Is Global Warming Saving People From Cold?

By the way, are you— is your field economics? Is that your background?

I'm actually a political scientist, so I think I'm a pretend economist. I work with, you know, hundreds of the world's top economists, but I'm just a lowly political scientist myself.

Oh, that was a bit too humble for my show, but nevertheless, you're not—

I'm a great political economist.

There you go. All right, so back to this column, folks, which is up at DennisPrager.com. It is so consequential about comparing deaths from cold to deaths from heat and just giving the lie to how spectacularly fatal it is. So continue, please.

So everyone talks about these heat deaths, and yes, they're important, and obviously we should do policies to avoid people dying from heat. But as you pointed out, almost everywhere cold deaths vastly outweigh heat deaths. Every year in the US and Canada, about 2,500 people die from heat, but more than 130,000 people die from cold. And, you know, so there's just an incredible gap between these two numbers. And yet most people, as you also just presented, sort of assume, of course, Well, of course there are more heat deaths than cold deaths. No, there are not. This is obvious in cold Canada, but it's also true for both Spain and the U.S. and Brazil, and even in very hot countries like India. And this is not just my understanding or a few peer-reviewed papers. This is what everyone shows and the World Health Organization in their Global Burden of Disease. So this is not something you can have an opinion about. This is just the way it is. So what you need to understand is as temperatures rise, you will see more heat deaths. That's true. And that's a problem. But we're actually currently seeing even fewer cold deaths. So we're seeing more avoided cold deaths than we see extra heat deaths. So right now, it is actually such that we're probably seeing about 100,000 more heat deaths but about 200,000 fewer cold deaths because of global warming. If you're only being told about the people that die from heat, which is true, but not being told about the very, very many people who don't die from cold because of global warming, you're not very well informed.

So ironically, or at least ironically if one believes what one reads in most most newspapers, it is fair to say that fewer people are dying as a result of global warming.

It is true today. The important bit is to remember that what we talk about and what we're trying to do with climate change is not really about changing the temperature or even the temperature increase right now. It's about changing it over the next 50 to 100 years. And in that time period, it is very likely that there will be at least as many or possibly even more extra heat deaths compared to fewer cold deaths. So in some way, you could say this is a benefit that we were already scheduled to have. And so we have to have the conversation about what are we going to do for the next 50 to 100 years. But the crucial bit is still to remember you're only being told one side, the negative side or the scary part of climate change. And of course you're not being told how do you mostly save people from heat. You do it through air conditioning. Remember, the U.S. has seen increasing heat at least since the 1960s. And what you have also seen is fewer people dying from heat. Why? Because you got air conditioning. And of course that's the simple and cheap and effective way that you will save people around the world. That mostly is about making sure that people are not poor.

Exactly. So one more thing that I've never gotten a coherent response to: if people truly believe the dangers of global warming, why are they not passionate advocates of nuclear power?

And that's a very good example of why people are probably not really worried about global warming, because obviously if you think this is the end of the world, it seems very, very weird that you would say, so let's do the policies that haven't worked for the last 30 years. The problem with nuclear power is that it's still fairly expensive, and that's one of the reasons we'd be very happy that Bill Gates and many others are actually investing in making the next generation incredibly cheap. We'll see whether that succeeds, but obviously if you get nuclear power that's not only safe but also very, very cheap, it's going to be very hard to imagine that that's not the way the world is going to pick its future energy.

So do you think if it's cheap— it already is safe in my opinion— but if it's cheap, can you see any reason it will not be the dominant source of power?

Well, only if people are really, really afraid of it. But again, remember, coal power pollutes a lot. Coal power probably kills about half a million to a million people every year. So it's very, very dangerous. And obviously we should clean up a lot of that air pollution, whereas nuclear is probably one of the safest forms of power in the world, despite all that you've heard about Chernobyl and other places. These are very, very Undangerous technologies, but they're so expensive. So yes, you need to get them cheap. Once we become cheap, it may be such that the US and other rich countries that still don't dare touch them because we have bad experience, or mostly that we have bad PR from them, we will not use them. But obviously China, India, Africa are going to embrace nuclear power. But remember, this is not a given. We should We should be researching a lot of different technologies so we can find both the cheapest and the best and the ones that will actually succeed.

All right, I was going to thank you, but I do have one question I have not seen you write on, and I would like you to answer me, and that is: I think between nuclear power and desalinization, humanity's future is very bright in those arenas. Am I wrong about desalinization? We will return. Bjorn Lomborg, my guest. I'm Dennis Prager.