It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about – Telegraph.

This just in – cold temperatures kill far more people than warm temperatures do.  This isn’t news in the sense that it is new information, but it is news in the sense that it is new information to anybody who gets their news from the mainstream media, whose single-minded purpose is to convince you that your driving a car contributes meaningfully to the eventual deaths of millions of people and the eventual extinction of all life on Earth.

Bob Murphy previously pointed out how even by the consensus, mainstream estimates, global warming will provide a net benefit to GDP for the next 50 years.  Of course, the common leftist response to such observations is “Who cares about GDP!  People are dying here because of climate change!”  What about the people dying from the cold?  Do we not care about them?  The simple fact of the matter is that all proposed “solutions” to climate change thus far have required massive state interventions that have resulted in higher costs for energy.  Higher costs for energy means less people get energy, which means more people freeze to death and die.  To briefly recap the article, in England, a heat wave was responsible for 2,000 deaths, while a relatively mild winter was responsible for 24,000 deaths.

The left loves to focus the debate on whether or not the Earth is getting warmer.  On this issue, the numbers are probably on their side (I don’t really know, as I don’t consider it especially relevant or interesting, in and of itself).  The far more interesting question, in my opinion, is “Will a warming planet lead to catastrophic harm?” and the results on this one do not seem conclusive in the slightest.  Most alarmists simply assume it to be true.  But it isn’t true.  It is not a given that the climate of the 18^th century (or whenever you’d like to start where you assume human CO2 emissions did not exist on a large scale) is the absolute perfect climate that must exist throughout all history and could not possibly be improved upon.

At the risk of repeating myself, as of right now, rising temperatures save lives.  That doesn’t single-handedly prove that climate change isn’t happening, isn’t caused by man, or is a good thing.  It’s just a simple fact that it would be nice of the alarmists to recognize.  It would probably increase their ever-declining credibility in the eyes of the general public to admit that there are in fact a few issues that aren’t completely and totally decided in their favor.  But the sad truth is that global warming alarmists don’t actually care about human lives.  They are interested in pursuing an agenda and hyping up a massive coming catastrophe that could only possibly be solved by eliminating individual freedom and expanding the power and reach of government.

Keep this one simple fact in mind the next time some statist is screaming to you about how only government can stop the evils of climate change.  Casually remind them that more people die of cold than die of heat, and that right now, global warming, if it exists, is saving lives and providing a net benefit to humanity.

A far more significant threat than carbon emissions.