What’s the bigger existential threat to humanity, climate change or nuclear holocaust? As Trump and Biden take different sides on this question, the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump ponders the evidence.
Donald Trump is clear that “the biggest problem we have in the whole world, it’s not global warming. It’s nuclear warming”. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has recently claimed that: “This is the last existential threat, it is climate. We have a crazy SOB like that guy Putin and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is climate.” And so the battle lines were drawn. But who is correct?
In an effort to resolve this debate, Bump contacted the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. And one S.J. Beard – described on the centre’s website as an “emerging research leader in the transdisciplinary field of Existential Risk Studies” – told him that the best place to start is by defining what we mean by “existential”. “We tend to look at two things,” Beard said. “One of them is full-on human extinction. The other is global societal collapse.”
So with those criteria, whose existential threat does Beard view as the bigger risk: Trump’s or Biden’s? According to Bump:
“The problem is they’re just incredibly different kinds of risk,” Beard began, fairly. The difference, though, is mainly one of timelines. The damage done by climate change accrues slowly, chronically. It’s accruing now, as Beard noted. The threat of nuclear weapons is, to put it dryly, acute. In each case, there would be risks to food supplies, forced relocations, interruptions to power production and so on. It’s just that it happens very rapidly in the wake of a nuclear exchange.
“Right now, nuclear weapons are much more likely to have really global catastrophic effects than climate change,” Beard said. “But in 100 years’ time, the effects of climate change may have added up to what we would experience with a nuclear war.” …
Asked which existential threat seemed more likely to unfold, Beard demurred.
So with no firm reply I visited Mr. Beard’s organisation’s website and discovered under ‘Research’ there was no report on the risk of nuclear holocaust, but there was an extensive section on climate change that relied almost completely on the research of the economists Wagner and Weitzman, who used the IPCC’s figures to produce estimates – which were of course highly uncertain – of possible extreme temperature rises. “If we continue to pursue a medium-high emissions pathway, [the IPCC authors] estimate the probability of eventual warming of 6°C is around 10%, and of 10°C is around 3%.”
What this completely misses, however, is that at COP 28 last year, the IPCC announced that it had slashed its estimate for the Earth’s maximum warming in half, from 5-6°C. to only 2.7°C.
It’s also important to note that warming due to an increased concentration of CO2 is logarithmic. This means that as the concentration of CO2 increases the amount of warming wanes until it levels off completely and rises no further. Therefore, the risk of the Earth reaching any ‘tipping point’ for a climate catastrophe to happen is small to non-existent. Alarmist scientists claim that the modest effect of carbon dioxide will trigger other processes that cause runaway warming and ‘climate breakdown’. But this is all just guesswork of course as no such tipping point has been observed.
So, what has been the record of ‘climate related deaths’ so far?
Over the past 100 years the number of deaths from catastrophic climate events has declined by 99%.
Also, since 1988 the Earth’s warming climate has so far only resulted in a greening planet, with shrinking deserts and rising temperatures that are saving thousands of people worldwide every year from premature death. These lives saved far outweigh the deaths that have been attributed to climate change worldwide.
According to the UN, droughts over the last 50 years have averaged 13,000 deaths annually, a number that has not been increasing.
NASA’s satellite observations found that since 2003 that the number of wildfires has declined. Deaths due to wildfires have typically been extremely low. Globally, wildfires were responsible for the death of approximately 310 people from January to September 2023, making it the year with the highest number of such deaths since 1990. Over the past three decades, the global death toll due to wildfires has totalled around 2,900.
The number of famines worldwide has been in sharp decline since the 1960s.
According to NASA’s satellite data, sea levels have risen only 100.1 mm since 1993. This has come to just 4 inches over the past 30 years. And the most recent scientific research using satellite data has demonstrated that about 50% of the sea level increase on the U.S. East Coast has been attributable to subsidence and not thermal expansion of the oceans or melting glaciers and ice caps.
A new report by Allan Astrup Jensen, Research Director and CEO at the Nordic Institute of Product Sustainability and Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology in Denmark, shows that from September 2007 through September 2023, Arctic sea ice declines were near zero.
