Angry because she’d been called out by members of her own Democratic Party and by fellow climate activists, the congresswoman, affectionately known as AOC, attempted to fine-tune her message via one of her appointees, as Michael Shellenberger writes:
An AOC spokesperson told Axios, “We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it’s existential or cataclysmic.” But, he added, “We’re seeing lots of [climate change–related] problems that are already impacting lives.”But if that’s the case, the impact is dwarfed by the 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Moreover, that decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled.
In fact, both rich and poor societies have become far less vulnerable to extreme weather events in recent decades. In 2019, the journal Global Environmental Change published a major study that found death rates and economic damage dropped by 80 to 90 percent during the last four decades, from the 1980s to the present.
Humans are now less likely to suffer from climate-related or climate-caused disasters. The predicted droughts aren’t causing the migrations of thousands of refugees. The predicted rising of sea levels hasn’t devastated towns and villages around the world.
For humans on planet Earth, life expectancy has risen over the last two decades, and the number of people living in poverty has decreased. Although climate activists have predicted disaster and misery since the 1990s, and perhaps even earlier, those predictions have shown themselves to be inaccurate.
