The Wall Street Journal of Friday, Aug. 6 performs an overdue service to truth and humankind in publishing an “opinion piece” by Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, titled “Climate Change Doesn’t Cause All Disasters.”
Lomborg asserts that warming, annually, causes about 120,000 heat deaths — but prevents nearly 300,000 cold deaths. Or, turning to the recent flooding in Germany and Belgium, which many, including German Chancellor Merkel, blame on climate change; yet a study of more than 10,000 rivers around the world shows that most rivers flood less: What used to be a 50-year flood in the 1960s, happens every 152 years today, mainly due to urbanization, flood control measures, and changes of climate. Some rivers still flood, Lomborg grants, and reporters may flock there, but they don’t mean more global flooding. The Ahr River, where most of the German flood deaths occurred, had a huge flood on July 14, 2021, but fatalities were lower than the deaths in 1814 and 1910. However, Lomborg points out that in Germany, and elsewhere, more people are building settlements on flood plains, leaving the water nowhere else to go.
Blaming deadly floods on climate change instead of taking responsibility for the missed early warnings, for politicians like Mrs. Merkel, who, during her visit to Schuld, a devastated village on the Ahr, said, “We must get faster in the battle against climate change.” Lomborg draws the parallel with the United States, where “climate change” is often blamed for the forest fires in the West caused in fact by poor forest management.