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Climate researchers show we’re actually “safer than ever from climate” catastrophes

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The climate safety denial movement

I and others have documented that we’re safer than ever from climate. Catastrophists can’t refute us, so they’re now saying that disaster deaths don’t matter!

For decades climate catastrophists have portrayed climate disasters as getting deadlier and deadlier.

Now that I and others have documented that we’re safer than ever from climate, catastrophists are saying that disaster deaths don’t matter!

  • Reuters says “Drop in climate-related disaster deaths not evidence against climate emergency.”

    But a drop in deaths from something—here, a 98% drop—is obvious evidence against it being an emergency.

    Would Reuters say: “98% drop in flu deaths not evidence against flu emergency”?¹

  • Why is Reuters, along with The New York TimesPolitiFact, and USA Todayclaiming that a 98% drop in climate disaster deaths doesn’t contradict their climate emergency narrative? Because it obviously does, and they can only save their narrative by intimidating us into denying the obvious
  • The central narrative of climate catastrophists is that fossil fuels and their CO2 emissions are killing more and more people via climate disasters.

    This narrative has always had a fatal weakness: it totally contradicts the data, which show plummeting climate disaster deaths.³

  • Why are climate disaster deaths plummeting as fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions rise?

    Because the enormous ability uniquely cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy gives us to master climate danger far outweighs any new climate challenges from CO2 emissions.

  • An example of fossil-fueled climate mastery overwhelming CO2 impacts is drought.

    Any contribution of rising CO2 to drought has been overwhelmed by fossil-fueled irrigation and crop transport, which have helped reduce drought deaths by over 100 times over 100 years as CO2 levels have risen.⁴

  • Over the last decade, I and a number of others, including Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, have challenged catastrophism by pointing to declining climate disaster deaths.

    Catastrophists couldn’t refute our argument. So instead they pretended it didn’t exist.

    Until last year.⁵

  • In 2023, climate catastrophists finally felt compelled to address the fact that climate disaster deaths have plummeted (driven by fossil-fueled climate mastery).

    Because of honesty? No—because Presidential candidates started bringing it up and persuading people with it.

  • Here is Vivek Ramaswamy during his Presidential campaign referring to a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths—and, crucially, giving fossil fuel energy credit.

     

  • Here is Ron DeSantis during his Presidential campaign referring to a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths—and, crucially, giving fossil fuel energy credit.
  • The 98% decline in climate disaster deaths, driven by fossil fuels, is a blockbuster fact: it shows that we are experiencing not fossil-fueled climate emergency but fossil-fueled climate safety.

    But instead of being happy, catastrophists engage in climate safety denial.

  • Here are 3 recent instances of climate safety denial—from ReutersPolitiFact, and USA Today. All have long portrayed climate deaths as a fast-increasing problem. But now they claim deaths don’t matter.
    https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/drop-climate-related-disaster-deaths-not-evidence-against-climate-emergency-2023-09-19/

    https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/aug/24/vivek-ramaswamy/vivek-ramsaswamys-misleading-gop-debate-claim-abou/

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/27/false-claim-disaster-deaths-show-climate-change-not-real-fact-check/71249882007/

  • Climate safety denial utilizes 5 main myths to evade the decline in disaster deaths:

    1. Fossil fuels don’t deserve credit
    2. Weather forecasting deserves the credit
    3. 100 years is a misleading period
    4. Damages are drastically increasing
    5. There’s a major increase in reported disasters

  • Myth 1: Fossil fuels don’t deserve much credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths; it’s “resilience.”

    Truth: Uniquely cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy makes us resilient through plentiful infrastructure-building, heating and cooling, irrigation, transportation, etc.⁶

  • Myth 2: Storm warning systems deserve the credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths.

    TruthDrought, not storm, deaths are the leading source of reduced climate deaths. And fossil fuels power storm warning and evacuation systems (and more resilient infrastructure).⁷

  • Myth 3100 years is a misleading period to measure plummeting climate disaster deaths.

    Truth100 years is a standard, very meaningful period to look at. While we have data going back an additional two decades, those tend to underreport due to less global communication.⁸

  • Contrary to the claim that starting analysis of climate disaster deaths in the 1920s overestimates the decline, it actually likely underestimates the decline due to insufficient past reporting; data before WWII extremely likely underreport deaths compared to data after 2000.
  • Myth 4: There is an alarming increase in reported disasters, revealing an underlying climate emergency.

