The New York Times unveiled a new project on climate change Monday with a stunning indictment. “We’ve failed our planet,” headlined the introductory piece. “This is an SOS.”
“Postcards from a World on Fire,” Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury explained, is a new project published as the world awaits an inevitable apocalypse of biblical proportions entirely due to our own negligence, and “makes clear, climate change is already underway. At this point, we can’t stop it.”
Except today’s generation enjoys the safest planet in human history.
Climate-related deaths have dropped more than 98 percent since 1900, with weather to blame for 0.07 percent of deaths worldwide and 0.01 percent of deaths in the United States between 1980 and 2014. That’s after the planet already warmed 1 degree Celsius since the Little Ice Age century of the 1800s despite far higher atmospheric pollution than previously existed.
Today’s statistics showing comparatively low climate mortality are something to celebrate, a landmark accomplishment one might imagine would warrant a project to applaud from one of the nation’s largest legacy newspapers.
Instead, The New York Times’ “Postcards” project aims to terrify an audience susceptible to hysterical predictions of a world coming to an end through climate self-destruction. The project comes despite rapid development made possible by cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels that have transformed a dangerous planet into a manageable one, opening the door to adaptation and environmental stewardship.
“Anyone who portrays today’s world as ‘devastated’ or ‘ruined’ by fossil-fueled climate change is ignorant, anti-human, or both,” Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of “Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” told The Federalist. “With the New York Times’ ‘Postcards From a World on Fire,’ it’s almost certainly both.”
The Times published 193 stories, one from each country, to offer a glimpse into the experiences with a changing planet from each corner of the globe. The visuals are striking to the ignorant eye, soaked in the images of fires, floods, death, and destruction.
Yet Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg outlined in the Wall Street Journal last month exactly how the world faces far less danger today than ever before.
“Many of the fearful descriptions you hear of souped-up hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires aren’t accurate. And estimates of costly but increasingly frequent climate dangers are typically designed to mislead,” Lomborg wrote.
Lomborg went on the highlight rising numbers of $1 billion-plus natural disasters calculated by the National Centers for Environmental Information as a prime example of disinformation feeding hysteria.
“But,” Lomborg wrote, “only measuring the total damage of natural disasters over time misses the important point—there’s much more stuff to damage today than there was several decades ago.”
As nations continue to develop, there’s more for massive storms, which are actually on the decline, to destroy.
As the world has gotten richer and its population has grown, the number and quality of structures in the path of floods, fires, and hurricanes have risen. If you remove this variable by looking at damage as a percent of gross domestic product, it actually paints an optimistic picture. The trend of weather-related damages from 1900 to 2020 declined from 0.26 percent of global GDP to 0.18 percent. A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disaster. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat, and cold.
Michael Shellenberger, the president of Environmental Progress and author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” also emphasized declining disaster costs in a Twitter thread and added that emissions over the last decade are on the decline.
Emissions globally declined over the last decade pic.twitter.com/OUYa3Snwt5
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 13, 2021
Cost of natural disasters as share of GDP is going down pic.twitter.com/liWwlzcdSc
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 13, 2021
Declining emissions coupled with declining rates of climate-related mortality shows a planet far from the brink of manmade Armageddon.