Like it or not, the warming to date has saved countless lives, and any economic losses have been small to non-existent when compared to the benefit that has resulted from the increase in crop yields etc. Ergo, Mr. Trump is 100% correct and Mr. Biden is only wrong.
Richard Burcik is the author of two short books, The DNA Lottery and Anatomy of a Lie.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The Beard guy in the picture looks like a totally vacuous c u next Tuesday.
By their hairstyles shall ye know them.
When I see dyed hair, I’m fairly sure I could predict their opinions on a number of topics.
Spot on. Instead of asking a guy looking like this about anything, you can just read it yourself from official publications of US democrats as that’s the ‘classic’ I support the current thing! guy.
Brain dead criminal idiot, xi Biden. Getting ready to steal another election engineered by the CIA-DoD. The same bastards who brought you Rona and have been preaching Globaloneysomething for 40 years.
Plant food causes….everything. Including loser morons like the Beard dude in this article. A mentally ill trans-tard who is a ‘budding leader’ in the Climate cult. I wonder if he gets aroused by man-pig Mikey Mann and his bulging hockey stick.
The Hockey Stick lost its erection long ago. ——-McIntyre and Mckitrick saw to it that Mann could no longer be aroused.
The possibility of CO2 causing warming, even if the hypothesis itself was true, has already been exhausted at current levels.
Warming by CO2 cannot happen unless there are positive feedbacks. But most feedbacks in nature are not positive. They are negative. Otherwise we would have had all manner of runaway effects and the earth as we know it would not really exist. Instead because of negative feedbacks helping to self regulate the earth is remarkably resilient. ——Climate Change because of a little extra CO2 is POLITICS not Science. It is not even known how sensitive the climate is to rising levels of CO2, a parameter called ECS (or Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity). It is just assumed in all of the climate models that this number is high, which is why all of the expensive models have so far been WRONG. Yet more climate models continue to be wheeled out as evidence of a climate crisis. ——-But failed models are evidence of NOTHING and are not science.
Obviously. And Islamophobia is worse yet.
Emerging from what?
Emerging from his WEF Indoctrination School. Suitably cabbaged.
I suppose articles such as this should be applauded for blowing ozone holes in the climate scam but the bottom line is that I have never believed in ANY climate garbage.
The ozone layer has big holes in it because of fridges, we are heading for an ice age, the seas are boiling, global warming because we burn coal, gas, wood and oil domestically but the elites emissions don’t matter, cow farts, growing garden veg, and on and on, the Amazon is the lungs of the world, blah, blah, blah.
The climate scam has more holes in it than a navvies string vest.
And then along came the C1984 and before I knew much about the medical scam I had found the Club of Rome Limits to Growth and ALL my convictions were proven.
So the further confirmations are welcome but ultimately nothing will change my view on climate change. We have occasionally changing weather patterns and anybody not supporting this position is either ignorant, a liar or both. It really is that simple.
Thanks for further supporting my position.
Or as the resident climate activist on GB News Jim Dale said the other day “The Earth is on Fire”. ——-This is not the language of science. It is the language of climate activism based on faith and emotion. But as with all of these people they are like a hammer that sees everything as a nail. ——According to this silly man no matter what problems there are in the world, climate change is always way more important. ——Dear Mr Dale, There are currently one billion people in the world that do not even have electricity, but you and your silly manufactured climate crisis are keeping these people in a state of abject misery under false pretences of a climate emergency for which you have not a shred of evidence.
Biden has hedged his bets by blowing up Nordstream and increasing the risk of both climate change and a nuclear hollyhocks.
Biden might want to ask Californians about that, since their weather forecast says 10 feet of snow will cover the Sierra Nevada mountains by this weekend.
I can’t remember the technical term, but before Ice Ages come, the Jet Stream starts forming deep loops, bringing warm air up from the tropics, followed by cold air down from the Arctic, then warm air again, which seems to fit current patterns.
But it’s not as bad as ‘misgendering’ Caitlyn Jenner.
Biden thinks Hamas is an island in the Aegean. Who is going to listen to this idiot that should be sitting in a bath chair in a care home being spoon fed Tomato soup.
