Climate and Economy
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Hunger
Proponents of greenhouse gas controls frequently claim global warming will reduce crop productivity in the developing world, thereby exacerbating hunger and famine (e.g., Freeman and Guzman, 2009). Idso and Singer (2009) rebutted this claim, citing a series of studies showing that important food crops benefit from higher CO2 concentrations (pp. 696–697). This, coupled with technological advances, has increased crop productivity and production dramatically during the latter half of the twentieth century in least developed countries (LDCs) as well as globally, as is shown in Figure 10.1.1.
Because of the increase in agricultural productivity and trade in agricultural and food inputs and outputs, the portion of the developing world’s population suffering from chronic hunger has been declining for decades. From 1969–1971 to 2003–2005, it declined from 33 percent to 16 percent (FAO, 2009a). However, it has started to rise once again, at least temporarily (see Figure 10.1.2; FAO, 2009a). It increased to about 17 percent in 2008 and 19 percent in 2009 before being projected to decline to 16 percent once again in 2010. But as shown in Figure 10.1.1 (which goes only through 2008), neither productivity nor production has declined. Therefore, the recent increase in hunger cannot be a result of any loss of productivity or production due to global warming.
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) ascribes the increase in hunger to a surge in food prices, the global economic slowdown, insufficient investment in agriculture, and biofuel production that has diverted crops from food to fuel production (FAO, 2009a; 2009b). Ironically, concern over global warming is responsible for the mandates and subsidies that drive biofuel production. In addition, as spending on global warming has increased, investments in agriculture have dropped.
Life Expectancy and Disease
While the IPCC claims death and disease have increased due to the modest global warming of the twentieth century driven by economic development and energy use, actual data on life expectancy and the incidence of diseases tell a different story. Average life expectancies around the world have increased from 31 years in 1900 to 47 years in the early 1950s and 69 years today (Goklany, 2007; World Bank, 2010a). For developing countries, life expectancies increased from twenty-five to thirty years in 1900 to forty-one years in the early 1950s and sixty-nine years at present (Goklany, 2009a; World Bank, 2010a).
For Sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy increased from 40.9 years in 1960 to 52.1 years in 2008. In virtually every country, health-adjusted life expectancies currently exceed unadjusted life expectancies from just a few decades ago (Goklany 2007). [“Health-adjusted” life expectancy is the life expectancy adjusted downward to partially discount the numbers of years of life an average person would spend in a disabled or diseased condition.] In other words, people in developing countries are not only living longer, they are also healthier.
Meanwhile, the ranges of the most critical climate-sensitive infectious diseases have shrunk. Malaria accounts for about 75 percent of the global burden of disease from vector-borne diseases and therefore serves as a good surrogate for the latter (IPCC, 2001). As indicated in Figure 10.1.3, the area in which malaria due to Plasmodium falciparum – the deadliest of the four protozoan parasites that cause malaria – is endemic has been reduced substantially since 1900 (Gething et al., 2010).
Endemic/stable malaria is estimated to have covered 58 percent of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30 percent by 2007. P. falciparum malaria is today restricted largely to developing countries in the tropics. Equally important, its endemicity has fallen by one or more classes in more than two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission. See Figure 10.1.3c.
Gething et al. (2010) note:
[O]f the 66 million km2 of the Earth’s surface thought to have sustained stable/endemic malaria in 1900, 12%, 18% and 57% had exhibited proportional decreases in the reproductive number of up to one, between one and two, and greater than two orders of magnitude, respectively; 11% had shown no evidence of change; and 2% had shown evidence of an increase in the reproductive number by 2007.
Figure 10.1.3 does not show the rebound in malaria in many developing areas that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s because of a combination of poor policies (such as cessation of indoor spraying of DDT in many countries partly due to a reluctance of developed countries’ aid programs to support DDT use), development of resistance to drugs and insecticides, and a deterioration of public health infrastructure in many African countries coincident with a period in which their economies deteriorated and AIDS was ascendant (Goklany, 2007). Since then, however, matters have improved substantially. According to the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2010, estimated deaths from malaria in Africa declined from 900,000 in 2000 to 709,000 in 2009 (WHO 2010, 61). Globally, the number of malaria deaths over the same period fell from 985,000 to 781,000.
Poverty
Did CO2-induced global warming during the second half of the twentieth century cause rising levels of poverty in developing countries? If the IPCC’s catastrophic claims (IPCC, 2007-II, 835) were true, one would expect to see some evidence of this in economic statistics. But the data, in fact, show just the opposite trend.
The proportion of the developing world’s population living in extreme poverty (defined as less than $1.25 per day in 2005 dollars) was halved from 52 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 2005 (World Bank, 2010b). The number of people living in extreme poverty declined from 1.9 billion to 1.374 billion even as world population grew from 3.7 billion to 5.5 billion. See Figure 10.1.4.
The most spectacular improvements in personal income were in East Asia and the Pacific, where the headcount of those in poverty dropped from 1.071 billion to 316 million. More people escaped poverty at a faster rate in these countries than at any other time in human history. It is no accident that the fastest reductions in poverty occurred in areas that experienced the greatest increases in both economic development and greenhouse gas emissions.
Extreme Weather Events
The IPCC claims death, disease, and property damage from extreme weather events will increase if man-made greenhouse gases were not restricted. While property damage indeed has increased over time, this seems to be due to an increase in both population and wealth, which increases the property at risk (Bouwer, 2010; Neumayer and Barthel, 2011), losses of life due to extreme weather events have fallen. Data for 1900 to 2008 indicate that since the 1920s, cumulative annual deaths from all extreme weather events – droughts, floods, extreme temperatures (both extreme heat and extreme cold), wet mass movement (slides, waves, and surges), wildfires, and storms (hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons, etc.) – declined globally by 93 percent on average while the annual death rate dropped by 98 percent (Goklany, 2009b). See Figure 10.1.5.
