There may be shortages of certain goods and services and worries that there won’t be enough natural gas to go around this winter. What we have a surplus of right now are stories about the heat and how the heatwaves visiting some parts of the world this summer foretell a coming climate apocalypse.
It’s easy, perhaps even tempting, to succumb to the doom mongering. That’s the human condition – we’re suckers for bad news. But not all is as bad as the headlines say, and in some ways, things are getting markedly better.
The University of Colorado’s Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. looked at insurance data on economic losses from weather and climate disasters for the first half of the years and discovered…losses aren’t getting worse. And in broad context, losses are declining as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product:
There is no evidence on a global scale that economic losses from weather and climate disasters are increasing
In fact, since 1990, weather and climate losses as a percentage of GDP have decreased from ~0.25% to 0.20%
That’s good news
Indeed it is good news. We would expect, from the tenor of the headlines, that losses from climate and weather disasters were mounting up at such a rate as to be nearly crippling. And as Pielke notes, the U.S. hurricane season is yet to get fully underway, so second-half data will look different – especially if the season is especially destructive:
Lots could still happen in 2022, and thus the full year’s losses might fall outside this range. For instance, a $200 billion U.S. hurricane in 2022 would by itself push 2022 global losses up to 0.35% of GDP, similar to 1993.
Worth remembering. But so, too, is the idea that the data show disasters aren’t bankrupting economies. Yes, they destroy wealth and harm prosperity (a case of Bastiat’s seen and unseen). But – so far – humanity has shown great resilience in the face of calamity.
Because at the bottom, the greatest resource we have isn’t gas or oil or wind or solar. The greatest resource we have is human ingenuity – the ability to meet challenges, and solve them, in ways that make our lives better, safer, and richer.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Well, Al Gore predicted that the world would be flooded by 2013. He missed. The fact of the matter is that climate changes constantly, irregardless of what humans do. One volcanic eruption can wipe out all the CO2 savings over several months within hours. In fact, remember the winter of 1944? Coldest in history. And that was when the world was at war, polluting the atmosphere like never before. Global warming/climate change is a farce meant to make some people richer.
More bogus for Control & abuse by Dems
Yea — someone finally figured that out, it only took what — 20 plus years to finally say — gore and the rest of these corrupt clowns were scamming to get wealthy — and fat !!!! No wonder nothing ever gets accomplished with career politicians at the helm — it took a businessman like Trump to get anything done and the career hacks just couldn’t handle the embarrassment.
People get the idea that the earth is forever and that they are the center of the universe. Best example is when they thought the Sun orbited the Earth. The weather will always be changing, things beyond our control will always cause us trouble. Some will think it is our fault because they think we are the center of the universe. But that is not the case. We are not even in the center of it. So instead of figuring out ways to destroy what we already have by making edicts (New World Order’s and Biden’s current MO) we should figure on how to get to where they want to be first. You can’t create solutions for things the technology does not exist for. You must create the technology first and the rest will come. It is not solvable by political means at this time. Yet here we are, being destroyed for no good reason.
I believe climate change is a natural, normal event. It is just another huge hoax along with the pandemic as a way for the left to try to control the masses. I’m sure the climate will get worse as the mid-terms get closer.