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July 27 - September 16, 2024
The biggest environmental killer, outdoor air pollution, initially increases as incomes go up, but then it starts declining as individuals become even richer. Put simply, when immediate concerns like hunger and infectious diseases are tackled, people start demanding more environmental regulations.
The prediction that the polar bear would suffer immensely because of a lack of summer ice was always somewhat odd. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now.
When we look at what influences species extinction, climate change is one of the smallest factors: 5 to 12 percent. A 2016 study published in Nature similarly suggests that overexploitation, agriculture, and urban development are the most prevalent threats to species, with climate change the least important of seven factors.
The scientists found that heat caused almost 0.5 percent of all deaths, but more than 7 percent of all deaths were caused by cold. For every heat death, seventeen people die from the cold.
Heat kills when body temperature gets too high, and this alters the fluid and electrolytic balance in weaker, often older people. Cold usually kills because the body restricts blood flow to the skin, increasing blood pressure and lowering our defenses against infections.
The latest US data on heat and cold deaths, which unfortunately covers up only to 2006, shows that heat deaths are few and are in fact declining (because, in spite of the research assumption, people do buy air conditioning), whereas cold deaths are far larger, and are actually increasing
There are two lessons we need to take away. First, hearing only about deaths caused by heat means we end up believing things are much worse, leading to more fear. Second, it means we focus on the smaller problem of heat deaths that in many places is relatively easily solved by simple adaptation measures already being undertaken. Instead, we focus too little on the bigger and often stubborn problem of cold deaths.
A 2015 analysis of heat and cold deaths in Madrid showed that not only are cold deaths outweighing heat deaths five to one, but also heat deaths are declining, especially in the older age groups; however, cold deaths are increasing for all groups.
China has seen its green area almost double in the last seventeen years, partly because of a massive reforestation program, partly because of carbon dioxide, and partly because it grows multiple crops, keeping land green for more of the year.
Researchers find that global greening over the past thirty-five years has increased leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States. It is equivalent to greening the entire continent of Australia with plants or trees, two times over.
Just to be clear, global warming will in total have a negative impact on our planet and well-being, so overall, there will be more bad than good impacts to describe. But the overarching narrative that insists on telling us only the bad stories is unlikely to give us adequate information with which to act smartly.
They found that since 1950 drought had likely increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa, but had likely decreased in central North America and northwest Australia. In other words, on a planetary level, the earth isn’t experiencing more drought.
Moreover, the UN scientists found—and this may be very surprising—that the purported link between man-caused climate change and drought is actually weak: “There is low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century to human influence.”
The evidence also shows that globally, the number of consecutive dry days has been declining for the last ninety years.
Looking at inland flooding, the UN’s scientists say there is “a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.” The US Global Change Research Program clearly says that it cannot attribute changes in flooding to carbon dioxide, nor find detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration, or frequency.
If we look at computer models only when there is a flood and then sometimes say a-ha!, we are ignoring all the places where there was no flooding; and, because climate change means less rain in some places, there could have been flooding in the absence of climate change. This is exactly what the UN tells us when it points out that overall and globally there is no increase in flooding. Reporting only the negative is sadly what gives us a biased understanding.
widespread claims by the climate community that if precipitation extremes increase, floods must also,” it actually appears that “flood magnitudes are decreasing.”
So while the dollar value of flooding damage has increased dramatically as a percentage of the national income, flooding takes far less of a toll than it did a century ago.
And the primary factor in the reduction in global burned area over the past 110 years is human activity: when more people started planting crops, they wanted to avoid fires, and did so with fire suppression and forest management.
There is no US study looking at this, but an Australian study shows that while the value of property damaged by wildfire is on the rise, it is caused by more people and more houses built in high-risk locations. When the damage is adjusted for the number and value of houses at risk, the trend is not increasing—it is actually slightly, but insignificantly, decreasing.
