Wood Romances

Lucy Biggers appears to be the next up-and-coming influencer in the climate space. She presents herself as a former a climate activist suffered from extreme anxiety over climate, and so she advocated for policies and viewed other activists like Greta Thunberg as her hero. However, she says she was uninformed about the scientific evidence supporting her "doomer" anxiety. Then she read a couple books by Shellenberger and Koonin that caused her to stop being a climate activist, and now she is employed by the Free Press to share her newly found liberation from doomerism with the world. In reality she never stopped being a climate activist; she just changed her politics. Her appeal to her viewers appears to be that she (unlike many of her thought leaders) usually doesn't pretend to be an expert in science or policy. Instead, her approach appears to be that since she converted from doomerism to contrarianism, she has cured herself of her anxiety .[5] She was once filled with cl...

A popular contrarian trope promoted by Bjorn Lomborg  and his followers is that " climate-related deaths " have plummeted since 1920. Recently, he's claimed that there has been a 97.5% reduction in climate-related deaths since 1920. This is an extremely misleading graph, and it's not too difficult to uncover why. Lomborg got his data for "climate-related" deaths from the Our World in Data website, which lists deaths from "natural disasters" (OWD does not specify which of these deaths from natural disasters are "climate-related." I went to the site to see if I can reproduce Lomborg's graph. He only lists " floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires " but OWD includes other causes of death, including extreme weather and temperature. It's possible that by "storms" he means "extreme weather," but it's impossible to know what he's calling a "storm" to understand what he included and exclude...

If you follow contrarian talking points on social media, you might get the impression that cold weather kills more people than hot weather, and so global warming will result in fewer deaths, and lives will be saved as the planet warms. You can see this in this graph from Bjorn Lomborg, based on a Lancet study[1] that quantifies "cold-related" and "heat-related" deaths. This kind of thinking may seem superficially convincing, but with a little investigation, much of what is being said by Lomborg (and others) is incredibly misleading. It's based on a misunderstanding of what these types of studies say, as well as some flawed logic about how deaths will be affected by warming.  Cold vs Hot Related Deaths This Lancet paper is one of many[2][3] based on a concept of "minimum mortality temperature" (MMT), which is defined as the mean temperature at which non-accidental death rates in any particular location is the lowest.  In most places the mortality rate i...