![]() ![]() Gleick confuses the reader about the relationship between disasters and extreme weather events. “If you look at the actual article he cites,” writes Gleick, “the journalist makes clear the “influence” of climate change just two sentences later.” But, as noted above, I have never suggested there wasn’t an influence, just that it is outweighed by other factors. Gleick falsely accuses me of cherry-picking a quote from a 2019 New York Times story on Amazon fires. “What most determines how vulnerable various nations are to flooding,” I note, “depends centrally on whether they have modern water and flood control systems, like my home city of Berkeley, California, or not, like the Congo.” My point is, again, that human development and disaster preparedness massively outweigh whatever increase there’s been in hurricane wind speed, the length of forest fire season, or modestly more precipitation. ‘For instance,’ he notes, ‘some recent research is suggestive that regional warming in the western United States can be associated with increasing forest fires.’” But on page two I write, “Today, California’s fire season stretches two to three months longer than it was fifty years ago.” As for extreme weather, I wrote, about one of the world’s leading experts, “ Pielke stresses that climate change may be contributing to some extreme weather events. Gleick similarly accuses me of denying any relationship between climate change and extreme weather events, and ignoring how fire seasons have grown longer. ![]() Food surpluses have been rising gradually for millennia and especially in the 220 years since Thomas Malthus wrote his famous tract, claiming that humans were doomed to periodic starvation. ![]() Gleick, for his part, offers no reason to expect declining food production, much less famine. In Apocalypse Never I explicitly acknowledge climate change’s potentially negative impacts on food production and point out that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and every other major scientific body conclude that fertilizer, irrigation, flood control, roads, tractors, and other technologies needed to increase yields massively outweigh rising temperatures around the world, including in poor and developing nations in the tropics. ![]() To get to the bottom of the disagreement, we need to review the best available science, as well as the history of Malthusian ideology. Gleick disagrees and defends the Malthusian notion that future food surpluses are highly uncertain due to climate change, and argues that I ignore such risks. I further argue that, if we continue to develop in these ways, deaths from natural disasters will continue to decline, food surpluses will continue to rise, and global carbon emissions will likely peak and decline soon, preventing temperatures from rising more than three degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels. In Apocalypse Never I show why poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America will enjoy higher standards of living, and protect the natural environment, by doing the exact same thing Americans and Europeans have done, which is to industrialize, urbanize, build flood control systems, modernize agriculture, and move up the energy ladder, from wood and dung to hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels to nuclear. PETER GLEICK 3RD AGE OF WATER HOW TOWe know how to improve agricultural efficiency to both grow enough food for everyone and to get it to hungry mouths.” “We know we must now work to both cut greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the severity of climate change and at the same time work to adapt to the impacts we can no longer avoid. “We know how to provide safe water and sanitation to the billions who still lack it,” he writes. To be sure, there is much that Gleick and I agree upon. Most troubling, Gleick writes, “if Malthusians are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place.” But in Apocalypse Never I show that, for Malthusians, making the world a “better place” has meant letting the poor starve, keeping poor nations dependent on wood fuel, and diverting World Bank funding from dams, roads, and fertilizer for development to charitable endeavors like solar panels for rural villagers aimed at making poverty sustainable. In fact, Gleick mischaracterizes Apocalypse Never, which accurately reflects the best available science and promotes energy progress, not nuclear to the exclusion of other sources, without making personal attacks. He argues that I construct strawmen, promote nuclear energy above other energies, and engage in ad hominem (personal) attacks. In his review of my new book, Apocalypse Never, at Yale Climate Connections, Peter Gleick accuses me of mischaracterizing environmentalism and misrepresenting climate science. ![]()
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