President Biden declared climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it” at the Cop26 summit. He’s wrong, says Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. “Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity.” Rather, it is a condition we can manage. Take hunger: experts think climate change will increase deaths from malnutrition, which is true. “But it is also true that malnutrition has plummeted over the past three decades, and is expected to continue plummeting in the next three.” Thanks to dramatic reductions in global poverty, the number of children who died from malnutrition dropped from seven million to 2.7 million in 30 years. So it’s clear we can get people out of poverty – now we just have to keep doing it.
The same goes for deaths caused by climate-related disasters. In the 1920s natural disasters killed almost half a million people on average every year. In the 2010s that figure was 18,000. The trick was that we spotted a problem and built better infrastructure. But this is the trouble with climate alarmists – they assume humanity will do nothing to adapt. Thankfully, they’re wrong. We have the technology and resources to protect people, and we will use them.