Check out this entry on Cato-At-Liberty:
Is Climate Change the World’s Most Important Problem?
For a while now I’ve been wondering about this whole climate change problem. Something just doesn’t seem right to me. I’m not saying that the Earth isn’t getting warmer, but I also know that lots of phenomena - including the weather - operate in cycles. In other words, the Earth gets warmer and then gets cooler. For anyone who is a jogger, you know that when you’re running, you speed up and slow down throughout the course. When I studied economics we learned about an economic cycle where the economy grows and grows until it reaches a point where it slows down again, sometimes even retracting. After a certain point the economy will begin to expand again. This cyclic phenomenon occurs again and again throughout society and nature, so why not when the Earth warms and cools?
Moving beyond the idea of just whether or not the Earth changes temperature, the entry from Cato talks about whether or not the warming of the planet is really the most pressing issue we have to deal with at the moment. To put it bluntly, “NO!” Here’s an excerpt:
Specifically, climate change is easily outranked by threats such as hunger, malnutrition and other nutrition-related problems, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, indoor air pollution, malaria, urban air pollution.
With respect biodiversity and ecosystems, today the greatest threat is what it always has been — the conversion of land and water habitat to human uses, i.e., agriculture, forestry, and human habitation and infrastructure. See,e.g., here.
Climate change, contrary to claims, is clearly not the most important environmental, let alone public health, problem facing the world today.
The author, Indur Goklany, promises to continue the discussion about climate change in future posts. Sounds good to me.
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