Why Global Warming Would be Good for You
A Shortened version of this article entitled "Why Global Warming Would be Good for You" appeared in The Public InterestWinter 1995 without footnotes, tables, the chart or references. The complete version was published later in 1995 in the Hoover Institution Working Paper series as
GLOBAL WARMING: A Boon to Humans and Other Animals
Thomas Gale Moore
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution
Climate extremes would trigger meteorological chaos -- raging hurricanes such as we have never seen, capable of killing millions of people; uncommonly long, record-breaking heat waves; and profound drought that could drive Africa and the entire Indian subcontinent over the edge into mass starvation. ... Even if we could stop all greenhouse gas emissions today, we would still be committed to a temperature increase worldwide of two to four degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the twenty-first century. It would be warmer then than it has been for the past two million years. Unchecked it would match nuclear war in its potential for devastation.[1]
-- Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell
Senator Mitchell's forecast and his history are both wrong. Warmer periods bring benign rather than more violent weather. Milder temperatures will induce more evaporation from oceans and thus more rainfall -- where it will fall we cannot be sure but the earth as a whole should receive greater precipitation. Meteorologists now believe that any rise in sea levels over the next century will be at most a foot or more, not twenty.[2] In addition, Mitchell flunks history: around 6,000 years ago the earth sustained temperatures that were probably more than four degrees Fahrenheit hotter than those of the twentieth century, yet mankind flourished. The Sahara desert bloomed with plants, and water loving animals such as hippopotamuses wallowed in rivers and lakes. Dense forests carpeted Europe from the Alps to Scandinavia. The Midwest of the United States was somewhat drier than it is today, similar to contemporary western Kansas or eastern Colorado; but Canada enjoyed a warmer climate and more rainfall.
Raising the specter of disaster as well, Vice President Al Gore has called the threat of global warming "the most serious problem our civilization faces."[3] In fact, he has styled those who dispute it as "self-interested" and compared them to spokesmen for the tobacco industry who have questioned the relation of smoking to cancer. But Gore is misinformed; many disinterested scientists, including climatologists with no financial interest other than preventing wasteful expenditures of society's limited resources, question the evidence and the models that underlie the warming hypothesis.
https://web.stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_Man.html#:~:text=A%20warmer%20climate%20will%20lower,make%20water%20transport%20less%20risky.
