at least partly responsible for a series of self-inflicted wounds. Our health and medical establishment either failed to address or enabled declining life expectancy, a mental health crisis including an addiction epidemic, and a botched response to Covid. Our military and foreign policy establishment unnecessarily started and prolonged war and conflict in the Middle East and violated civil liberties at home in the name of fighting terrorism. And liberalized migration laws have depressed working-class wages, swamped the ability of cities to absorb the new migrants, and created a humanitarian disaster on the border.

Given all of that, the President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations make sense. As Border Czar, Thomas Homan will take strong action to close the southern border and deport criminals. National Director of Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard will bring greater skepticism to foreign military entanglements and calls to restrict civil liberties for national security. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will stand up to the corporations that most everyone agrees have put self-interest before the public’s interest on everything from drug safety to food quality.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some of them hold views that many of us disagree with. The main criticism of Trump’s nominees is that they have dangerous and fringe views. Homan said he would deport whole families. Gabbard said the Russian-backed Syrian dictator was not America’s enemy. And Kennedy espouses marginal and unsubstantiated views on everything from nuclear power to 5Gs.

But Homan has made clear his focus will be on deporting criminals, not families, whatever one thinks of Gabbard’s position on the Syrian conflict, it’s obvious from the context that she made her remarks in service of her loyalty to the US, not Russia, and Kennedy has said, repeatedly, that he won’t ban vaccines.

And throughout history, most real reformers and innovators have held fringe views and have had aspects of their personalities that are problematic. In most cases, those flaws or idiosyncrasies proved to be a small price to pay for their willingness to overcome the many obstacles required to achieve serious reforms of deeply entrenched institutions. This is true not just of Homan, Gabbard, and Kennedy, but also of Defense Secretary and Attorney General nominees, Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, respectively. The accusations the media has made against the two men are so far unsubstantiated by the available evidence.

And none of the allegedly wrong views or bad deeds of Trump’s nominees outweigh the potential of the nominees to reform the institutions that are directly responsible for the invasion of Iraq, prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, entanglement in foreign conflicts, corporate capture of the FDA, the weaponization of government, Covid school closures, authoritarian and gratuitous Covid vaccine mandates, unhealthy diets, the addiction crisis that kills 100,000 Americans per year, the humanitarian disaster along the border, and the mistreatment of children with pseudoscientific transgender medicine.

Strong leaders committed to reforming America’s military and foreign policy establishment, its public health, food, and medical establishments, and its immigration and border security establishment are precisely what the American people wanted when they voted for Trump. If those nominees pursue destructive agendas in lieu of doing their jobs, we will be the first to call them out for it. But the establishment has no ground on which to stand...

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!
Read 4 tweets
Nov 15
Over the last decade, Democrats & the media said that those of us who opposed DEI, racial quotas, and open borders had gone “far right.” We hadn’t. Rather, Democrats and the media had gone far left. We are only now emerging from 10+ years of extreme, psychopathic gaslighting. Image
Make no mistake: it was the mainstream news media that induced the mass psychosis that radicalized Democrats into believing that the US had somehow become *more* racist, against all available evidence. Image
The media did this. The mass brainwashing came from college-educated elites in control of the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. They got Democrats to believe the ludicrous view that their fellow Americans had somehow become secretly racist, practically overnight. Image
Read 13 tweets

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