Does UN’s Latest Climate Change Warning Frighten You?

Yangtze River plastic
 

Bjorn Lomborg is a “climate-change-alarmist” skeptic. Nevertheless, he calls the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report “actually serious and sensible. It doesn’t surprise, [reconfirming] that global warming indeed is real and a problem.”

Lomborg, however, also credits the report for:

  • saying “the frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased,” which matters because “many more people die from cold than from heat,” and the difference means “climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.”
  • finding “low confidence” in the human influence on global high river flows; “low confidence” that floods are caused by climate change.

  • mentioning climate upsides such as more CO₂, which acts as a fertilizer in the atmosphere generating “profound” global greening.

Skeptic Lomborg notes the UN report only deals with the physical impact of climate change, avoiding the human response. Why convert rising sea levels into a catastrophe that will displace a reported 187 million people, “drowning” entire cities like Miami in 80 years? Humans adapt, as Holland has shown. Models of adaptation exist that reduce the number of flooded people 12,000-fold.

Along the same line, a recent Issues & Insights editorial reported these facts, all uncomfortable for anti-West climate alarmists:

  • greenhouse gas emissions are not an American or Western problem, rather a Chinese problem. Sun Yat-sen University in China found that more than half of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions are generated in only 25 big cities, with 23 of them in China.
  • the great plastic scare that led to outlaw single-use plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic utensils, and other modern products, even as the data show 90% of ocean plastic enters the ocean from just 10 rivers, with the highest loads from eight in Asia, two in Africa. None are in the U.S., which contributes 1% of ocean plastic.
  • as of 2020, 350 coal-fired power plants were under construction worldwide. Seven were in South Korea, another 13 in Japan. But China and India were building 184 and 52 plants, respectively.

The “Green New Deal,” editorializes Issues & Insights, is about pulling down capitalism, weakening the U.S. and the West, and thereby advancing socialism. It’s why the movement hits economic systems furthest from socialism — not China.

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