I think it is worth examining the negative. There has been a troubling school of thought that has developed since the mid 1990s which argues that a nuclear exchange, whilst destructive, is potentially winnable and that the damage has been overstated or at least can be limited. There are of course commercial presures involved. Part of this agenda is the legitimization of battlefield nuclear weapons. They argue that the use of such weapons does not necessarily escalate into the use of larger weapons on a larger scale and that even if it did the war could still be winnable. This is an evil viewpoint which has no grounding in reality but it is quite prevalent.
I’ll start taking their climate change propaganda seriously when Greta Thunberg and her JSO ilk start blocking military industrial complex factories and facilities, not easy targets like commuters and ambulances. I suspect a cold day in hell before that happens.
General comment, not a direct reply to Jabby!
I think it is worth examining the negative. There has been a troubling school of thought that has developed since the mid 1990s which argues that a nuclear exchange, whilst destructive, is potentially winnable and that the damage has been overstated or at least can be limited.
That’s most certainly the case. The Mt Saint Helens eruption in 1980 released a thermal energy of 26 megatons of TNT and will have had quite some radioactive fallout due to naturally occurring isotopes as well. Yet, it was a pretty localized phenomenon which killed only 57 people. OTOH, a nuclear exchange is completely pointless as wars are not won by devastating cities and the only real purpose of nukes is to be safe from nuclear blackmail by the USA (for all states which are not the USA) or nuclear blackmail by England and France¹ for all states which are called Germany and because of this, must not have any.
¹ French military doctrine calls for a nuclear first strike in response to an invasion and as invasions from Belgium, Luxemburg, Italy or Spain are – well – ‘unlikely’, it’s pretty obvious where the projected targets of French nukes are.
A much threat than either of these things, which is actually an unfolding reality rather than a threat, is the ongoing destruction of white civilisation. No fancy risk prediction academics required to tell us that it’s a certainty unless people wake up.
Text predict on my iPhone after I type “white” always gives “supremacy” as an option. Just an observation. I suspect their intention is more that it will be in the context of the threat posed by evil white racists.
They see us as lower because in their minds we havent ‘gamed it out’ We are partly to blame for allowing a cult of measurement to take control From thence all sorts of horrors can ensue. But we aren’t so far gone that we can’t paddle back and start to set up a genuinely human path based on integrity. You shouldn’t think that it is all gone and then succumb to oblivion. Bear in mind the utter weakness and fragility of our enemy even if they pretend otherwise.
Just bear in mind that uou are not dealing with the brightest bulbs in the chandelier or the adults in the room. I know that it is difficult to accept this given the control that they exert over us but this isn’t the tyranny of evil geniuses. It is more like petulant children carrying on until we put a stop to them. It might be too late to turn things around but given the lateness of the hour we do have to try.
Don’t go down the nuke path. You might think that at least it is quick but not really. You might survive and you will be surrounded by people with horrendous burns, a huge number of people will be blind, agonies that we can’t fully comprehend. And as Carl Sagan said, a sense that this wasn’t some sort of natural catastrophe, but that we did this to ourselves and each other. I understand the temptation because I long for nuclear annihilation myself but I would advise a different path.
Biden. More DUFUS than POTUS
Nuclear Bombs are a REAL threat. We know what Nuclear bombs can do. ——————————–Climate Change on the other hand is largely a manufactured one. Bearing in mind that there is no actual increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event anywhere in the world despite us having supposed to have caused climate to change as a result of our emissions of CO2 since the start of the Industrial revolution. ——–We do not project the devastation that could or might or maybe will be caused by Nuclear war by putting assumptions and speculations into computer models, but with climate change that is exactly what we do. We make assumptions and “project” what will happen in the future, but because the issue is highly politicised these projections cannot be trusted, just as we cannot trust government on many other issues. So for anyone to claim like Biden seems to be doing that climate change is a greater threat than Nuclear Holocaust means (1) They probably don’t think Nuclear war will end up happening, and (2) They have a vested interest in the issue of climate. eg Bidens Green New deal and all the other social justice and Liberal Progressive policies that depend on their being a climate crisis.
I hate when I put “their” instead of “there”.
Senile old fool talks bollocks ….. is this news?
I thought the biggest existential threat to humanity was the globalist eugenicist elite.