More climate scaremongering this morning on news channels, suggesting temperatures in the next five years could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius more than they were in pre-industrial levels.
Let's say they're right. Let's say we are seeing the effects of industrialised climate change. If so, these are some of the impacts since the industrial era ...
Looks disastrous, doesn't it.
[Hat tip Patrick Moore & Mindsmith]
"[A]n increase in social inequality is not at all worthy of criticism if it is accompanied by a reduction in poverty. The Nobel Prize winner for economics Angus Deaton even goes so far as to argue that progress is always accompanied by inequality. The fruits of progress have rarely been equally distributed in history. Thus, between 1550 and 1750, the life expectancy of English ducal families was comparable to that of the general population, possibly even slightly lower. After 1750, the life expectancy of the aristocracy increased sharply compared to that of the general population, opening up a gap that was almost 20 years in 1850. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century and the gradual beginning of a social order that is today called capitalism or a market economy, life expectancy also increased for the general population from 40 years in 1850 to 45 in 1900 and almost 70 years in 1950. 'A better world makes for a world of differences; escapes make for inequality,' Deaton observes....
"[W]hat would be the price of eliminating inequality? ... the renowned Stanford historian and scholar of ancient history Walter Scheidel ... concludes that: 'So far as we can tell, environments that were free from major violent shocks and their broader repercussions hardly ever witnessed major compressions of inequality.... we cannot simply close our eyes to what it took to accomplish this goal in the past. We need to ask whether great inequality has ever been alleviated without great violence.' Scheidel’s answer is a resounding no."~ Rainer Zitelmann, from his new book In Defense of Capitalism. Quoted in David Gordon's post 'Equality Requires State Violence'
"'We are typically taught that whatever the benefits of fossil fuels or other forms of energy are, they always come at the expense of our environmental safety and health.
"'But the history of climate safety shows that fossil-fueled machine labour makes us far safer from climate— a phenomenon I call 'climate mastery....'"What has allowed humanity to reduce climate-related deaths by 98% over the last century is Climate Mastery. '[O]ver the last century, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly increased, the climate disaster death rate fell by an incredible 98 percent. That means the average person is fifty times less likely to die of a climate-related cause than they were in the 1920s.... not only does our knowledge system ignore the massive, life- or- death benefits of fossil fuels [illustrated so well by this one], but it has a track record of being 180 degrees wrong about the supposedly catastrophic side-effect of climate danger — which has dramatically decreased...'
"'Knowing that our knowledge system consistently denies [this] temperature mastery is crucial context to keep in mind whenever we hear claims about 'catastrophic' temperature changes in the future; there is a very good chance those claims are based on climate mastery denial, and that without such denial catastrophe would be implausible....'
"'As [climate-mastery denialist Paul] Krugman puts it [for example], 'We can see the damage now, although it’s only a small taste of the horrors that lie ahead.' '
"'But the idea that climate danger is bad and getting worse, overwhelming our mastery abilities, is completely false....'
"'[I]f we look at the universally acknowledged history of climate and life on this planet, we inevitably come to the conclusion that rising CO2 levels leading to an unliveable planet is literally impossible — because the planet was incredibly liveable for far less-adaptable organisms, with much in common with us, when CO2 was at levels that we could not come close to even if we wanted to....'
"Given all of the horrors of nature that humanity has already mastered, humanity can clearly master some more. Yes, we can imagine worst-case scenarios that overwhelm our abilities. Imagination, after all, is infinite. But that doesn’t show that such scenarios are likely enough to worry about.
"As I’ve argued before, our default should that worst-case scenarios are highly unlikely. After all, humanity already got this far. If specialists with a long track record of hyperbole warn us of doom, we should ignore them. Unless, of course, specialists with a long track record of calm, measured thought chime in, 'For once, the doomsayers are right.' Show me these specialists, and I’ll read them."~ Alex Epstein, with comments interpolated by Bryan Caplan, from Caplan's post 'The Meaning of Climate Mastery'
"Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800: [because] people have 8.5 times more stuff[1]; they have 5 times as much time to enjoy it[2]; and there are 6 times as many people.[3]"~ philosopher Stephen Hicks doing philosophy-maths in his post 'Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800'
NOTES (page references are to Deirdre McCloskey's 2006 book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce):
1. Wealth: “The amount of goods and services produced and consumed by the average person on the planet has risen since 1800 by a factor of about eight and a half” (p. 16). The items consumed include more and better food, cleaner water, education, health care, safer technologies, and so on. Consequently:
2. Life expectancy: Increased wealth “raised the expectation of life at birth in the world from roughly 26 years in 1820 to 66 years in 2000” (p. 18). So if one is an adult by, say, age 16, the average amount of adult life rose from 10 years in 1820 to 50 years in 2000 — a factor of 5.
