In 2005, the United Nations claimed that by 2010 there would be 50 million ‘climate refugees’. This claim has been a mainstay of the argument for global climate change policy, and is based on the belief that climate change will compound the ‘effects of poverty and war’. However, by the mid 2010s, this estimate of people’s… Read More »Environmental migration
Green campaigners have argued climate change is already making people poorer and will increase rates of poverty. They argue similarly that solving the problem of climate change will in itself tackle the problems of poverty and inequality. But the data shows that extreme poverty was well on the way to being solved, and that climate… Read More »Poverty
Claims that storms damage property and civil infrastructure, largely driven by dramatic news coverage of extreme weather events, have created the misunderstanding that these events are becoming more frequent, more damaging, and will be one of the main mechanisms of the ‘climate crisis’ that ultimately makes the world hostile to humanity. But the evidence for… Read More »Property Damage
Deforestation has long been a concern to all sorts of people and isn’t particular either to environmentalists or conservationists. This is why the survival of forests has become an emotive issue, and this emotion mobilised to service the green agenda. The UK’s Natural History Museum, for instance claims that ‘Centuries of farming, building and industry… Read More »Deforestation
On the green view, society depends on natural processes throughout the environment that provide essential resources. For example, pollinators such as bees assist in agriculture, and photosynthesis in plants and algae produce oxygen. Seas produce fish, on which many coastal communities depend. According to green reasoning therefore, changes to the climate, especially warming, will alter… Read More »Ecosystems
According to green claims, climate change could bring increased volumes of water to some areas, overwhelming rivers and other water management infrastructure. Flooding has always been a problem for people, particularly in older European towns and cities, which were built beside rivers and estuaries when they were important modes of transport. Historic British cities such… Read More »Flooding
Sea level rise is perhaps the most plausible threat from climate change. The risk comes from thermal expansion of water and the melting of glacial ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, in which vast volumes of frozen water are locked. The idea that a warmer atmosphere will cause more ice to melt, and for this… Read More »Sea Level Rise
Many campaigners, NGOs, journalists, politicians and some scientists claim that we are in the midst of a “biodiversity crisis” or a “sixth mass extinction”. According to these stories, climate change is one of a number of anthropogenic factors responsible for killing life on Earth at a rate which is equivalent to cataclysmic changes in natural… Read More »Species extinction and biodiversity loss
Each summer, fresh images of extensive damage done to forests and homes by wildfire ignites media panic and speculation about the role of climate change in these apocalyptic scenes. But areas from which these images are produced, such as California and Australia, are typically places that have always been prone to significant wildfire. Moreover, it… Read More »Wildfires
Drought is a consequence of global warming that drives many fears about the future. But like heatwaves, the definition and detection of a drought is not as straightforward as meteorological phenomena such as rain or wind, and are instead defined by deviation from a norm or average. Some places are naturally much drier than others,… Read More »Drought