    Truth: The increase in reported disasters over time is due overwhelmingly to increased global communication. Changes in fundamentals, such as storms, are extremely modest.⁹

  • The claim that more reported disasters show an increasingly dangerous climate is absurd in light of the fact that underlying data show massive increases in reporting before significant human climate impacts and the reporting trend also massively goes up for non-climate causes!
  • Other biases might inflate the number of reported disasters. E.g., governments of poor countries have an incentive to declare more disasters with increasing international relief.¹⁰
  • Using obviously problematic disaster frequency reporting instead of direct climatological evidence to try and show increasing climate danger is a revealing choice by catastrophists. They are making it because the climate change we’ve experienced has been very modest—and masterable.
    Do Not Declare a “Climate Emergency”

    Do Not Declare a “Climate Emergency”

    ·
    AUGUST 17, 2023
    Read full story
  • An example of unalarming climate fundamentals: neither the frequency nor the energy in global hurricanes has changed significantly relative to the noisy average. There is also little evidence for more landfalling hurricanes.¹¹
  • The catastrophist attempt to undermine the 98% decrease in disaster deaths by pointing to the increased reporting of disasters is actually self-defeating.

    If disaster deaths are plummeting despite incomplete past reporting, that means they’ve declined by even more than 98%.

  • Myth 5Climate damages are drastically increasing, revealing an underlying climate emergency.

    Truth: Even though there are many incentives for climate damages to go up—preferences for riskier areas, government bailouts—GDP-adjusted damages are flat.¹²

  • We often hear that “billion-dollar disasters” have increased significantly. But this is a bogus metric. Of course, as GDP grows we’ll have more billion-dollar disasters because there is more wealth for disasters to strike. But when we adjust for GDP there’s no increase in damage.¹³
  • Reuters “fact check” alarmingly claims a 151% growth in disaster damages from a period starting in 1978 to a period ending in 2017.

    But they evade that the global economy grew by over 200% during that period!

    (And they evade that disaster and damage reporting increased.)¹⁴

  • The stupidest climate safety denial myth (used by The New York Times): 2 million people died from extreme weather in the last 50 years; that’s obviously an emergency.

    Truth: 2 million in 50 years is a rate of 40,000 per year—far, far less than 100 years ago, thus confirming today’s climate safety.¹⁵

  • The last-gasp climate safety denial myth: Okay, we’re safer than ever from climate disasters, and it is driven by cheap energy from fossil fuels, but we can easily replace fossil fuels with solar and wind.

    Truth: For the foreseeable future there is no cheap global energy without fossil fuels.

  • Observe that all these seemingly scientific outlets, such as The New York Times, Reuters, and PolitiFact are totally unable to refute the death-blow to their “climate emergency” narrative that is the drastic decline in climate disaster deaths.

    Science requires that they admit defeat.

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UC San Diego – The Keeling Curve

For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%–from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.

Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).

Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.

Population estimates for the 2010s come from World Bank Data

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Business

Opposition leader Poilievre calling for end of prorogation to deal with Trump’s tariffs

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From Conservative Party Communications

The Hon. Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Official Opposition, released the following statement on the threat of tariffs from the US:

“Canada is facing a critical challenge. On February 1st we are facing the risk of unjustified 25% tariffs by our largest trading partner that would have damaging consequences across our country. Our American counterparts say they want to stop the illegal flow of drugs and other criminal activity at our border. The Liberal government admits their weak border is a problem. That is why they announced a multibillion-dollar border plan—a plan they cannot fund because they shut down Parliament, preventing MPs and Senators from authorizing the funds.

“We also need retaliatory tariffs, something that requires urgent Parliamentary consideration.

“Yet, Liberals have shut Parliament in the middle of this crisis. Canada has never been so weak, and things have never been so out of control. Liberals are putting themselves and their leadership politics ahead of the country. Freeland and Carney are fighting for power rather than fighting for Canada.

“Common Sense Conservatives are calling for Trudeau to reopen Parliament now to pass new border controls, agree on trade retaliation and prepare a plan to rescue Canada’s weak economy.

“The Prime Minister has the power to ask the Governor General to cut short prorogation and get our Parliament working.

“Open Parliament. Take back control. Put Canada First.”

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Carbon Tax

Carbon tax tripping up Liberal leadership hopefuls

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The Liberals and progressives everywhere were so close.  At the height of their influence, no one, certainly anywhere in the English speaking world could make this claim: “Climate change IS NOT an existential threat to planet earth.” Those who did were immediately sidelined, ostracized by their cohorts, dismissed by corporate media and social media behemoths. Sure the battle still rages, but only in their information world where you still see phrases like “climate change denialist”.

You see their information world has not yet realized something new has happened.  History writers will say Elon Musk stopped the progressives in their tracks by buying Twitter, releasing the Twitter files and eventually with Donald Trump, swinging the information world in the direction of X.  If you have doubts just look at this picture.  While the Twitter files reveal the new information world was under the, let’s say ‘secret influence’ of the White House, this photo shows those same tech power brokers are publicly, and happily celebrating the man they worked secretly to bring down.  Or at least they’re not ashamed to publicly text their friends about it. The fact they’re not hiding probably reveals their eager support.

Sometimes we find it’s the people we look down our noses at who make all the difference.  Like those overweight beer-guzzling hunter types who wear the red hats. (No not the Roman Cardinals, but the Appalachian trailer house occupants). These conspiracy theorists started to proclaim that the world would in fact not burn up by next weekend.  Sure many of these seemed to be the same people who claim the world is flat and their neighbor is from another planet.  But then more people stepped forward.  Not about ‘pancake Earth’, but about the existential threat of climate change.

