Editor’s Note: For another viewpoint, see Point: Is Biden Ready for the Urgency of the Climate Crisis?
Since when are we supposed to believe that a cold climate is better than a warm climate? At what point did politicians decide that remaining in the cold, miserable, historically unusual Little Ice Age would have been better than emerging into the warmer, more bountiful, and more historically typical climate we enjoy today?
If a President Joe Biden turns his attention to climate change, he should demonstrate the wisdom and courage to not trample our freedoms, stifle our economy, and depress American living standards by pursuing expensive, pointless and counterproductive climate activism.
A warmer climate has always benefited human health and welfare, while a colder climate has always brought death and misery. For example, the Little Ice Age, which lasted from approximately A.D. 1300 to A.D. 1900, brought the coldest climate of the last 10,000 years.
The Little Ice Age also brought rampant crop failures and starvation, extreme weather events, the Black Plague, declining human life spans, and declining population numbers. By contrast, the Medieval Warm Period that preceded the Little Ice Age brought favorable climate conditions, bountiful crop harvests, longer life spans, and a growing human population.
The benefits of a warmer climate have become apparent once again, as our planet finally returns to the warmth that predominated during the Medieval Warm Period.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization documents consistent increases in crop production, frequently setting records. Longer growing seasons, fewer frost events, more atmospheric carbon dioxide, and more abundant precipitation are an important driving force behind this newfound crop abundance.
More abundant food production, stimulated by a more ideal climate, is producing dramatic improvement in human health and welfare by reducing hunger, malnutrition and starvation.
Mortality statistics show far more people die each day during the cold winter months than during the warm summer months. Here in the United States, approximately 800 more people die each day during the cold of winter than during the rest of the year.
Globally, scientists report 20 times more people die from cold than from heat. That amounts to 4 million excess human deaths each year that could be dramatically reduced if global temperatures continue to modestly warm.
For all the misleading propaganda about unprecedented global heat, global temperatures are presently unusually cool rather than unusually warm. Scientists have long known that temperatures have been significantly warmer than today throughout most of the time that human civilization has existed.
It is only by comparing present temperatures to the unprecedented cold of the Little Ice Age — and declaring that the start of the temperature “record” began just over a century ago — that climate activists can claim “record” present heat. They conveniently ignore the warmer climate — a warmer climate than even today — that has predominated throughout most of the period of human civilization.
Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges it has low confidence that any of the forecast harms of a warming planet are occurring today.
The IPCC acknowledges it has found little or no evidence of worsening hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, etc., as the planet returns to its customary warmth. Warnings of future climate harms remain solely that — speculative warnings that have failed to come true even after many decades of warnings.
By contrast, the prescribed solutions to fight global warming are far more environmentally harmful than the warming itself. The mining of rare earth minerals necessary for wind and solar equipment is perhaps the most environmentally destructive activity on the planet. Also, wind turbines already kill more than 1 million birds and bats each year in the United States, including many threatened and endangered species.
A Green New Deal or net-zero carbon dioxide emissions would sentence tens of millions of additional birds and bats to unnecessary deaths each year.
Moreover, scientists point out that replacing conventional electricity generation with wind power would require covering one-third of the United States with wind turbines, which would decimate open spaces and natural habitats, while directly and indirectly killing an unimaginable amount of wildlife.
Whether we view the issue from an economic perspective, a human welfare perspective, or an environmental perspective, a warmer planet with an economy fueled by affordable, conventional energy is far more beneficial than a colder planet fueled by environmentally devastating wind and solar power.
