That’s the message of Matt Ridley and Indur Goklany, as they write against relying on climate models to argue for political interventionism. (bold emphasis mine)
Was this because we controlled the weather? No. It was because we adapted to it. So even if extreme downpours do increase, death rates as a result of them will continue to decline so long as we continue to get more people access to roads, telephones, houses and information. It’s like malaria: it retreated rapidly in the twentieth century despite rising temperatures, and it will retreat rapidly in the twenty-first century despite rising temperatures.
As the above figure shows, globally the average annual death toll from all extreme weather events is about 35,000. Compare this to the hundreds of thousands of excess winter deaths that occur annually. Perhaps we should try to control winter before we tackle climate change! Oddly enough, while we may not be able to control the weather, in the U.S., millions have done the next best thing—they have migrated from colder northeastern climes to the warmer southwestern states. This, according to a paper in MIT Press’s Review of Economics and Statistics by econometricians Deschênes and Moretti, is responsible for 8%–15% of the total gains in life expectancy in the U.S. population from 1970 to 2000.
Read more of their splendid article here
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