Irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future
This Earth Day, dramatic warnings about climate change will be ubiquitous. At his climate summit, U.S. President Joe Biden will undoubtedly repeat that global warming presents an “existential threat.”
But most of the hype will be vastly exaggerated. This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past few decades.
Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that, along with other environmental concerns, climate change could cause worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse. Such irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future.
The evidence actually shows that climate-related disasters are killing far fewer people than ever before. Over the past century, the number of dead from floods, droughts, storms, wildfire and extreme temperatures has dropped by an incredible 98 per cent.
For the rest of this column: https://financialpost.com/opinion/bjorn-lomborg-this-earth-day-lets-replace-alarmism-with-smarter-policy