Bjorn Blogging II

This new book from Bjorn Lomborg is going to enrage all the right people, those it's important to wind up. We're endlessly told that climate change is going to mean us all boiling to death, as in the heat wave in France in 2003 (3,500 dead in Paris alone). But we do need to note two further things: the first is that death comes to us all (alas, alack even) and the second is that heat isn't the only cause of it.
In fact, cold causes many more deaths than heat. Given the infrastructure of a specific pace (how the houses are built, heated, cooled etc) the optimal temperature varies from perhaps 59oF in Helsinki to 75oF in Athens. That is, taking the optimal temperature to be the one at which we have the least deaths overall from boh cold and heat. Now the thing is, in almost every place on the planet vastly more of the year is spent below said optimal temperature and only a small amount of time above it (for Athens, 63 days a year above it, 251 below). Thus we can expect that the warming predicted will indeed increase deaths from heat, but at the same time reduce deaths from cold. Indeed, that the reduction in deaths will be greater than the increase.

For Britain, it is estimated that a 3.6oF increase will mean two thousand more heat deaths but twenty thousand fewer cold deaths.
That's a net reduction in deaths of 18,000 a year: who said that climate change was all bad?

And of course that's one of the points of the book. If we're going to do a cost benefit analysis (which of course we should before we go off spending trillions of dollars, pounds and euros) then we do need to look at the benefits as well as the costs.