Family members and friends scorned and ridiculed them, and many still do.  They were outraged that a regular citizen would dare to share information from a completely sane climate scientist or researcher who did not agree with the majority. They’d lose their marbles on those silly enough to cite a peer reviewed scientific paper.  IF anyone was bold enough to take the time to read an entire report from NASA or Environment Canada, well you’d certainly hear someone say “You fool! You can’t do your own research!! You’re not a scientist!!”

Fortunately, funny man podcaster Jimmy Dore has the perfect comeback for these situations.  Dore says when his own friends warned him only a Conspiracy Theorist would do his own research, he replied “You know before COVID doing your own research used to be called… reading”.  It’s really worth two minutes to check this out.  If you don’t find it funny, really funny, then I’m sorry. One day you will.

Speaking of reading, in the days before the printing press the Church and various wildly wealthy monarchs had a stranglehold on information sharing.  Those who contradicted the party line could have their heads chopped off by a guillotine bought and paid for with their meagre tax offerings, or, they could expect to be publicly shamed and eternally condemned by their local preacher.  Sure some of them probably deserved it but who am I to judge?

Then the printing press was invented. At first the Church leaders said, “Great now everyone can be educated, learn to read and even write themselves, and study the Bible on their own!”  Eventually some of those same leaders said, “THIS IS A DISASTER! Everyone can be educated, learn to read and even write themselves, and study the Bible on their own!”  After a few centuries the power structures in Europe completely changed.  The Church divided into thousands of Protestant movements and the Catholic Church forever lost the political clout it never should have appreciated.  Universities sprung up around libraries. Monarchs handed over power to early democratic governments. Books about science lead to scientific innovations. Average Joe’s eventually moved from underground mud huts to middle class condos in the sky.

Well the same thing is happening now with the internet.  Except at breakneck  speed.  What took the printing press hundreds of years to accomplish, takes the internet a few months.  The emergence and re-emergence of Trump Presidencies, revolutions against power structures, could not have been accomplished without the way we get information on the internet.

Sure there’s a lot of murky confusion as corporate media used to their powerful podiums of the printing press and cable tv are moving their content over to the new medium.  But they’re being (sorry it’s all over, they have been) overtaken by the new form of information sharing.  We’ve gone from headlines and ten second sound bites, to three hour long conversations with plenty of time for explaining and context.  That’s something cable tv just didn’t have enough bandwidth to deliver.

So what does this mean for people trying to buy 1,200 square foot condos in Canada today?

Well we get to watch the power brokers struggle to retain their grip on / over our lives.

Those running to replace the son of … Hmm. Here’s a perfect example. Depending upon where you get your information from he’s either the son of Pierre, or he has an incomprehensively uncanny and impossibly accidental resemblance to a close personal family friend.

Those running to replace Liberal Leader Justin (let’s leave the last name out until the DNA results are back) definitely believe his father is Pierre. They believe Russians are our enemies.  They think COVID vaccines saved the world. They think NATO is protecting Ukraine. And they certainly believe if we pay higher taxes in Canada we’ll save the world from the temperatures many of us pay thousands of dollars to escape to for a few days for six months of the year.

Carney, Gould, and Freeland don’t seem to realize everyday Canadians are simply done with the idea that a Carbon Tax in any form is going to save the world.  Thanks to the internet, regular folks/voters have had time to do a little reading and listen to a few long conversations about this.  Average people are understanding that CO2 makes up not 40% or 60% of the atmosphere, but .04%.  Of that .04%, less than 4% is caused by humans. Mathematically it’s silly to think that paying more for food and groceries and everything else in Rosetown, Saskatchewan or Red Deer, Alberta is going to stop, slow down, or make any difference at all to global temperatures in 20 years.

It’s ironic that it’s the modern progressive movement who are stuck in the old information age.  You’d think the slower thinking conservatives would hold on to the old ways and they’d be the ones trying to enforce restrictions on the new communication movement.  Somehow the self proclaimed forward looking progressives are the ones trying to censor.  Maybe it does make sense.  Conservatives are more likely to read their history.  They know the ones who censor are always trying to retain their failing grasp on power.  New information consumers are ready, willing, and annoyingly attempting to debate.  But there’s no debate for those who say “The science is settled.” I guess that means they’re all finished learning things.

Sorry to the Liberal Leadership hopefuls.  They haven’t heard the news.  Well actually they have and that’s the problem.  Instead of paying attention to what’s really happening, they’re dismissing everything and everyone who doesn’t appear on the cable news channels.. other than to be ridiculed that is.

I leave you with this short video from Franco Terrazzano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.  Franco explains how those vying for control of the PMO are tripping over their new versions of an old and failed Carbon Tax. Pity them. They don’t realize voters have moved on.

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