A climate expert has taken aim against what he calls “weather porn” – images and stories meant to convey a false impression that the world is on the brink of cataclysmic climate disaster – in order to force unnecessary policy changes by governments across the globe that will destroy prosperity and kill, not save, human lives.
In a series of recent opinion pieces and social media posts, Bjorn Lomborg, author, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, continues to call attention to the extreme measures being demanded by climate change activists and politicians who seek to inflict policies that are far more harmful than helpful.
“Watching the news, you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable. We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires,” wrote Lomborg in his recent newsletter. “But this impression is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. Data show climate-related events like floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people.”
“Quite the contrary. Over the past decade, climate-related disasters have killed 98% fewer people than a century ago,” said Lomborg. “If we want to achieve fewer disaster deaths, we should promote prosperity, adaptation, and resilience. But when we are inundated with ‘weather porn’ and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.”
‘Six billion deaths in less than a year’
In an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Lomborg described what would happen if climate alarmists were to suddenly get their way:
The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we rapidly ceased using fossil fuels, four billion people would suddenly be without food.
Add the billions of people dependent on fossil-fuel heating in the winter, along with our dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transportation, and it is no wonder that one recent estimate by economist Neil Record showed an abrupt end to fossil fuel use would cause six billion deaths in less than a year.
Global elites have made it clear that they have judged the world to be vastly overpopulated, and have set for themselves a goal of reducing the world’s total population to just 500 million people. An “abrupt end to fossil fuel use” would come very close to achieving their utopian anti-human goal.
“Why is the environmental movement stewarded over by murderous, human-hating wackos who desire to see billions of people die?” asked James Corbett of the Corbett Report last month.
Not mincing words, Corbett continued: “Because the conservation movement (and all of the mainstream environmental organizations that grew out of that movement) was pioneered by murderous, human-hating eugenicists and funded by the eugenicist royals who wanted to keep their beautiful natural vistas clear of the riff-raff scurrying around beneath them.”
“Why do nation after nation appear to be in a race to the bottom, implementing policies that will actively hinder the productivity of their own populations and making it more and more difficult for those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to eke out a subsistence living on the corporate-governmental fascist plantation that we call the developed world?” wondered Corbett.
“And why is it now increasingly in vogue for governments to offer “medically assisted dying” as their “solution” to the strain and stress of this deliberately degraded world? Because those same governments are stewarded over by elitist eugenicists who hate you and want you dead.”
‘Follow the science’ obscures truth, allows for the promotion of dangerous policies
Lomborg has said that the constant refrain of “follow the science” allows politicians to “obscure and avoid responsibility for lopsided climate-policy trade-offs.”
“More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office,” wrote Lomborg in his WSJ piece.
“It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction,” said the climate expert. “Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change. It’s simply a matter, they say, of ‘following the science.’”
Draconian net-zero climate policies are, according to Lomborg, prohibitively costly.
Recent peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows the total cost “will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100.”
“Net zero is more than seven times as costly as the climate problem it tries to address,” yet this is precisely what the Biden administration is hoping to achieve by 2050.
Outgoing U.S. climate chief John Kerry, one of the chief purveyors of “weather porn,” suggested recently that if climate change is not quickly addressed, we face planetary destruction “beyond comprehension.”
UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell issued a similarly ominous if not shrill warning on X this week: “We have two years to save the world,” and therefore, “starting now, we need a quantum leap in climate finance [and] Bold new national climate plans by all nations.”
Lomborg fired back on X, dismissing the UN climate honcho’s hyperbolic claims.
“UN employees have been telling the same stale story for more than half a century: Now, that is right now, we have just a few years to save the world.”
UN employees have been telling the same stale story for more than half a century:
Now, that is right now, we have just a few years to save the worldhttps://t.co/Oz3yOGZUg8
Be a bit more serious, please? pic.twitter.com/hC6Sgu3hWt
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) April 11, 2024
“Some of the most popular climate policies will have costs far greater than climate change itself. When politicians try to shut down discussion with claims that they’re ‘following the science,’” concluded Lomborg in the pages of the WSJ.
“Don’t let them,” he urged.