What the new GCSE in global warming should teach

For years, environmentalists have campaigned for children to study global warming as a subject rather than simply as a part of geography. Their wish has now been granted in England with a new GCSE in natural history, starting from 2025. We know nothing yet about the syllabus but it’s quite the opportunity to ask what our planet’s problems really are, and how effective the net-zero agenda is as a solution.

Rather than be scared to death about the future of the planet, pupils should instead be encouraged to take a rationalist approach. They might ask whether the obsession with climate change in recent decades has taken attention away from the many other major problems facing the planet. And they might also look at ‘extreme weather events’ and whether they really are claiming more lives.

Let’s start with hurricanes. The world experienced fewer of them in 2021 than in any year since satellites started to consistently record their prevalence. The latest study from the UN climate panel of scientists finds that hurricanes will be less frequent but stronger, thereby increasing the commercial cost of hurricane damage. But because the world will also get richer, relative damages will keep declining, just slightly more slowly than they would have done. A problem, yes. But not a catastrophe.

So is ‘climate chaos’ costing more lives – in the third world, or elsewhere? Insofar as official records can attest, the overall risk of climate-related disaster death has dropped over the last century, not by a little but by an astonishing 99 per cent. Over the past 20 years, as temperatures have gone up, heat deaths have increased by 116,000 per year. But a recent global Lancet study also shows that cold deaths, which are almost ten times more common, have declined by 283,000.