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By Root 621 0

a warmer world because of greater evaporation from the oceans, as it did in previous warm episodes such as the Holocene (when the Arctic ocean may have been almost ice-free in summer), the Egyptian, Roman and medieval warm periods. The great droughts that changed history in western Asia happened, as theory predicts, in times of cooling: 8,200 years ago and 4,200 years ago especially. If you take the IPCC’s assumptions and count the people living in zones that will have more water versus zones that will have less water, it is clear that the net population at risk of water shortage by 2100 falls under all their scenarios. Although water will continue to be fought over, polluted and exhausted, while rivers and boreholes may dry up because of over-use, that will happen in a cool world too. As climate zones shift, southern Australia and northern Spain may get drier, but the Sahel and northern Australia will probably continue their recent wetter trend. Nor is there any evidence for the oft-repeated assertion that climate will be more volatile when wetter. Ice cores confirm that volatility of climate from year to year decreases markedly when the earth warms from an ice age. There will probably be some increase in the amount of rain that falls in the most extreme downpours, and perhaps more flooding as a result, but it is a sad truth that the richer people are, the less likely they are to drown, so the warmer and richer the world, the better the out come.

The same is true for storms. During the warming of the twentieth century there was no increase in either the number or the maximum wind speed of Atlantic hurricanes making landfall. Globally, tropical cyclone intensity hit a thirty-year low in 2008. The cost of the damage done by hurricanes has increased greatly, but that is because of the building and insuring of expensive coastal properties, not because of storm intensity or frequency. The global annual death rate from weather-related natural disasters has declined by a remarkable 99 per cent since the 1920s – from 242 per million in the 1920s to three per million in the 2000s. The killing power of hurricanes depends far more on wealth and weather forecasts than on wind speed. Category 5 Hurricane Dean struck the well-prepared Yucatan in 2007 and killed nobody. A similar storm struck impoverished and ill-prepared Burma the next year and killed 200,000. If they are freed to prosper, the future citizens of Burma will be able to afford protection, rescue and insurance by 2100.

In measuring health, note that globally the number of excess deaths during cold weather continues to exceed the number of excess deaths during heat waves by a large margin – by about five to one in most of Europe. Even the notorious one-off death rate in the European summer heat wave of 2003 failed to match the number of excess cold deaths recorded in Europe during most winters. Besides, once again, people will adapt, as they do today. People move happily from London to Hong Kong or Boston to Miami and do not die from heat, so why should they die if their home city gradually warms by a few degrees? (It already has, because of the urban heat island effect.)

What about malaria? Even distinguished scientists have been heard to claim that malaria will spread northwards and uphill in a warming world. But malaria was rampant in Europe, North America and even arctic Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the world was nearly a degree cooler than now. It disappeared, while the world was warming, because people kept their cattle in barns (providing mosquitoes with an alternative dining option), moved indoors at night behind closed windows, and to a lesser extent because swamps were drained and pesticides used. Today malaria is not limited by climate: there are lots of areas where it could rampage but does not. The same is true of malaria’s mountain limitations. Just 2 per cent of Africa is too high for malarial mosquitoes now, and where highland areas have become malarial in the past century, such as in Kenya and New Guinea, the cause is human