Bjorn Lomborg
Despite what activists say, the planet is not on fire
From the Fraser Institute
Nearly half of young Canadians surveyed in a 2022 study said they believed humanity is doomed because of climate change, while more than three-quarters said they were frightened. No wonder. They have grown up bombarded both by footage of natural disasters, not just in Canada but around the world, and by activists’ claims that climate change is making the planet unliveable. But that’s just wrong.
The ubiquity of phone cameras and our ability to instantly communicate mean — the “CNN effect” — that the media can show more weather disasters now than ever before. But that doesn’t mean the disasters are deadlier or costlier.
As we saw in the first article in this series, deaths from climate-related disasters have dropped precipitously. On average in the 1870s five million people a year died from such disasters. A century ago, about half a million people a year did. In the past decade, however, the death toll worldwide was fewer than 10,000 people a year. As global population has more than quintupled, disaster deaths have declined 500-fold. And this dramatic decline is true for all major disaster categories, including floods, flash floods, cold waves and wind disasters, and for rich and poor countries alike. But you never hear about that during disaster reporting.
Floods are the most costly and frequent Canadian disasters. But the common claim that flood costs are rising dramatically ignores the obvious fact that when a flood plain has many more houses on it than decades ago and the houses are worth much more then the same flood will cause a lot more damage. We need to keep these changes in mind and measure costs in proportion to GDP. Even the UN says that’s how to measure whether cities and towns are safer.
Though peer-reviewed analysis for Canada is lacking there is plenty to draw on elsewhere. As so often, the U.S. has the most comprehensive data. It shows that while flood costs have increased in absolute terms, that’s only because more people and property are in harm’s way. In the country’s worst year for flooding, 1913, damage exceeded two per cent of GDP, though the yearly average in that era was 0.5 per cent. Today it’s less than 0.05 per cent of GDP — just a tenth what it was a century ago.
We know adaptation makes disasters much less threatening over time. Consider sea level rise, which threatens to flood coastal zones around the world. A much-cited study shows that at the turn of this century an average of 3.4 million people a year experienced coastal flooding, with $11 billion in annual damages. At the same time, around $13 billion or 0.05 per cent of global GDP was spent on coastal defences.
By the end of this century, more people will be in harm’s way, and climate change could raise sea levels by as much as a metre. If we don’t improve coastal defences, vast areas will be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing $55 trillion in annual damages, more than five per cent of global GDP in 2100. This finding does routinely make headlines.
But it ignores adaptation, which research shows will cost much less. On average, countries will avoid flood damage by spending just 0.005 per cent of GDP. Even with higher sea levels, far fewer people will be flooded — by 2100 just 15,000 people a year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and damage will be just 0.008 per cent of GDP.
Enormously ambitious emissions-reduction policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars could cut the number of people flooded at century’s end from that 15,000 number down to about 10,000 per year. But notice the difference: Adaptation reduces the number currently being flooded by almost 3.4 million and avoids another 184 million people being flooded annually by 2100. At best, climate policy can save just 0.005 million.
We often hear that the “world is on fire” because of climate change. New Liberal leader Mark Carney repeated that in his acceptance speech Sunday. And it’s true that in 2023 more of Canada’s surface area burned than in any year since 1970, with climate change probably partly to blame. Even so, two points need to be kept in mind.
First, most studies projecting an increase in wildfires ignore adaptation. In fact, humans don’t like fire and make great efforts to reduce it, which is why since 1900 humanity has seen less burned area, not more. The data from last century involve historical reconstruction but since 1997, NASA satellites have tracked all significant fires. The record shows a dramatic fall in global burned area. Last year it was the second lowest, and in 2022 the lowest ever. And studies find that with adaptation the area burned will keep falling, even without climate action.
Second, reducing emissions is a terribly inefficient way to help. Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that even drastic cuts in emissions would reduce the burned area only slightly this century. Simpler, cheaper, faster policies like better forest management, prescribed fires and cleaning out undergrowth can help much more.
