Extinction Rebellion rebels against the possible extinction of humankind due to climate change. Some are more optimistic. David Attenborough fears that climate change will end human civilization, reduce us all to hunter-gatherers. Others are more pessimistic. Bernie Sanders seems to think that climate change will do to the planet what the Death Star did to Alderaan. If any of this were true, or even remotely likely, I would join the rebellion. But it is not, fortunately, so I won’t.
To be clear, climate change is real, it is caused by humans, and it is a problem that needs to be solved. However, climate change is not an existential threat.
We’re all gonna fry
Death Valley is so called because the heat is so intense that it kills. The human body simply cannot cope. Like all warm-blooded animals, we must keep our core temperature stable lest our organs fail. Unlike other warm-blooded animals, we sweat to keep cool. Death Valley is not the worst. The human body can tolerate dry heat up to 55 degrees Celsius – but only 35 degrees with 100% humidity. Global warming means that more people will be exposed to intolerable heat for longer.
Jacobabad is one of the hottest cities on Earth. Journalists travelled there during a recent heatwave, apparently expecting to see the bodies piled high. Instead, they found that people do not just use physiology to keep cool. They change their behaviour too, doing as little as possible and seeking out cooler areas. Indeed, the locals have seen heatwaves before and have made places that stay cool. People live in Death Valley too.
Jacobabad is poor. Where people have more money, air conditioning is the answer to heat. The number of air conditioners has gone up rapidly in China’s south, in Malaysia, and in India’s middle class. We see the same pattern in North America and Europe: Heat is dangerous to the poor, an inconvenience to the rich.
We’re all gonna drown
Many societies have a legend of a Great Flood. And now another one is coming: Massive sea level rise caused by climate change. You can watch videos of what it will do to your favourite city, maps of what will happen to the place where you live. These reports often leave out the time scale. Sea levels are projected to rise by far less than a metre by 2100 – although more, much more is expected later, much later. A friend had worried our son about the coming deluge. I said that will not happen for a very long time. So, when I’m 14, he asked. In fact, it is something that his great-grandchildren may see.
These breathless stories overlook that we will not simply let this happen to us. Dikes were probably first built by the Sumerians some 5000 years ago. The Chinese independently invented the same technology a while later. Since then, technological progress in flood protection has been massive. It is much easier now to move large amounts of material. Our understanding of coastal dynamics is rapidly improving.
Bangladesh is the poster child of vulnerability to sea level rise. The Netherlands, another densely populated river delta in the path of big storms, is not. In fact, the Dutch make good money exporting their engineering know-how. Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in reducing the death toll from natural disasters: It fell by more than a factor 20 in the last 50 years even though population more than doubled. We can expect more progress now that politics has stabilized and incomes are growing fast. The Maldives, too, have become very good at coastal engineering.
The real concerns about the impact of sea level rise are in countries that are poor, chaotic, or both. Coastal protection requires a government that is capable of raising money and delivering large infrastructure projects – and cares about its people. Poverty, incompetence, and corruption are more worrisome than rising seas.
We’re all gonna starve
Climate change is predicted to reduce crop yield by up to half. Activists often skip those two little words, up to, and foretell widespread famine. Global average crop yields have increased three-fold over the last 60 years. If that trend continues and climate change takes away half, we will grow roughly the same amount of food, per head, in 2085 as we do today. Some experts argue that climate change has already reduced the rate of improvement of crop yields. Other experts counter that, since we produce more food than we need, the attention of farmers and crop researchers has shifted from growing more to better food. In Europe and North America, cropland has been taken out of production and reverted back to nature.
The remarkable technological progress in agriculture has not reached everyone. The yield gap, the difference between a typical farm and a model farm in the same climate and on the same soil, can be as large as 90%. That is, if these farmers would use current best practice, not some yet-to-be-invented future technology, they would get 10 times as much produce from their land. Let climate change take away half and they still grow 5 times as much.
The yield gap is largest in places where farmers lack access to modern seeds, fertilizers, pest control, and irrigation, often because land tenure is insecure and markets monopolized by middlemen or the state. The yield gap is smallest in countries where farmers are highly educated and well-capitalized.
Climate change or poverty?
These three examples have two things in common. First, on closer inspection, the predicted impacts of climate are not nearly as bad as some would like us to believe. Climate change is a problem, for sure, and the world would be better off without it. But it is not the apocalypse.
Second, the worst impacts of climate change are symptoms of underdevelopment and mismanagement. That means that we should always ask what is the best way to improve the lot of future people. Is it greenhouse gas emission reduction or economic development?
(This piece was commissioned but not published by a national newspaper. A newspaper in another country published a much longer version.)