Facts of life and climate change

There is so much wrong with that that it is difficult to know where to start. In all fairness, the AP has been joined by other elements of the legacy media in their derangement over climate change.

Let’s start with a few facts.

Forest fires in the U.S. are becoming rarer and less damaging. Last year, there were about 7 million acres burned in forest fires in the United States. In 1930, more than 50 million acres of forests were burned in the United States. Was 1930 an outlier? Not really. In each year between 1926 and 1950, more than 10 million acres burned.

Some sense of scale is important as well. The United States has almost 2 billion acres; seven million acres is about one-third of 1% of the landmass of the U.S.

In 2000, there were more than 92,000 wildfires in the United States. Last year, there were about 58,000.

This is, of course, despite the unabated rise in carbon dioxide, which grew from about 300 parts per million in the atmosphere in 1930 to more than 415 parts per million now.

So, the trend lines of greenhouse gases and forest fires appear to be completely unrelated.

How about disasters more generally? Again, the incidence of disasters and the cost associated with those disasters have been trending down for some time.

Over the last 30 years, alarmists have routinely claimed that climate change is making natural disasters including hurricanes, floods and heatwaves more frequent. The data, however, show that the number of climate-related disasters worldwide has actually declined slightly over the last 20 years.

The impressive Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado, routinely argues that the societal cost of those disasters has declined as a percentage of the economy between 1990 and 2020. In his 2020 review, Pielke found “little evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses documented on climate time scales is attributable to human-caused changes in climate ...”

How about accelerated mortality? Well, in its 2020 mid-year review, the insurance giant MunichRe noted that: “A total of 2,900 people lost their lives in natural disasters in the first half of the year, much lower than the average figures for both the last 30 years and the last 10 years.” Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist who recently ran for governor of California as a Democrat, notes the trend lines in deaths due to natural disasters, especially in the developing world, continue to decline sharply. Cyclones and other natural disasters that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of people in the developing world as recently as 50 years ago, now routinely kill fewer than 100 people.

It is commonly understood among academics that deaths from cold weather outweigh deaths from heat — by a sizable number. A recent study in The Lancet determined that each year cold kills about 4.5 million people, while about 600,000 die from the heat.

Moreover, when the researchers of The Lancet study assessed increased mortality from increased heat (about a half a degree per decade), there were about 116,000 more heat deaths each year and about 283,000 fewer cold deaths each year. As a practical matter, that means the temperature increase experienced since 2000 has resulted in 166,000 fewer weather-related deaths each year worldwide.

You’re welcome.

Given all of this, it is probably no surprise that few people prioritize climate change as a political issue. In a recent survey, just 1% of voters identified climate change as the most pressing issue facing the U.S.. Clearly, the other 99% are not buying the endless rhetoric about the “existential threat” posed by climate change. We share their skepticism.