The Bright Side of Global Warming
How climate change could benefit life on earth.
Do you feel like there is no future for humanity? Do you lie awake at night in a panic over global warming? Have you thought about not having children because of climate change?
I felt like that. To alleviate my climate anxiety, I went to work at a solar energy company in the American Midwest, installing through solar panels the carbon dioxide offset equivalent to planting over a million trees. But the more I learned about my field, the more I became convinced that climate change, while real, is one of the biggest psyops of our time—inducing us to live in a state of fear and existential dread while neglecting other environmental and spiritual dangers that threaten humanity.
There is a lot of understandable anxiety surrounding global warming. When one 2019 survey asked Gen Z and Millennials to name the biggest problem facing their generation was, “climate change” took the top spot. It’s indisputable that the earth is warming, and that this warming is significantly influenced by human activity. But how this will affect our society and planet has only been portrayed one way, as apocalyptic—until now.
In mass media, extremely negative forecasts of the future are presented as fact, like maps showing the world becoming a desert by 2100 except for Canada and Russia. This is absurd considering that we can’t even predict the weather a week from now, that scientists have separately found that global warming has explosively greened up to half of the the planet’s vegetated areas, and that many climate predictions, such as 75% of the Arctic ice cap disappearing by 2016 or sea levels rising 20 feet by now, simply aren’t anywhere close to coming true.
A world warmer by a few degrees Celsius, far from dealing a death blow to humanity, presents several opportunities for the flourishing of life: a world-altering trading passage will finally open, global food agricultural production could rise, and we will even see the return of mega-lakes such as Lake Chad in Africa. This certainly depends on the degree of warming: for example, a 2.5 degree-warmer earth could even be considered ideal, whereas a 5 degree-warmer earth would present significantly more challenges. Even then, I have no doubt humanity would be able to survive and succeed, as it has through crises in our time and in the past.
This is an unpopular opinion. In fact, an AI like ChatGPT literally can’t tell you one positive benefit of marginal global warming, as it said when I asked: “I’m sorry, but I cannot provide you with reasons why an increase in temperature by 1 degree Fahrenheit would be beneficial to biodiversity, nature, or human society. Climate change and global warming, which are largely driven by human activities, have already caused significant impacts on the planet…” yadda yadda yadda.
There will be negative effects of global warming. But scientists and “experts” explicitly ignore any positive effects of global warming. Dissident climatologists like Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have stated this is because entire academic careers, professional recognition, and media spotlights are linked to one’s degree of alarmism over climate change. (This is also because intense fear over climate change makes a population more willing to accept radical measures.)
Well, that’s why we have Countere. Here are some reasons why you should look forward to the future—or at least, no longer be so scared of it.
The Northwest Passage Will Open
The first major benefit of global warming is that the legendary Northwest Passage will finally open. For all of recorded history, the only ocean route connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic curled around the tip of South America, making such journeys either impossible or extremely long. Although that changed with the opening of the Panama Canal, the Northwest Passage, which weaves through Canada’s islands and exits at either Alaska or Greenland, promises an even more direct journey.
The historical problem was that the Northwest Passage was impassable due to ice—but that is all changing. The passage became completely ice-free for the first time in the summer of 2007. Global warming would finally wrest this route from its frozen lockbox, going so far as to halve international shipping times and inject a dose of vitality similar to the effects of the Panama Canal into the world economy.
Millions of Square Miles Will Become Livable
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global warming would warm winters more than summers and lead to increase in temperatures at the extremities of the earth more than at the equator. Vast tracts of land in Alaska, Siberia, and Canada will thaw and become truly habitable for the first time in human history. The quality of the soil and water in these places, completely untouched by the Age of Agriculture, is inconceivable to the modern human. While the loss of low-lying islands will undoubtedly be a huge tragedy, significantly more livable land will open up to both humans and animals in a warmer world.
Even at the worst ends of our climate projections—a planet which is 4 or 5 degrees Celsius hotter—large portions of Antarctica will become pleasant and farmable. This raises all sorts of interesting questions: whether a “Scramble for Antarctica” will begin among the world’s great powers, if there will be major wars fought in Antarctica, or if an Antarctican civilization will rise in the far-future.
Worldwide Food Production Will Increase
Moderate global warming has positive ramifications for food production. In many regions, spring will start earlier and growing seasons will be longer. A hotter climate would increase evaporation from the oceans and lead to more rainfall globally. Also, studies show that at both higher temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, crops and other plants grow better and are more drought-tolerant.
