LETTER: Climate change and human adaptation
September 19, 2021 - 9:01 pm
Recently, the White House staff again killed the video feed when President Joe Biden went off script and started to answer an unapproved question. In his speech in Boise, Mr. Biden stated that global warming is responsible for the Idaho fires, and that we cannot go back in time so we have to fix the problem now.
And, of course, that means spending trillions, responds author and environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. He states that he agrees climate change is a problem, but that global fires have gone down in the past century because we are actually a smart and adoptive species and “we should adopt much better forest management that many so-called environmentalists resist.”
Mr. Lomborg also fires back that we do not want to go back in time because, in the 1920s, on average, a half million people each year died from climate-related disasters (floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, etc.), while today that number is down to 6,000. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a climate problem, just that human resiliency and wealth have helped everyone around the planet.