The “climate emergency” lie may be even bigger than climate realists realize.
A new peer-reviewed article by Bjørn Lomborg, the founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, shows that the risk of death per one million persons from climate-related (i.e., weather) causes has dropped dramatically from nearly 250 per million in 1920 to close to zero per million in 2020.
The raw numbers of death from climate-related causes — defined as floods, droughts, storms, wildfire, and extreme temperatures — show a 98-percent decrease since 1920.
“Back in the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,357 dead per year or 96 percent lower. In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the preliminary number of dead was even lower at 8,086 — 98 percent lower than 1920s average,” according to Lomborg.
The risk of dying from a climate-related issue has dropped even further, owing partly to the large global population increase since 1920.
“Because the world’s population also quadrupled at the same time, the climate-related *death risk* has dropped even faster. The death risk is the probability of you dying in any one year. In the 1920s, it was 243 out of a million people that would die from climate-related disasters,” Lomborg wrote.
“In the 2010s, the risk was just 2.5 per million people — a drop of 99 percent. Now, in 2020, the preliminary number is 1 per million — 99.6 percent lower.”
So, actual data is showing that, at least currently, climate change (so-called), is far from an emergency as it relates to human life. Despite this, climate change, as defined by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) and other climate alarmists, is being increasingly referred to as a “crisis” or an “emergency.”
Unless the word “emergency” has been redefined to mean that there is almost no immediate danger of dying from something and a statistically near-zero chance that the average person will die from it, there’s obviously something fishy here. During the past several years, climate alarmists have been actively pushing another name change for the issue — one that grabs attention and frightens people.
Remember that, at first, they referred to the alleged situation as “global warming” — until the Earth stopped warming at the onset of the 21st century. At that point, the term “climate change was coined so that any weather event outside the norm — be it storms or droughts or heat waves or polar vortexes — could be blamed on that meaningless tautology.
But now, the term “climate change” seems to be losing its effectiveness, probably due to the fact that people can see that the short-term horrors predicted by climate-alarmist scientists have not come to pass.
Last year, disparate groups of climate alarmists got together to create the “Call it a Crisis” petition, which is meant to pressure mainstream media outlets into using their new, more dire phrase to refer to the climate-change issue.
It seems now that this pressure may be bearing some fruit, as more and more frequently we are being told that climate change is indeed a crisis. Potential President Joe Biden has been pressured by left-wing groups to refer to the climate issue as either a “crisis” or an “emergency.” Biden is even being pressured to declare a “climate emergency,” which climate alarmists believe will give Biden the power to bypass congressional oversight on climate-related issues.
Words such as “emergency” and “crisis” imply fast impending doom — a situation so dire that immediate action must be taken or the consequences will be so grave that they cannot even be considered. Lomborg’s research makes it obvious that there is no real climate emergency and that it is not a crisis. That should be good news in that it gives us time to study the issue and truly determine if it is a problem, and whether we have any hope to address it in any meaningful way.
But the new charged rhetoric coming from the movement in the wake of COVID-19 and the U.S. presidential election makes clear that the climate-alarmist movement isn’t interested in any discussions about the issue. They have planted their flag on the hill of climate change being an immediate concern for the world and that’s all there is to it.
Climate realist Anthony Watts sums it up neatly: “Despite this good news, it is unlikely to deter climate alarmism, since it has evolved into a belief system, eschewing data and science for ‘climate justice.’”