The flood of disaster porn is terrifying our kids and skewing our perception, and that can only lead to bad climate policy.
Bjørn Lomborg
From the Fraser Institute
APPEARED IN THE FINANCIAL POST
By: Bjørn Lomborg
Canada’s chattering classes claim that climate change is one of the country’s pre-eminent threats. This is extraordinary. Canada is experiencing a productivity slowdown, the worst decline in living standards in 40 years, and growth rates that lag most developed economies. Geopolitical threats loom, the healthcare system is under stress and education is faltering. Yet the federal government has spent or committed more than $160 billion on climate initiatives since 2015, and is funneling $5.3 billion to help poor countries respond to climate change.
Like most nations, Canada faces tough decisions in coming decades. Resources spent on climate will not be not available for health, education, security or boosting prosperity.
Global warming is a real problem. Science has shown quite clearly that more CO₂, mostly from fossil fuel use, increases global temperatures. Climate economics has shown how this brings both problems and benefits (for instance, more deaths caused by heat, fewer by cold) but, overall, more problems than benefits. More CO₂ means higher social costs, so reducing CO₂ does have real benefits.
But climate policies also have costs. They force families and businesses to use more expensive energy, which slows economic growth. You might have heard otherwise but if the new ways really were cheaper, no regulations or mandates would be needed.
If climate change were treated like any other political issue, we would openly recognize these trade-offs and try to balance them to get the most climate benefits for the least cost, recognizing that climate policies need to compete against many other worthy policies.
But in two important ways the climate conversation has gone off the rails.
First, people say — wrongly — that global warming is an existential challenge, risking the end of mankind. Of course, if the world is about to end, it follows that any spending is justified. After all, if a world-obliterating meteor is hurtling towards us, we don’t ask about the costs of avoiding it.
Second, it is also often claimed — somewhat contradictorily — that the green transition will make energy cheaper, societies safer and everyone richer. In this “rainbows and unicorns” scenario, there are no trade-offs and we can afford climate policy and everything else.
Both claims are repeated ad nauseam by Canadian politicians and activists and spread by media hooked on selling climate catastrophes and green utopias. But both are quite untrue.
That is why I’m writing this series. I will outline how many of the most sensationalist, scary climate stories are misleading or wrong and ignore the best climate science. Being data-driven, I will show you this with the best peer-reviewed data and numbers.
So: Is climate change the world’s all-encompassing problem today? One way to test this is to look at extreme weather, which we constantly hear is having an ever-larger impact on our societies. But the data paint a very different picture (see chart).
We have good evidence for the number of people killed in climate-related disasters, i.e., floods, storms, droughts, and fires. (We’ll look at temperature deaths next week.) A century ago, such disasters routinely killed hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in a single disaster. On average, about half a million people a year died in such disasters. Since then, the death toll has declined precipitously. The last decade saw an average of fewer than 10,000 deaths per year, a decline of more than 97 per cent.
Of course, over the past century the world’s population has quadrupled, which means the risk per person has dropped even more, and is now down by more than 99 per cent. Why this great success story? Because richer, more resilient societies with better technology and forecasting are much better able to protect their citizens. That doesn’t mean there is no climate signal at all, but rather that technology and adaptation entirely swamp its impact.
In the same way, climate’s impact on overall human welfare is also quite small. In proportion to the total economy, the cost of climate-related disasters has been declining since 1990. Looking to the future, the best estimates of the total economic impact of climate change come from two major meta-studies by two of the most respected climate economists. Each shows that end-of-century GDP, instead of being 350 per cent higher, will only be 335 per cent higher.
“Only” becoming 335 per cent richer is a problem, to be sure, but not an existential threat. Despite that, as this series will show, many of the most draconian climate policy proposals so casually tossed around these days will do little to fix climate but could dramatically lower future growth and the opportunities of future generations.
We need to get smart on climate. This series will map out how.
Bjørn Lomborg
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