SatStats

 

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Venturing into the half-empty world.

Former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman and Princeton University economist Alan Blinder recently wrote the following in the Wall Street Journal: “cumulative CO2 emissions heat up the atmosphere, causing climate changes of all sorts—most of them bad. Because this huge negative externality has been allowed to run rampant, we are gradually making the Earth an inhospitable place for humans.”

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show that over the last one hundred years, CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere indeed have both sharply increased. And NASA data show that since 1920, our planet’s temperature has risen by 1.25 degrees Celsius.

The University of Oxford’s Our World in Data has reported that since 1920, the world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion.

It also has reported that the share of people living in extreme poverty fell from 74 percent in 1910 to less than 10 percent by 2015.

And EM-DAT (The International Disaster Database) data show that since 1920, the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.

Sustaining a population that has grown by about six billion people, lifting most of those people out of extreme poverty, and reducing the number of natural disaster deaths by over 80 percent show that whatever impacts increasing CO2 emission and atmospheric levels and rising temperatures have, they are not making the planet “an inhospitable place for humans.”

The data instead suggest that increasing CO2 emission and atmospheric levels and rising temperatures are making the planet more, not less, hospitable for human life.

The Heartland Institute has extensively documented “increased plant and forest growth, bigger crop yields and longer growing seasons as benefits derived from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide.”