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migration and habitat change, not climate change. ‘There is no evidence that climate has played any role in the burgeoning tragedy of this disease at any altitude,’ says Paul Reiter, a malaria expert. Should we not do something to prevent a million people dying of preventable malaria each year now, before worrying about the possibility that global warming might increase that number by 30,000 – at the very most? Likewise, a jump in tickborne disease in eastern Europe around 1990, initially blamed on climate change, turned out to be caused by the fact that people who lost their jobs after the collapse of communism spent more time foraging for mushrooms in the forests.

Many commentators seized on the World Health Organisation’s 2002 estimate that 150,000 people were dying each year as a result of climate change. The calculation assumed that an arbitrary 2.4 per cent of diarrhoea deaths were due to extra warmth breeding extra pathogenic bacteria; that some proportion of malaria deaths were due to extra rainfall breeding extra mosquitoes, and so on. But even if you accept these guesses, the WHO’s own figures showed that climate change was dwarfed as a cause of death by iron deficiency, cholesterol, unsafe sex, tobacco, traffic accidents and other things, not to mention ‘ordinary’ diarrhoea and malaria. Even obesity, according to the same report, was killing more than twice as many people as climate change. Nor was any attempt made to estimate the number of lives saved by carbon emissions – by the provision of electric power to a village where people suffer from ill health due to indoor air pollution from cooking over open fires, say, or the deaths from malnutrition prevented by the higher productivity of agriculture using fertiliser made from natural gas. In 2009 Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum doubled the number of climate deaths to 315,000 a year, but only by ignoring these points, arbitrarily doubling the diarrhoea deaths caused by climate, and adding in ludicrous assumptions about how climate change was responsible for ‘inter-clan fighting in Somalia’, Hurricane Katrina and other disasters. Remember that every year fifty to sixty million people die: even going by the GHF figures less than 1 per cent of those die from climate change.

The global food supply will probably increase if temperature rises by up to 3°C. Not only will the warmth improve yields from cold lands and the rainfall improve yields from some dry lands, but the increased carbon dioxide will itself enhance yields, especially in dry areas. Wheat, for example, grows 15–40 per cent faster in 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide than it does in 295 ppm. (Glasshouses often use air enriched in carbon dioxide to 1,000 ppm to enhance plant growth rates.) This effect, together with greater rainfall and new techniques, means that less habitat will probably be lost to farming in a warmer world. Indeed under the warmest scenario, much land could revert to wilderness, leaving only 5 per cent of the world under the plough in 2100, compared with 11.6 per cent today, allowing more space for wilderness. The richest and warmest version of the future will have the least hunger, and will have ploughed the least extra land to feed itself. These calculations come not from barmy sceptics, but from the IPCC’s lead authors. And this is before taking into account the capacity of human societies to adapt to a changing climate.

The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive. Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger. Keeping climate at 1990