Between 1900 and 2008, droughts were responsible for most (58 percent) of the global fatalities due to extreme weather events. Global deaths and death rates from droughts peaked in the 1920s and have since fallen by 99.97 percent and 99.99 percent, respectively (Goklany, 2009b). The death toll that inevitably used to follow in the wake of drought has been reduced almost to the vanishing point.
In 2000–2009, according to the EM-DAT, the International Disaster Database, an average of only 116 people died annually due to drought (EM-DAT, 2010), compared to 472,000 deaths annually in 1920–29. To place these numbers in context, currently more than 58 million people die each year due to all causes worldwide (WHO, 2008).
With respect to floods, the second most deadly form of extreme weather event, deaths and death rates crested in the 1930s. By 2000–2008 they were down by 98.7 percent and 99.6 percent, respectively (Goklany, 2009b).
Extreme weather events today contribute only 0.06 percent of the global (and U.S.) mortality burdens in an average year. They have declined even as all-cause mortality has increased (Goklany, 2009b). This indicates that the world, including the developing world, is coping better with risks of death from extreme weather events than it is with other, larger health risks. It also suggests that it might pay greater dividends to society if more resources were expended on the latter than on reducing man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Water Shortages
The possibility of water shortages leading to droughts and hunger are recurring themes in the climate change literature (e.g., Freeman and Guzman, 2009; IPCC, 2007-II). Droughts, which are a manifestation of severe water shortages, have plagued humanity from time immemorial, and deaths from droughts are probably the best indicator of the socioeconomic impact of such water shortages. As noted above, deaths and death rates from droughts have declined by 99.97 percent and 99.99 percent since the 1920s. This decline occurred despite a more-than-tripling of the global population.
There is also a concern that the combination of population growth and global warming might reduce access to safe water. Yet between 1990 and 2008, although global population increased 27 percent, the percentage of global population with access to safe water increased from 76.8 percent to 86.8 percent. An additional 1.8 billion people gained access to safer water over this period (World Bank, 2010a; WRI, 2010). At the same time, 1.3 billion more people gained access to improved sanitation..
Even Sub-Saharan Africa, historically a slow-development region, has seen improvements. Despite a 60 percent increase in population, the proportion with access to improved water sources increased from 48.9 percent in 1990 to 59.7 percent in 2008, as 240 million more people in that region gained such access (World Bank, 2010a; WRI, 2010).
Clearly, long-term trends for hunger, disease, and deaths from droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events are not consistent with the IPCC’s narrative regarding the impacts of global warming. Perhaps global warming is not happening after all, or if it is, its effect are relatively small and/or overwhelmed by improvements in human adaptive capacity or other factors. Or perhaps the global warming narrative is simply based on false expectations, that warming’s real impacts are more positive than negative. Whichever explanation (or combination of explanations) is correct, the salient fact is that real-world data do not support claims that global warming is reducing human well-being.
References
Bouwer, L.M. 2010. Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3092.1.
EM-DAT. 2009. The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database. Brussels, Belgium: Université Catholique de Louvain. Available at http://www.em-dat.net. Data downloaded 24 August 2009.
EM-DAT. 2010. The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database. Brussels, Belgium: Université Catholique de Louvain. Available at http://www.em-dat.net. Data downloaded 22 May 2010.
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). 2009a. State of Food Insecurity 2009. Rome, Italy: FAO.
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). 2009b. The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Economic crisis: impacts and lessons learned. Available at http://www.fao.org/economic/es-policybriefs/ multimedia0/presentation-the-state-of-food-insecurity/en/.
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). 2010a. FAOSTAT. Available at http://faostat.fao.org/default.aspx, visited 9 May 2010.
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). 2010b. State of Food Insecurity 2010. Rome, Italy: FAO.
Freeman, J. and Guzman, A. 2009. Climate change & U.S. interests. Columbia Law Review 100: 101–171.
Gething, P.W., Smith, D.L., Patil, A.P., Tatem, A.J., Snow, R.W., and Hay, S.I. 2010. Climate change and the global malaria recession. Nature 465: 342–345.
Goklany, I.M. 1998. Saving habitat and conserving biodiversity on a crowded planet. BioScience 48: 941–953.
Goklany, I.M. 2007. The Improving State of the World. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.
Goklany, I.M. 2009a. Have increases in population, affluence and technology worsened human and environmental well-being? Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1(3). Available at http://www.ejsd.org/docs/HAVE_INCREASES_IN_POPULATION_AFFLUENCE_AND_TECHNOLOGY_WORSENED_HUMAN_AND_ENVIRONMENTAL_WELL-BEING.pdf. Goklany, I.M. 2009b. Deaths and death rates from extreme weather events: 1900–2008. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 14: 102–09.
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2001. Climate Change 2001. Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. IPCC. 2007-II. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edited by M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson. Cambrridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Neumayer, E., and Barthel, F. 2011. Normalizing economic loss from natural disasters: A global analysis. Global Environmental Change 21: 13-24.
World Health Organization (WHO). 2008. Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors: 2004 Update. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO.
World Health Organization (WHO). 2010. World Malaria Report 2010. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO.
World Bank. 2010a. World Development Indicators, available at http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/DDPQQ/ member.do?method=getMembers&userid=1&queryId=135
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World Resources Institute (WRI). 2010. EarthTrends. Available at http://earthtrends.wri.org/.
