United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told a meeting of the Global Environment Forum in Incheon, South Korea, August 11, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet” from catastrophic climate change.

The deadline referred to an international conference in Copenhagen set for December at which Ban Ki-moon and other climate alarmists want to “Seal the Deal” on an international treaty to limit greenhouse gases.

Climate change, Ban said, “exacerbates all of the problems we face: poverty, disease, hunger and insecurity. . . . It deepens the food and energy crises.”

“If we fail to act,” he continued, “climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters.

“Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest – even violence – could follow.

“The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable.”

With all due respect to the Secretary General, we beg to differ.

As Bjorn Lomborg has demonstrated in his book Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections for manmade climate change suggest that the most likely scenarios would have a net positive impact on food production and other aspects of the human economy. And while with any climate change—manmade or natural—there will be changes in the patterns and locations of droughts, floods, and natural disasters, there is no convincing scientific evidence that such disasters will be more frequent or intense with warming. In fact, historical evidence strongly suggests that they are more frequent and intense during cooler periods.

And the economic evidence is also strong that attempts to fight global warming by mandated cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions will deepen and perpetuate abject poverty, as both Lomborg and Yale economist William Nordhaus have shown.

Ban’s most basic mistake is counting only the harms projected from global warming (and rising CO2), not also the benefits, and only the benefits projected from greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, not also the harms. Count both harms and benefits in both cases, and you find that trying to reduce global warming will do more harm than letting it occur while our economies continue to grow. Consider a few illustrations, from Lomborg’s Cool It, and remember that money spent to fight global warming can’t be spent on other things, too:

• Potential malaria cases prevented through 2085 by Kyoto compliance: 70 million // Potential malaria cases prevented through 2085 by direct malaria reduction strategies: 28 billion (p. 100)
• Assuming the IPCC is right about global warming, world agricultural production will double around “2081 rather than 2080.” (p. 104)
• Even the world’s poorest areas will see increased agricultural production through this century despite global warming. (p. 105)
• ”. . . how many hungry the world will end up with depends much less on climate than on demographics and income. . . . using climate policy to obtain a small reduction in hunger is simply not the best strategy. . . . if we really care about helping the hungry, we . . . could focus on simple measures like investing in agriculture . . . . Each time our investment in climate saves one person from hunger, a similar investment in direct hunger policies could save more than five thousand people.” (pp. 106-108)
• Since lack of water is driven primarily by inefficient services, not by natural limits, and services improve with economic growth, “increased economic ability will probably more than compensate for the lower amounts of water available” and “The remarkable result is that global warming actually reduces [emphasis original] the number of people living in water-stressed areas, with less water stress in warmer scenarios than in colder ones.” (pp. 108-109)
• Investing about $4 billion annually in improving access to clean drinking water for the 1 billion people who lack it now “would avert almost one billion cases of diarrhea each year,” saving “on average two hundred hours per person each year” with total monetary value over $200 billion per year.

As Lomborg summarizes, “The fundamental economic [emphasis original] problem with both Kyoto and its stricter follow-ups is that all macro-economic models show that they are poor investments” (p. 119).