3. Population: “The world’s population increased from 1800 to 2000 by a factor of about six” (p. 15).
"Adam Rutherford reminded me that it was the now-demonised Francis Galton who did statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer. His most famous is finding out that British Royals, who are prayed for constantly, didn’t live any longer than non-royals at a similar level of well being. Galton did related studies of the success of sea voyages accompanied by prayer versus those with no prayer. Again, no effect. And, more recently, I’ve written about the Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer that found no effect of such prayer on the rate of recovery from cardiac surgery (in fact, those who were prayed for did marginally but not significantly worse). This constitutes direct evidence against [the] implicit thesis [of the efficacy of prayer]."~Jerry Coyne, from his post 'Does the ubiquity of prayer prove the existence of God?'
"In his brilliant dissection of the climate extremists’ case in his book, 'Unsettled,' Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in President Obama’s Energy Department, notes that climate-related deaths have plummeted in the era of global warming. Citing data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, he notes that 'weather-related death rates fell dramatically during the past one-hundred years' and are 'about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago.'
"Why? Almost entirely thanks to improvements in infrastructure and mitigation enabled by rapid industrialisation.
"[T]he idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialisation and not the many benefits is ahistorical. The sophists at the United Nations insist that the new fund is a model of 'climate justice,' but it sounds an awful lot like a vehicle for the 'reparations' climate extremists have long demanded from the countries that were first to industrialise for supposedly having inflicted their environmental costs on the world.
"If we in the West are to pay damages for the Industrial Revolution, shouldn’t we also consider the extraordinary wealth that process has helped spread around the world?"~ Gerard Baker from his column 'The West Made the World Prosperous. COP27 Will Make Us Pay'
"Virtually no products are more valuable than the modern medicines produced by the biopharmaceutical industry. They cure diseases and extend lives...
"Except in rare cases, pharmaceutical companies develop drugs for the U.S. market. For drugs that make it in America, potential sales in Europe, Japan, Canada, China and elsewhere are gravy. Drugs that can’t make it in the U.S. are scuttled....
"Drug research and development involves enormous fixed costs. As of 2013, the cost per new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration was $2.9 billion. Historically, these fixed costs have doubled in real terms every nine years. So in 2022, the inflation-adjusted fixed cost per approved drug is close to $7 billion.
"That huge cost must be spread out over a small fraction of the world’s population during a limited period of marketing exclusivity. Without wealthy American consumers and insurers who pay retail or close to it for brand-name drugs, some drugs won’t be developed at all. While it’s true that foreign governments mostly free-ride on the enormous investments in R&D made by the U.S., it’s also true that somebody has to pay. If nobody pays, many treatments that would improve and extend people’s lives won’t exist....
"Research by Columbia University economist Frank Lichtenberg suggests that 73% of the increase in life expectancy that high-income countries experienced between 2006 and 2016 was due solely to the adoption of modern drugs. He also found that the pharmaceutical expenditure per life-year saved was $13,904 across 26 high-income countries and $35,817 in the U.S. ...
"New drugs are a fantastic investment for humanity."~Charles L. Hooper and David R. Henderson, from their article 'Expensive Prescription Drugs Are a Bargain'
"The primary measure of technological progress is life expectancy. Not the stock market."
~ Balaji S. Srinivasan
The decline of child mortality was important for the increase of life expectancy, but as we explain in our entry on life expectancy increasing life expectancy was certainly not only about falling child mortality – life expectancy increased at all ages.
Such improvements in life expectancy — despite being exclusive to particular countries — was a landmark sign of progress. It was the first time in human history that we achieved sustained improvements in health for entire populations. After millennia of stagnation in terrible health conditions the seal was finally broken.
