Relying on human ingenuity to coexist with a changing climate, either warmer or cooler, and tending to long-recognized public health threats are the best ways to ensure the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants, according to an Australian physician and expert in climate and public health.
“The ingenuity of Homo sapiens at adapting to climate has permitted people to populate almost the entire globe from the freezing Arctic to the steamy tropics,” notes Dr. D. Weston Allen, lead author of a paper supporting a proposed repeal of a federal designation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. “If we stick to doing what we do best — adaptation — we will continue to thrive.”
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Citing nearly 400 references, the paper was filed as a formal comment by the CO2 Coalition in Fairfax, Virginia, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in support of its proposal to rescind the regulation known as the Endangerment Finding.
Allen says that civilizations did well in past eras of relative warmth during Minoan and Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period. And, he says, cool periods often brought suffering, the most recent being the Little Ice Age, which experienced “frequent widespread crop failures, mass starvation, disease and depopulation.”
“The Black Death of 1346-1353 wiped out 30%-60% of Europe’s population and up to 200 million people across Eurasia,” he writes.
However, natural change in the climate and industrialization that spread in the 1800s and accelerated in the 20th century fostered unprecedented prosperity and health.
“Global rewarming since the 18th century, associated with increasing prosperity, better housing, sanitation, food and water supplies, has greatly benefited human health and wealth,” Allen says. “Deaths from typhoid and tuberculosis declined dramatically during pre-antibiotic 20th century warming (1910-1945). Mortality from all causes fell as temperatures rose. From a billion people in 1800, the global population doubled by 1927, doubled again to 4 billion in 1974 and again to 8 billion in 2022.”
Fuels for new technologies and industry, first coal, then oil and natural gas as well, made modern living possible.
“By cheaply and reliably powering industry, mechanizing agriculture and transport, fossil fuels helped to end slavery and emancipate women and children, propelled urbanization, sewerage, safe water supplies, electricity, heating and cooling,” the paper says. “They also facilitated better hospitals and health care.”
In places where fossil fuels are available and affordable, people live longer, healthier lives. Access to electricity enables disease surveillance, vaccination drives, and reliable transport for medicines and doctors. Africa, Asia, and South America — regions once ravaged by cholera, malaria, and famine — now see falling death rates and rising life expectancies.
In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, warning of mass starvation in the 1970s, recalls Allen. However, global famines declined rather than increased.
“Prophesies are in the province of religion, not science,” Allen counsels.
The warm climate and carbon dioxide-enriched air have boosted agriculture and expanded habitable zones. Crop yields soared, aided by higher atmospheric CO2 (the same gas vilified in climate debates) and the fertilizers, pesticides, and modern equipment dependent on fossil fuels. Between 1980 and 2003, as CO2 concentrations rose by 11%, global food output leapt by 63%.
Although activists claim that warming will spread tropical diseases into temperate zones, malaria, once widespread in Europe and North America, declined because of public health measures such as draining swamps, spraying insecticides, and increasing medical treatment.
An oft-ignored fact is that cold weather is far deadlier than heat. Globally, cold kills many times more people than heat, despite fearmongering about warming. Also, contrary to hyperbolic headlines, data for the last 100 years show that deaths from extreme weather have dropped by 90%.
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When policymakers focus exclusively on carbon dioxide and hypothetical climate harms, populations are denied the tools to manage real threats: infectious disease, hunger, dirty water, and unsafe housing.
“It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones, and that they avoid using climate change as a scapegoat for failure to implement sound public health policies and proven preventive measures,” Allen writes. “Misguided climate action can be worse than unmitigated climate change.”
Gregory Wrightstone is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition and author of Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know and A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity.