Global warming is hardly the world’s biggest problem – by Bjorn Lomborg (National Post – September 23, 2014)

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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is meeting the world’s leaders for a climate summit today, “to make climate change a top priority for all leaders.” Of the world’s many ills, he unequivocally finds that “top of the priority list is climate change.”

While it is important to find smart solutions to the real problem of global warming, it does not make sense to claim climate is our first priority.

With the outreach program The World We Want, the UN already has asked what the rest of us think. More than 4-million people from every nation say the top priorities are better education and health care, less corruption, more jobs and affordable food. At the very last place, as priority number 17, comes global warming.

Is this surprising? If you’re Samson Banda from Zaire, having been sick from malaria for six months and faced with appalling health care, your priority is health. As he says: “If I die from malaria tomorrow, why should I care about global warming?”

This is also true for rich countries. When the Pew Research Center earlier this year asked Americans to rank 20 top priorities for the President, they similarly focused on jobs, education, health along with the economy and terrorism. Climate came in 19th. Yet, Obama has made climate one of his top three priorities for his second term.

Politicians’ alarmism is not helping either. Obama wants to make climate relevant by claiming it is “happening now,” highlighting California’s drought and warning of “devastating” hurricanes. Yet, the UN Climate Panel has “low confidence” in either claim for the next 40 years: Climate impacts are mostly about the second half of this century and beyond.

If we step back for a moment, it is obvious the biggest drought in U.S. history was the 1930s Dust Bowl. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program found that “droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century.” The global hurricane energy indicator is close to its lowest index since the 1970s.

In an analysis of climate communication, the University College of London found that appeals to fear are often ineffective and lead to a suspicion that “they are trying to manipulate me.” Remember in 2007, when Al Gore told us in his Nobel speech that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff” and it could be gone in “as little as seven years. Seven years from now.” That is now. Arctic ice definitely shows a long-term decline, but nowhere near 100% reduction. This September, it is about 17% reduced.

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