Tom Nelson

Climate and history: since UN Secretary General is talking about supersized El Niño， let's revisit the most extreme El Niño event in the last 800 years. The multi-year drought famine in the late 1870s. The worst hit countries of the 1870s Great Droughts were India, China, Egypt, Morocco, Ethiopia, southern Africa, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. In China alone， a staggering estimation of 9.5-13 million people perished because of starvation. Global deaths were estimated to be around 50 million. As a serious student about climate， I don't buy the net zero narrative because I know climate history including cases like this. The world in late 1870s was almost net zero. Green house gas emissions caused by fossil fuel burning was less than 2% of today's value， the CO2 concentration was around 290 ppm. Yet， all these didn't prevent the worst weather disaster in the last 800 years. Climate has always been changing， and nature sometimes can be brutal， simply because of natural variations of the climate. Net zero today will not prevent similar natural variance from happening again. Industrialization and innovation are the best and most important measures to build civilizational resilience, regardless whether climate change is driven by natural variance or man made. Yet net zero frenzy is driving industrialized countries towards de-industrialization (the UK and Germany are the most salient examples), and preventing least developed countries from industrializing. They are exactly the wrong measures to deal with climate change. Long form article with scientific references is linked in reply.