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Economy

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

Published

1 year ago

12 minute read

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 Times, PolitiFact, and USA Today, claiming 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.²
  • 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 Reuters, PolitiFact, 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.

    Truth: Drought, 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 3: 100 years is a misleading period to measure plummeting climate disaster deaths.

    Truth: 100 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 5: Climate 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
  • A 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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Why it’s time to repeal the oil tanker ban on B.C.’s north coast

Published on July 2, 2025

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The Port of Prince Rupert on the north coast of British Columbia. Photo courtesy Prince Rupert Port Authority

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Will Gibson

Moratorium does little to improve marine safety while sending the wrong message to energy investors

In 2019, Martha Hall Findlay, then-CEO of the Canada West Foundation, penned a strongly worded op-ed in the Globe and Mail calling the federal ban of oil tankers on B.C.’s northern coast “un-Canadian.”

Six years later, her opinion hasn’t changed.

“It was bad legislation and the government should get rid of it,” said Hall Findlay, now director of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

The moratorium, known as Bill C-48, banned vessels carrying more than 12,500 tonnes of oil from accessing northern B.C. ports.

Targeting products from one sector in one area does little to achieve the goal of overall improved marine transport safety, she said.

“There are risks associated with any kind of transportation with any goods, and not all of them are with oil tankers. All that singling out one part of one coast did was prevent more oil and gas from being produced that could be shipped off that coast,” she said.

Hall Findlay is a former Liberal MP who served as Suncor Energy’s chief sustainability officer before taking on her role at the University of Calgary.

She sees an opportunity to remove the tanker moratorium in light of changing attitudes about resource development across Canada and a new federal government that has publicly committed to delivering nation-building energy projects.

“There’s a greater recognition in large portions of the public across the country, not just Alberta and Saskatchewan, that Canada is too dependent on the United States as the only customer for our energy products,” she said.

“There are better alternatives to C-48, such as setting aside what are called Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas, which have been established in areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Galapagos Islands.”

The Business Council of British Columbia, which represents more than 200 companies, post-secondary institutions and industry associations, echoes Hall Findlay’s call for the tanker ban to be repealed.

“Comparable shipments face no such restrictions on the East Coast,” said Denise Mullen, the council’s director of environment, sustainability and Indigenous relations.

“This unfair treatment reinforces Canada’s over-reliance on the U.S. market, where Canadian oil is sold at a discount, by restricting access to Asia-Pacific markets.

“This results in billions in lost government revenues and reduced private investment at a time when our economy can least afford it.”

The ban on tanker traffic specifically in northern B.C. doesn’t make sense given Canada already has strong marine safety regulations in place, Mullen said.

Notably, completion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion in 2024 also doubled marine spill response capacity on Canada’s West Coast. A $170 million investment added new equipment, personnel and response bases in the Salish Sea.

“The [C-48] moratorium adds little real protection while sending a damaging message to global investors,” she said.

“This undermines the confidence needed for long-term investment in critical trade-enabling infrastructure.”

Indigenous Resource Network executive director John Desjarlais senses there’s an openness to revisiting the issue for Indigenous communities.

“Sentiment has changed and evolved in the past six years,” he said.

“There are still concerns and trust that needs to be built. But there’s also a recognition that in addition to environmental impacts, [there are] consequences of not doing it in terms of an economic impact as well as the cascading socio-economic impacts.”

The ban effectively killed the proposed $16-billion Eagle Spirit project, an Indigenous-led pipeline that would have shipped oil from northern Alberta to a tidewater export terminal at Prince Rupert, B.C.

“When you have Indigenous participants who want to advance these projects, the moratorium needs to be revisited,” Desjarlais said.

He notes that in the six years since the tanker ban went into effect, there are growing partnerships between B.C. First Nations and the energy industry, including the Haisla Nation’s Cedar LNG project and the Nisga’a Nation’s Ksi Lisims LNG project.

This has deepened the trust that projects can mitigate risks while providing economic reconciliation and benefits to communities, Dejarlais said.

“Industry has come leaps and bounds in terms of working with First Nations,” he said.

“They are treating the rights of the communities they work with appropriately in terms of project risk and returns.”

Hall Findlay is cautiously optimistic that the tanker ban will be replaced by more appropriate legislation.

“I’m hoping that we see the revival of a federal government that brings pragmatism to governing the country,” she said.

“Repealing C-48 would be a sign of that happening.”

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