“The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable”

Marlo Lewis:

Climate economist Richard Toll has a provocative op-ed in today’s Financial Times titled “Bogus prophesies of doom will not fix the climate.” Last week, Tol accused the IPCC of being too alarmist about global warming and asked to have his name withdrawn from its recently-released Working Group II report (WG2) on climate change impacts.

Public discourse on climate change would be much improved if every discussion — for example, Secy. of State John Kerry’s climate speech in Jakarta, Indonesia — began with a reading of the Tol’s opening paragraph:

Humans are a tough and adaptable species. People live on the equator and in the Arctic, in the desert and in the rainforest. We survived ice ages with primitive technologies. The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable.

Even if one accepts WG2′s estimate that a “further warming of 2°C could cause loses equivalent to 0.2-2 per cent of world gross domestic product,” that is “about as bad as losing one year of economic growth” in half a century, Tol notes. In contrast, since the start of the Eurozone financial crisis, the income of the average Greek has fallen more than 20%. “Climate change is not, then, the biggest problem facing humankind.”

After noting that climate change is not even the biggest environmental problem (indoor air pollution has killed 260 million people — more than all the wars of the 20th century combined, Bjorn Lomborg estimates), Tol points out that the best protection from climate-related risk is economic growth and the institutions that facilitate it:

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