Despite Climate Change, Today Is the Best Time To Be Born

Economic growth will ensure an abundant future

By Maarten Boudry.

"Fifty years ago, in 1973, the global child mortality rate was three-and-a-half times higher than today (three times, even in the U.S.), and in 1923, it was almost nine times higher. The distant past was even worse. For all of human history up until the Industrial Revolution, at least three in 10 children died before reaching their fifth birthday. In the past half-century, extreme poverty has also been slashed, for the first time in history: While nine out of 10 people were extremely poor before the Industrial Revolution, today the proportions are inverted: Fewer than one in 10 falls below the absolute poverty level. In almost every respect, the world is a much better place to be born right now than at any previous time in history."

"A temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius—slightly more than we expect right now—will most likely reduce global GDP by only a couple of percentage points. That is not an absolute reduction compared to today, mind you, but compared to a hypothetical future without climate change: In all likelihood, our prosperity will keep growing and child mortality will keep falling, just by a bit less than in a counterfactual world without global warming."

"global deaths per million people due to natural disasters have fallen by a factor of 100 over the past century. Mother Nature has become more violent and capricious in recent years (at least when it comes to hurricanes and floods, though not to earthquakes or volcanic eruptions), but that makes our achievement all the more impressive."

"the very best protection against natural disasters—whether caused by global warming or not—is economic growth and development. Material and economic progress is what allows us to build dikes, sturdy houses, hospitals and hurricane shelters, install air-conditioning and tsunami alarms and build infrastructure for early warning and evacuation."

"In 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti killed more than 220,000 people. Six weeks later, Chile was rocked by an earthquake that released 500 times more energy than the one in Haiti. The Chilean quake resulted in 500 casualties—still tragic, but a fraction of the Haitian death toll. The main difference? Haiti is one of the poorest countries on the planet, while Chile is now a high-income country."

"the climate debate suffers from a persistent status quo bias—the tacit or explicit assumption that human societies will just passively suffer rising sea levels, intensifying heat waves and extreme droughts, stuck at our current level of wealth and technology. But consider that even today, millions of people are living in regions that would be “uninhabitable” without modern technologies like air-conditioning, irrigation and dikes. Much of California, for example, was “arid beyond habitability” before visionary engineers turned all that inhospitable wasteland into “one of the world’s most vibrant economies.” When the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was asked what enabled the economic miracle of the tropical city-state (its GDP per capita is 65% higher than the U.S.’s), his answer was simple: modern air-conditioning."

"extreme cold still kills nine times as many people as extreme heat, and that the region with the largest rate of cold-related deaths is ... sub-Saharan Africa. That sounds bizarre, but it drives home the overwhelming importance of adaptation: Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region on the planet, which makes it more vulnerable to cold even than rich countries in the Arctic North, even though Africa is of course much warmer overall."

"In the past half-century, artificial fertilizer, irrigation, genetic modification and mechanized harvesting have made agriculture far more resilient against weather extremes, quadrupling global food production even as the Earth was warming by 1.2 degrees Celsius. Thanks to the globalization of our food system, famines are now mostly a thing of the past, and the only ones that remain are caused by political conflict and mismanagement."

"A study from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations forecasts that global food production will increase by another 30% by 2050, after taking into account climate change. According to a meta-analysis in Nature, by 2050 average caloric intake is expected to increase, and undernourishment to decrease, at all socioeconomic levels."

"In its sixth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change writes that “there is no evidence of abrupt change in climate projections of global temperature for the next century.” What compounds the confusion is that tipping points are often confused with the political thresholds of 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, as written down in the Paris agreement."  

"climate scientists such as Seaver Wang have argued that we should discard the concept of tipping points altogether—not because there’s no such thing as a “tipping point,” suitably defined, but because the metaphor speaks to a popular but inaccurate understanding that “the climate system is on the verge of very unstable, self-reinforcing, and abruptly rapid disaster.”"   

"no matter how accurate your model of the climate system is, it cannot predict the evolution of human ingenuity and adaptation. Even speculative projections of extreme climate scenarios with multiple dramatic tipping points provide no basis for confident predictions about “billions of deaths” or “collective suicide.”"

"For years, serious scientific publications have tended to focus on the most dramatic predictions and outlier scenarios. The most extreme one (known to insiders as “RCP 8.5”) imagined a century-long frenzied global coal orgy that was never even remotely plausible, but that was nonetheless often misleadingly represented as “business as usual.”

If such a dramatic rise in coal consumption was ever in the cards, we now know it’s a complete fantasy. Electric cars are finally going mainstream, coal is being replaced by much cleaner natural gas, solar panels and batteries have achieved spectacular cost reductions and many countries are reconsidering their distaste for nuclear energy."