B (14:15)
Well, whether it's dogmatic or not, I mean that's, that's just the claim, right? It's made the climate bad and it's getting worse. And so an interesting question is how do you. I'm again philosopher, so I ask how are you measuring the climate being bad or not? I primarily measure it by how many human beings die from climate or what percentage of human beings die from climate. You can call this the climate death rate. So before I studied the data on the climate death rate, what I figured was the climate death rate has gone up a little bit because we hear all the time about how climate's more dangerous. But there are offsetting benefits of fossil fuels that are way more important than the climate death rate going up. But what was interesting is when I learned the data and I'll give you the most up to date data on this. The climate death rate in the last hundred years as we've been using more and more fossil fuels, has gone down by 98%. So this means the number of people dying from everything that's supposedly getting worse, storms, flood, flood, extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfires. Right. You have to believe this has gotten worse, right? There's more death, et cetera. No. 98% decline. So this means you are 1/5. Anyone in the world on average is 1/50 as likely to die from a climate related cause than they were 100 years ago. If you're commenting on the future, here's a view I have. I don't trust you to predict the future if you can't predict the present. So anybody who says that climate is terrible and getting worse, that's a non starter. If you're saying that, hey, climate is safer than ever, and I want to understand that, but I'm worried about the future. That's coherent, but it's related. The people who say climate is terrible today and who predict it to be terrible in the future, there's a reason why those go together and one reason is they don't recognize the role of adaptation in climate. How livable or how safe the climate is. It's a function of two things. What's going on in the climate and what's going on with human adaptation. And what we find is that the overwhelming thing that matters for how livable and safe the climate is is the state of human adaptation and what fossil fuels have done. Fossil fuels, energy more broadly, that's machine food. So that's the calories that our machines operate on. Machines make us way more productive because we don't have to use as much manual labor. We can use machines. So machines, our machines in the US do two, do 100 times more work than we do more, 100 times more physical work that allows us to build a really durable and resilient civilization. And so the reason climate is so safe, part of it is because climate hasn't gone out of control like people say. But the main reason is our adaptability is so high. And when you're predicting the future, you have to recognize whatever you predict, you have to factor in adaptability. So one example I covered on my podcast recently with a guy named Bjorn Lomborg who has a book about this called False Alarm. He gives a good example where they'll do studies, quote studies, where they're predicting the climate, which people are not very good at anyway, but they'll make a prediction and they'll say, you know what, if nobody adapts at all then, and this happens to the climate, then 187 million people will be homeless, at least temporarily. And what happens, the New York Times, Washington Post, they run with this and they say 187 million refugees. But the study also says this is if people don't adapt. But of course they will adapt, just as they adapt constantly, right? And, and then what happens if they do adapt? I think less than 1 million people will be homeless. How many people move every year? It turned out the number according to Bjorn was actually something like 300,000. So less than half the people who move from California every year. So it's a fascinating thing when you're talking about climate. The main cause of the catastrophe view is not understanding human adaptation. The other thing that's going on because I mentioned that climate has never been safer, how can they say that it's so bad? It's because they're not using the human standard, the human flourishing standard to evaluate the state of climate. They're using the unchanged nature standard. Notice the term is climate change. People think if we change climate it must be bad. But why is that? That's an anti human view, that if humans change something it must be bad. Right? If the rest of nature changes, climate doesn't matter. But if human beings do anything, then it must be bad. But wouldn't we want to neutralize hurricanes? Wouldn't some forms of climate change be good? So when we look at the impacts of rising CO2 levels, we can't assume they're good, we can't assume they're bad, we can't assume they're neutral. We have to look objectively, how good are these or bad are these for human life and then how to weigh those against the incredible adaptation benefits that fossil fuels give us.