As with flooding, the best way to manage fire is to focus not on carbon dioxide levels, but on human behavior. Planning decisions are far more important than climate impact. Building codes and regulations are of paramount importance, as are land management policies to ensure there are well-maintained firebreaks in forests, and effective firefighting strategies to stop fires from spreading.
There are now many more people living in Dade and Broward Counties in South Florida than lived along the entire coast from Texas to Virginia in 1940. For a hurricane in 1940 to hit the same number of people as a modern hurricane ripping through Dade and Broward today, it would have had to tear through the entire Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coastline
Only about a hundred thousand people lived in Miami at the time, in far cheaper houses than today. The inflation-adjusted damage ran to $1.6 billion. A hurricane of the same size and ferocity tearing down the same path today would be the costliest US weather catastrophe ever, causing damage worth $265 billion.
For the future, what matters most is that we make sure that the most vulnerable, worst-off people living in shantytowns like the Mudd are lifted out of poverty. It is growth, not carbon dioxide reductions, that will prevent the harrowing losses that the world’s poorest endure as a result of hurricanes.
In the 1920s, these disasters killed almost half a million people each year, mostly in large floods and droughts in developing countries. Today the total number of climate-related deaths across the world has declined to fewer than twenty thousand each year. Over the past hundred years, the number of deaths from these climate-related catastrophes has plummeted by 96 percent. Remember that over the same time period, the global population has increased fourfold. So the average personal risk of dying in a climate-related disaster has declined by 99 percent.
Thus, neither the human nor the relative financial cost of weather-related disasters has actually increased as a result of climate change. We cannot use these numbers to conclude that there are no increases in the number of weather disasters (although as we have just seen, droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes show little or no increase globally), but they do tell us that resiliency has outpaced any potential increase in the incidence of disasters.
For the United States, hurricanes have cost 0.19 percent of GDP since 2000. Floods have cost 0.07 percent of GDP—that is less than Americans spend each year on fast food. It’s a large sum (Americans love fast food), but it’s far from a world-ending amount on a national scale.
We should focus on the temperature rise of just above 7°F, because that is likely to be what we will see at the end of the century, without any additional climate policies beyond those to which governments have already committed. At 7.2°F in 2100, climate change would cause negative impacts equivalent to a 2.9 percent loss to global GDP. Remember, of course, that the world will be getting much richer over the course of the century. And that will still be true with climate change—we will still be much richer, but slightly less so than we would have been without global warming.
The first mistake is leaving out the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a fertilizer that boosts photosynthesis. That’s why professional vegetable growers pump it into the greenhouses that grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. More carbon dioxide means bigger, more productive plants. On a planetary scale, this link explains why we are seeing planetary greening.
The full study concludes that the total average global cost will be 0.26 percent of GDP by the end of the century. While we still will end up producing much more food for the world, global warming will mean we have to produce it with more effort and with more trade, overall leaving us less well off, at about a quarter of a percent of global GDP. And actually, this is in a worst-case scenario with very high warming; with less extreme warming the costs end up much closer to zero, and in three of eleven scenarios explored by the researchers there would actually be benefits of up to 0.15 percent
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In the United States, agriculture employed perhaps 80 percent of the workforce in 1800, and it was responsible for more than half the net worth of the economy. Today, it employs 1.3 percent and produces 1 percent of the economy.
Studies indicate that even in the absence of climate policy, 60 to 70 percent of the Greenland ice sheet would be around in a thousand years. And if temperatures went back down over the next centuries, it is likely much of Greenland would regrow.
Remember, two-thirds of the total, global value of fish is already produced in aquaculture, where increasing acidification would have close to zero impact.
