When it comes to questions about “climate change,” bad news for the fanatics is good news for everyone else.
Good news about growing wealth, the availability of food, and actual human ingenuity in facing challenges tends to put a monkey wrench in globalist plans to wreck world economies to battle what amounts to a phantom menace.
And two studies about global development published by credible experts on the subject show just how good the news actually is.
In a commentary piece published in January by the New York Post, one of the world’s best-known skeptics of the “climate change” movement highlighted the studies that show how wrong the greenies really are.
In fact, the Post’s headline said it all: “Climate change fanatics want to bankrupt the entire world for little to no reward.”
Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, another think tank based in Massachusetts.
He’s also an author, writing works such as 2001’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World,” 2023’s “Best Things First,” and 2024’s “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
He was named in 2004 as one of Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
In short, he’s no piker when it comes to environmental controversies — and he’s a thorn in the side for “climate change” alarmists, whether they’re youthful ignoramuses like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg or nonagenarian veterans of mass scares like biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” helped kick off liberal panic over the future of the planet that’s now in its fifth decade.
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And the studies Lomborg spotlighted should make the “climate change” world very uneasy.
To summarize: The studies found that technological advances and human ingenuity are more than capable of handling the challenges of a changing climate caused by human industry. (Lomborg appears to accept the basic premise that humans are behind “climate change.” He’s just skeptical of the climate fanatics’ ideas to combat it.)
“Alarmist campaigners and credulous journalists fail to account for the simple fact that people are remarkably adaptable and tackle most climate problems at low cost,” he wrote.
“Take food: Climate campaigners warn we’ll starve, but research shows that instead of a 51% increase in food availability by 2100 if there were no climate change, we are on-track for ‘only’ a 49% increase.”
Of actual weather-related calamities — like the Los Angeles wildfires progressives blame on “climate change” when Democratic ineptitude and misgovernance is a much more likely culprit — Lomborg’s commentary was equally deflating for progressive rhetoric.
“Or weather disasters: They killed half a million people annually in the 1920s, whereas the last decade saw fewer than 9,000 fatalities each year,” he wrote.
“The 97.5% reduction in mortality is because people are more resilient, because they’re richer and can access better technology.”
And so-called solutions from the left, which would only inhibit economic growth, actually make humans less resilient and less rich, which in turn leaves them more vulnerable to weather-related disasters.
Lomborg didn’t actually cite the Los Angeles fires in his column, but the disaster makes his point. While the fires caused more than $160 billion in damage, according to KNX News radio in Los Angeles, the death toll was 29, according to ABC News.
That’s not to belittle the death of any human being, but the fact is that a disaster on the scale of the Los Angeles blazes hit a densely populated area and destroyed buildings by the thousands while actual human losses were low. That’s a sign of an advanced society.
And that’s a society built on the use of fossil fuels and the marvel of the internal combustion engine.
The human ingenuity that creates global advancement is more than capable of meeting the challenges that advancement brings, Lomborg maintains.
“Why is this so different from the impression we have been given by the media?” Lomborg asked.
Oh, there are probably reasons — like the fact that the establishment media in the West is fully committed to spreading the propaganda that “climate change” is an existential threat to humans, and that governments around the world need more power over their citizens to fight it.
The two studies Lomborg publicized each carry considerable weight.
One was published in February of 2024 and written by Richard S.J. Tol, a professor of economics at the U.K.’s University of Sussex. Or, as Lomborg describes him, “one of the most cited climate economists” in the world.
The other, published in March of 2024, was written by William Nordhaus, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale who focuses on the environment and natural resources.
Together, Lomborg wrote, they suggest that the global costs incurred by anticipated “climate change” — a 3-degree Celsius rise in temperatures by the end of this century — will be more than offset by the advantages conferred by the industrial and technological advancement that is supposedly causing the change in the first place.
And that’s good news for the United States. It’s good news for the world.
But for the environmental fanatics, the news doesn’t get much worse.
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