Carbon Dioxide and a Warming Climate are Perfectly Fine, By James Reed

 A recent article in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, "Carbon dioxide and a Warming Climate are Not Problems," by Andy may and Marcel Crok, 29 May, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12579, gives a debunking of climate change alarmism, and counter the alarmist view that a warmer climate is a problem. Instead, it is shown that increased warmth and carbon dioxide levels will aid humanity. The authors outline how the Little Ice Age (1300-1850) led to crop failures and a die off of people, with 15 percent of Scotland's population dying in the 1690s due to famine. Cold, not heat, is the great killer.

Increased carbon dioxide levels have produced a greener, more biologically active world. As well, the authors do not see any evidence for the extreme events predicted by the climate change alarmist camp, saying: "it is hard to find any unusual weather or weather-related disaster that can be blamed on climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic."

"52 of 53 studies of disaster losses due to extreme weather were unable to attribute the events to human causes…"

Finally, even with a 3 C increase, which is supposedly catastrophic from the perspective of climate change alarmism, there would only be a 1 percent reduction in GDP of the US economy.

The climate change alarmist position is based upon ideology rather than science. But it is this position which is acting upon governments in the West to deindustrialise, while China leaps ahead. And that is not "cool."

Abstract

Prior to the mid-19th century, Earth was in the grip of the Little Ice Age. Since then, temperatures have on average trended upward. At the same time, human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) have increased, and the interest of scientists has turned to consider the extent of the relative contributions of anthropogenic CO₂ and natural forces to warming.

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group II (WGII) claims that human-caused climate change or global warming is dangerous. According to the report, "Human-induced climate change … has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability. … The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt (high confidence)" (IPCC, 2022a, p. 9).

The AR6 WGI and WGII reports measure climate change as the global warming since 1750 or 1850. The period before these dates is commonly referred to as the "pre-industrial period." The Little Ice Age, a phrase rarely used in AR6, extends from about 1300 to 1850. It was a very cold and miserable time for humanity, with a lot of well documented extreme weather in the historical record from all over the Northern Hemisphere. It was also a time of frequent famines and pandemics. Arguably today's climate is better than then, not worse.

None-the-less, the IPCC claims that extreme weather events are worse now than in the past, however observations do not support this. Some extreme weather events, such as the land area under extreme drought (Lomborg, 2020), is decreasing, not increasing. Globally the incidence of hurricanes shows no significant trend (IPCC, 2013, p. 216; Lomborg, 2020).

Observations show no increase in damage or any danger to humanity today due to extreme weather or global warming (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 140–161; Scafetta, 2024). Climate change mitigation, according to AR6, means curtailing the use of fossil fuels, even though fossil fuels are still abundant and inexpensive. Since the current climate is arguably better than the pre-industrial climate and we have observed no increase in extreme weather or climate mortality, we conclude that we can plan to adapt to any future changes. Until a danger is identified, there is no need to eliminate fossil fuel use."