No one ever says it, but in many ways global warming will be a good thing
“As global warming pushes temperatures up, more people will die in heat wave. What we don’t hear is that fewer people will die from cold.”
Last week, a study in the prestigious journal Nature revealed just how much CO₂ increases have greened the Earth over the past three decades. Because CO₂ acts as a fertilizer, as much as half of all vegetated land is persistently greener today. This ought to be a cause for great joy.
Instead, the BBC focused on warning that the paper shouldn’t make us stop worrying about global warming, with threats like melting glaciers and more severe tropical storms. Many other major news outlets did not even report on the study.
Hopefully the conversation can move away from debates about whether human-caused climate change is real (which is ridiculous that it is still not accepted by some) to the more nuanced economic discussion of which strategies from status quo inaction to the various paths of possible actions are predicted to lead to least net damage.
Of course morally this is bit of a problem because deriving a metric of "net damage" requires giving a weight of importance to the people and nations affected. And the people living in the richest countries have the strongest ability to reduce carbon emissions and are best equipped to adapt to the changes, while the people living in the poorest countries have the weakest ability to affect change and are must vulnerable to climate change.
And the moral problems are not only spatial but also temporal. The people in power today are more likely to escape (through natural ageing and death) the most severe consequences by delaying actions, while those not in power (or not even born) are going to bear the brunt of these decisions (or lack thereof).