It's cold tonight, and I sit at my desk, wishing it were
warmer. Even with central heat and air, winter is a difficult time.
My sinuses are inflamed, my knuckles are dry and red, and my joints are
sore with the cold. Every year I dread it more. And now
environmentalists like
Jeff Bezos want to make it colder.
It's
no accident that Shakespeare wrote of "the winter of our discontent"
(Richard III) and of "the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the
winter's wind" (As You Like It). Shakespeare, who lived
through some of the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, found nothing to
like about winter. Nor did Dickens, who wrote often of "the winter
of despair," or, in a line about the short days of winter that applies to
today's liberals, "Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it."
Turn off the lights — you're burning too much fossil fuel!
The
fact is that cold is more damaging than heat. Long, cold winters followed
by cold, damp springs and summers diminish crop yields, leading to global
hunger. If the Earth were a few degrees warmer, that heat would expand
corn and wheat belts to the north. In terms of global food security, it
is cold we should fear, not heat.
In
the Little Ice Age, roughly from the 14th through the mid-19th century, global
cooling limited food production, resulting in widespread hunger, disease, and
economic stagnation. In northern Europe, for instance, population growth
was stagnant until the 19th century, and for most people, there was little
improvement in daily life until after 1800. In Britain, for example,
population has soared from10 million in
1800 to over 66 million today. That would not have been possible in a
period of cooler temperatures.
Globally, 5.4
million die each year from cold-related deaths, while only 311,000
deaths are heat related. Just in the U.S., on average, 1,330
die from the cold each year, and snow and ice cause over 150,000
traffic accidents annually. Just as a matter of human comfort, heat is
preferable to cold. There is a reason why tens of millions of retirees
have moved to Florida and Arizona. No one retires in Michigan's Upper
Peninsula.
There
are many other benefits to warming. Some 40% of the U.S. corn crop is now
used to produce clean-burning ethanol — larger crops would support even greater
use of ethanol and contribute to U.S. energy independence. Warming would
also further open the
Northwest Passage for freighters, thus cutting two weeks off the time it takes
to transport goods between Asia and eastern Canada, and cutting fuel use as
well (though most arctic traffic will continue to pass through Russia's
Northern Sea Route).
It would
be wonderful if humans actually did have the power to raise global
temperatures. As it is, that power is limited. For millennia,
global temperatures have risen and fallen based on natural cycles resulting
from the shifting of the Earth's axis and other natural forces. These
forces created the Great Ice Age and the Little Ice Age, periods that were
followed by periods of warming, and that cycle of alternating warming and
cooling has been taking place throughout the Earth's history. We are
fortunate to live in a period of warming, however slight that has been.
The danger is that we may slip back into another extended period of cold.
This
is not just a remote possibility. The winter
of 2017–18 was unusually cold and long, resulting in late planting and
reduced crop yields in the temperate regions. And according to scientists
at NASA's Langley Research Center, thenext
20 years may see a repeat of 2017–18 or worse. That is because
we are entering a period of extended solar minima in which the Earth's temperature
declines as a result of lower sunspot activity. Don't donate your parkas
to Goodwill just yet, and prepare to eat less salad. If temperatures drop
even to a fraction of what happened during the Little Ice Age, Florida and
California will experience extreme cold — with damage to winter crops like
lettuce and tomato.
Environmentalists
believe that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere contribute to warming, but
CO2, in and of itself, is hardly a bad thing. It is common knowledge that
plant growth is increased in the presence of higher levels of CO2. Plant
life on Earth has
increased by 14% in the last 30 years as a result of increased CO2
levels and slightly higher temperatures. Apparently, environmentalists
wish to reduce plant life on earth, including staple crops.
If crop yields had not increased during the past 30 years, millions of
human beings would have suffered from hunger. Is it the intention of the
environmental movement to reduce crop yields?
If
humans could control the Earth's climate, it would be good to raise
temperatures as an offset to future periods of cooling already predicted by
climate scientists. Unfortunately, there seems to be no compelling
evidence that human activity can alter temperatures to anything beyond a
fraction of a degree, if that.
What
we can do is to prepare for whatever comes our way, but to do that, we must be
prosperous. At an estimated
cost of between $51 and $93 trillion over ten years, the Green New
Deal will destroy wealth in the U.S. and make it impossible to defend against
natural variations in the climate. Other schemes, such as the Paris
Climate Agreement, would add many billions more to the cost. There must
have been plenty of cave men during the Great Ice Age who wished they had
central heating. If we avoid spending on costly environmental
boondoggles, we will have the funds to live safely and comfortably no matter
what happens.
Periods of global warming and cooling
are inevitable. This time around, human beings may be able to cope with
it. Unlike those who suffered through the Little Ice Age and the period
of warming that followed it, modern humans possess the resources to survive
whatever nature throws at us — that is, if we don't squander those resources on
misguided schemes like the Green New Deal.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American
culture including Heartland
of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to
O'Connor to Haruf (2011).
