Climate protestors destroying artworks and gluing themselves to roads without offering a shred of evidence for their alarm exhibit a malicious stupidity that is blind to the actual state of the world.
Why do these activists not hold up placards with graphs, histograms, and Venn diagrams? Because actual data show that life today is much better than at any time in human history. Ignored is the fact that the change in climate has made Earth better and helped to advance humanity.
Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash
Much of the progress in the last three centuries hinged on one important event in the 17th century: the waning of the Little Ice Age, which finally ended in the 1800s. Contrary to popular media and the politically correct, climate change has aided in the unprecedented growth of human civilization.
The Little Ice Age disrupted global plant growth and fostered periods of famine, disease, and mass depopulation. However, since the advent of modern warming, there has been an overall greening of the planet, more bountiful crop harvests, and an eight-fold increase in humanity’s numbers. All of this has contributed to the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric concentration has increased in recent decades.
Global maize (corn) production was approximately 205 million tons in 1961. Today the world produces five times more maize, — 1.16 billion tons. There have been similar increases for all major food crops, including rice, wheat, soybeans, cereals, nuts and vegetables.
Captures of marine fish during 1961–2018 increased from 34 million tons to 84 million tons. During the period, aquaculture production increased from two million tons to 82 million tons.
Meanwhile, malnourishment in developing countries reduced drastically from 34 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015, despite a rapidly growing population.
Improved nutrition and technological advancements have combined to make life not only better but also longer. In Oman, for example, the mortality rate for children under 5 dropped from 38 deaths per 100 births in 1950 to less than one. Similar progress has been registered across the world.
Transportation has become more affordable to the general population. Nominal prices for roundtrip airfare almost halved in the 2010s compared to 1980.
Electricity has become more available to households and businesses. In China alone, power generation increased by 18 times between 1950 and 2015, enabling 1.3 billion people to have greater access to electricity and experience remarkable economic growth.
People are better protected against nature’s fury than ever before. The annual death rate from natural disasters has plummeted globally since the 1920s and 1930s. This is because greater prosperity supported by cheap, abundant energy resources has provided sturdier infrastructure to withstand weather extremes and modern reporting systems to warn of dangers. Media reports of a world ransacked to an unprecedented extent by storms and floods are as false as the predictions of an overheated globe.
Species that were hunted to near extinction have been making a comeback, including the Arctic’s polar bears and India’s Bengal tigers. The number of humpback whales in the western South Atlantic doubled between 2006 and 2022. In Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, gray wolves increased from 1,100 in 1975 to 3,600 in 2018.
In all of the U.S., there were merely 487 bald eagle pairs in 1963. By 2006, there were approximately 10,000. Today, wind turbines remain the only major threat to bald eagles, with the government dismayingly allocating “bald eagle-killing quotas” for each machine.
So, notions of a climate emergency and a planet in terminal decline are fallacious. The numbers do not lie no matter how much art is despoiled or how many commuters are delayed by the misguided.
This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy, December 14, 2022, and can be accessed here.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
louis wachsmuth says
I think you may be over looking dozens of news stories from across the world. It would be more honest to examine the dark side of human environmental destruction.
For example, record droughts on one hand, record rainfall event soon following. Record heat in Europe this week? Workers in UAE getting kidney loss due to working in extreme heat? Of course, they get a couple of bucks a day for labor, but that’s great human progress! What? War in Russia causing world wide starvation due to destruction? “Let them eat cake,” one kind ruler once said.
MC62 says
So, you believe the legacy media as if the modern-day media has no agenda or particular ideology they are pushing. One thing I’ve learned in 16 years of following the climate change con debate is that when the media says “It has never been this bad before.” Once I’ve checked climate history, not only has it been this bad before, it has been worse. Just 100 years ago over 500,000 people died globally of extreme weather related events. Today that number is between 20,000 and 25,000. There are numerous studies that refute the lie that the weather has never been this extreme before. Hurricanes and tornadoes have been at historic lows in both frequency and intensity. That urban sprawl gets in the way of these in no way supports the lie “It has never been this bad before”. Snow coverage is currently at a 56 year high–something the climate cartel told us in 2007 was going to become a thing of the past within a few short years. And since 1979, snowfall in the northern hemisphere is actually up 3.3% over the last 40 plus years according to NASA and NOAA.
I’ve been to the UAE a number of times. Guess what? It has always been hot there because it is a desert in the middle east. Besides, a cardinal rule of science is correlation is not causation. A new study from the medical journal Lancet determined that 9 times more people die of cold than heat. Both the Medieval and Roman Warming Periods indicate a warmer climate is better all around for growing seasons, health, longevity, economy, and innovation.
The list that refutes the nonsense and hyperbole of the media and talking heads who are deemed “experts” on green issues and climate change goes on and on. But only those who take the time to inform themselves discover it. Just explore this site and you’ll find some well researched and reasoned article that refute the PC narrative.
At least the article above is refreshingly telling us something the useless media never will. The utopia you seek doesn’t exist on earth and will never be ushered in through economy killing, life impacting green legislation.
louis wachsmuth says
Thank you for your response. However, I am 75 years old and have noticed big changes in the environment during this time. I had to sell the family oyster farm and seafood restaurant because the oceans are becoming dead zones. Too many humans harvesting too many fish, too many humans dumping plastics and chemicals into the water ways. For Cornwall to claim everything is just wonderful, just isn’t true. There are big issues in the environment world wide, caused by too many humans. Exactly what is the number of humans can this world hold until we all live in tiny shacks and eat beans only? Ten billion? twenty billion? Cornwall will not answer the question.