This has given us the best available estimate of the total costs of climate change at about 4 percent of GDP by 2100. This estimate is actually larger than the one provided by the 2018 UN climate panel report—the report that everyone uses to argue that we have a deadline of 2030 to act to prevent climate change. This report estimates that if we do nothing, the cost of global warming will reach 2.6 percent of global GDP by 2100.219
It costs about $6 to buy an authorization for one ton of carbon dioxide. If you buy an authorization, it means there’s one ton less that power plants can purchase. If you don’t use the authorization, that means all the power plants, between them, need to find a way to emit one ton less over the next year. Essentially, you’ve spent $6 and reduced global emissions by one ton.
In one 2018 study, Norwegian researchers found that realistically, the money saved from cutting food waste will be spent on other goods that will emit so much carbon dioxide that the original emissions savings will be entirely canceled.8
For instance, walking instead of taking the train means we emit much more carbon dioxide, because trains aren’t big emitters, and we save a lot of money that we spend on other things.
Generally, when researchers have studied the rebound effect across a range of activities, they estimate that 59 percent of the emissions savings from “virtuous” behavior are lost to the rebound effect.
A third problem with restricting our behavior for environmental reasons is that as in many areas of life, when we do something “good,” we allow ourselves to do something “bad” as a reward. This tendency is known as “moral licensing.”
This effect is copiously documented when it comes to environmentally friendly behavior. People who have just donated to a charity are less likely to behave in an environmentally friendly way afterward. Those who have reduced their water consumption through an awareness campaign use more electricity instead.
So if you’re living in a rich country, going entirely vegetarian for the rest of your life will reduce your total personal emissions by about 2 percent. You could achieve a similar emissions reduction by eating anything you want and paying $1.50 each year on the RGGI trading system.
Artificial meat generates up to 96 percent fewer greenhouse gases than conventionally produced meat. A perfect meat substitute would be an obvious win because it doesn’t require people to give up something they like. People could continue to enjoy their “meat,” but with just 4 percent of the emissions.
Across the world, an electric car with a reasonably long range will on average emit twenty-six tons over its lifetime. So, switching from a gasoline-powered car emitting thirty-four tons of carbon dioxide to a comparable electric car that emits twenty-six tons doesn’t eliminate emissions; it cuts them by 24 percent, leaving more than three-quarters in place.
China, the world’s biggest electric car market, has so many coal-powered plants that electric cars worsen local air, with lethal consequences. It is estimated that in Shanghai, pollution from an additional million electric-powered vehicles would kill nearly three times as many people annually as an additional million gasoline-powered cars.
But pollution isn’t the most significant cost when it comes to cars. About 80 percent of the damage cars cause overall comes from accidents and congestion. For these effects, it makes no difference if a driver is in a Tesla or a BMW. All of which is to say that buying, or subsidizing, electric cars doesn’t help with the biggest social problems with cars, and it is certainly not a good investment from a climate standpoint. Look at the costs we pay. The average subsidy spent on electric cars globally is about $10,000 per car. Each car saves eight tons of carbon dioxide over its lifetime, a
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Even if every single one of the 4.5 billion people getting on any flight this year stayed on the ground, and the same happened every year until 2100, the rise in temperatures would be reduced by just 0.05°F, equivalent to delaying climate change by less than one year by 2100.30
Instead of telling people not to fly on airplanes, we should focus on the carbon efficiency of those airplanes. Adaptation is already occurring: each new generation of aircraft is on average 20 percent more fuel efficient than the model it replaces.
Research is also under way on creating more sustainable fuels, including those produced by domestic and industrial waste. The overall carbon footprint of sustainable fuels is up to 80 percent less than that of today’s aviation fuel, and testing started on using such fuels on commercial aircraft in 2008.33
Every dollar we can spend as a society on research and development to bring forward the moment of carbon-dioxide-neutral flights will be far more meaningful and more effective in addressing climate change than a few of us trying to cut a few flights out of a misplaced sense of shame.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying that you shouldn’t think carefully about your own personal choices. There are solid reasons why any of us might choose to change our diets, drive a smaller car, and reduce the carbon footprint we leave on the planet. But climate change shouldn’t be the major consideration, because the effect of such choices is so limited.
