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reThe Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, calls on “everyone” to “stop the attack on the planet.” The corona pandemic and climate change “have brought us to a threshold” where there would be an opportunity to combat climate change, Guterres writes in a statement to the global community. Call on heads of state to declare a “climate emergency”.
Guterres shows that the United Nations (UN) has gone astray in the fight against climate change. His analysis, which he had circulated in the media around the world, is in fact incorrect and dangerous.
At the UN climate conference in Madrid in December 2019, António Guterres called on delegates that the consequences of climate change “have already been felt in the form of frequent extreme climate catastrophes.” Also in his new statement he invokes an increase in “fires, floods, droughts and apocalyptic storms”, which the data does not show. On the contrary: extreme weather conditions have become less dangerous despite global warming.
Furthermore, Guterres ignores the existential problems of billions of people by making climate change the focus of the global community through an emergency lawsuit. And the UN Secretary-General ignores the fact that a large part of humanity has long suffered from the problems that climate change is supposed to cause in the first place. Guterres looks at the world with the attitude of the rich West, as does the climate movement “Fridays for Future”, whose “Future” reveals that it ignores the current climate problems of poor countries, where climate disasters and food shortages have always been much more dangerous than in, even without man-made climate change. rich states.
More important than climate change
The United Nations has set 17 goals to make the world a better place, including the fight against poverty and economic growth. A UN global survey in 2012 showed that other things were more important to people than climate change: food security, energy, access to clean water, health, education, the fight against poverty. Guterres suggests that climate change would inevitably exacerbate all of these problems, dangerous misdirection.
To be sure, global warming carries considerable, if partly ambiguous, risks for humanity, so the fight against climate change has rightly been at the top of the agenda of the United Nations, which holds regular climate conferences since 1992. The states of the world agreed to the Paris Agreement in 2015. Despite the unprecedented agreement, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. However, this is not due, as is often claimed, to the political influence of fossil fuel companies, but mainly to the energy needs of emerging countries in Asia and Africa.
The billions of people in China and India are finally bringing their people more prosperity, thanks in particular to climate-damaging fossil fuels like coal and oil. However, according to the UN, one billion people still do not have access to electricity. Worse still: 821 million people are starving and the corona pandemic has increased their number. Why is there no nutritional emergency call? The fact that the UN secretary general described the pandemic as an “unexpected opportunity for a new beginning” in his statement must be seen as arrogant cynicism.
The fight against climate change requires fundamental interventions in society, the desired conversion of energy supply shakes the essence of industrialized nations and leads to conflicting goals with other fundamental social problems, such as food shortages and energy shortages. India, China and other emerging countries will not want to deprive their people of a better life to produce fewer emissions, as requested by the UN Secretary General.
No climate emergency
Guterres makes it easy for him: renewable energy would create 18 million new jobs by 2030, he says in his statement. But Guterres is only referring to the International Labor Organization (ILO), a UN agency that is responsible for improving working conditions, not an authority on economics.
With the evocation of supposedly increasing climatic disasters, Guterres wants to emphasize the exceptional position of climate change. However, an influence of global warming on the global damage caused by climate disasters has not yet been identified; this was also the case in the most recent UN climate report. You cannot speak of a “climate emergency”.
Last year, researchers from the journal “The Lancet” specified the positive development based on data from Munich Re reinsurance: the world is getting richer, cities are growing and, at the same time, climate disasters are destroying a smaller proportion, the study showed. The trend applies to rich countries, more clearly to poor ones. Prosperity reduces susceptibility to extreme weather conditions because, for example, levees and warning systems can be built. The economic rebound puts you on the defensive.
The two environmental researchers Giuseppe Formetta and Luc Feyen recently reported in the journal “Global Environmental Change” that development was particularly positive in poor countries. In Bangladesh, for example, which is often considered the country most affected by climate change, far fewer people die in climate disasters than in the past despite rapid population growth. The same is true around the world: “We have found that the number of deaths from storm surge has decreased since the 1960s.” two climate researchers wrote in the “Environmental Research Letters” in 2018. That’s impressive because the world’s population has roughly doubled over time and increased six-fold since 1900.
Less dangerous extreme climates
Despite the multiplication of the population, the statistics clearly show that far fewer people die due to extreme weather than decades ago, even though the world population has multiplied. Formetta and Feyen reported details: With the exception of heat waves, all types of weather disasters had less of an effect than before. Be it storms, floods of all kinds, cold or drought, the number of deaths in relation to the population affected by extreme weather has decreased. Despite global warming.
The result underscores that the international community must also rely on technological progress in its fight against climate change, which can only be achieved through prosperity that requires energy. Humanity is not defenseless in the face of climate change.
It would be time for top UN officials to abandon the seemingly colonialist attitude of climate reductionism to explain the world’s problems with climate change alone. Protecting the climate as an overarching goal can have inhuman consequences if it causes people to be deprived of energy or food.
“We already have more than enough ecological catastrophism with no consequences,” says the green pioneer Ralf Fucks the declaration of the head of the UN, Guterres. Instead, what is needed are “encouraging concepts and strategies for a green industrial revolution.” However, emergency rhetoric like that used by the UN Secretary General is misleading.
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