Economist Bjørn Lomborg has estimated that global warming would boost cereal production in richer countries by 4-14 percent, while cutting them in poorer countries by 6-7 percent. The official IPCC assessment is that “a few degrees of projected warming will lead to general increases in temperate crop yields, with some regional variation.” A 2007 report by the US Department of Agriculture found that global warming was likely to have a small positive effect on world food production, and therefore agricultural prices will possibly decrease.
The Earth Will Become Greener
Change in worldwide leaf surface from 1982 to 2015. Green means more vegetation, while purple indicates losses. Source: Boston University
Though popular visions of global warming see the earth transforming into an inhospitable desert, climate change has actually been responsible for an explosion of greenery on the planet. Researchers at Boston University have shown that over the last three decades, 31% of the global vegetated area of the planet has become significantly greener, with just 3% becoming less green—an increase they attribute primarily to increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Other studies, such as this one cited by NASA, show dramatic growth in up to 50% of Earth’s vegetated areas since the 1980s. Even the IPCC predicts a worldwide increase in global timber supply from forestry growth due to global warming.
Many argue that climate change will harm the world’s poorest and disproportionately affect places like Africa. What they don’t tell you is that the decline of famines in central Africa in recent years is partly due to the increased rainfall caused by global warming. In fact, the entire Sahel region of Africa has shown a huge increase in green vegetation since the 1970s. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projects that due to global warming, the Sahel could receive 50% more rain by 2040.
Lake Mega-Chad Will Return
How Africa might look in a world that is 2 degrees Celsius warmer, with Lake Mega-Chad in the center.
Instead of solely eradicating land, global warming will cause the world’s geography to shift, like an internally moving temple in a Zelda game, returning features to the planet only known from ancient memory. As increased rains wallop the African continent, Lake Mega-Chad, once the biggest freshwater lake on planet earth until possibly Roman times, will swell into a new center of vitality on the African continent. Apart from being epic and based, Mega-Chad and other emergent lakes will provide fresh water for local communities and new habitats for plants and animals.
Some Countries Will Become Wealthier
Far from only dealing negative damage to humanity, climate change creates a new equilibrium, in which some nations experience losses and other nations experience benefits. The United States is one country that will benefit from at least moderate warming. The American public vastly prefers warm weather to cold, and both death rates and healthcare costs are lower in warmer states. In 1998, economist Thomas Moore estimated that the net benefits to the United States of a warmer climate could be as high as 1 percent of the GDP.
On the flip side, spending Brobdingnagian amounts of money or remaking our societies to mitigate climate change appears to be massively ineffective. The European Union’s climate policies are estimated to cost £1.8 trillion over the course of the century, just to lower the temperature by about 0.005˚C—an undetectable amount to a normal thermometer. The consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit. That money could be better spent investing in the world’s poor, cleaning the oceans of micro-plastics, or creating technology to adapt to global warming, to name a few options.
Less People Might Die From Natural Disasters
Cold kills more people than heat. Countries like Britain and Greece see mortality rates rise by as much as 18 per cent each winter. In general, warmer temperatures create more favorable conditions for human populations to grow. In the last 100 years, an unprecedented period of warming, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98%, according to a report by scholar Indur Goklany.
In fact, a 2013 IPCC report says that while regional trends in cyclone frequency have been observed in the North Atlantic since the 1970s, “current data sets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century and it remains uncertain whether any reported long-term increases in tropical cyclone frequency are robust.” The paper goes on to say that “consistent with the majority of studies performed for higher degrees of global warming, the total number of tropical cyclones is projected to decrease under global warming, whilst the most intense (categories 4 and 5) cyclones are projected to occur more frequently.” While we will definitely experience calamities as the temperature rises, they happen frequently at our current temperature, happened frequently in the past, and would arguably be more deadly if the Earth experienced a cooldown.
The Next Ice Age Will be Avoided
Title screen from a 1978 TV episode narrated by Leonard Nimoy speculating that a new ice age was approaching.
This is probably the most memed benefit of global warming, but worth mentioning regardless: up until essentially the 70s, humanity was deeply concerned about an impending ice age. Natural drivers seemed to be pushing our planet towards a devastating cooling period. If the Earth was getting cooler rather than warmer, it would likely be more catastrophic for humanity, with more droughts, more famine, more food insecurity, more extinctions, and more natural disasters. Bear in mind that modern “civilization” only emerged because an ice age ended roughly 11,500 years ago. (At least these are things an AI will acknowledge.)
Climate change is not a new phenomenon. The Earth has been much hotter and colder before. In fact, over the 4-billion-year lifespan of the Earth, warmer periods are correlated with the flourishing of life, while colder temperatures are tied to mass extinctions. The impacts of global warming on our civilization will be complex and unpredictable; while it will undoubtedly cause harm to some, we must recognize its potential opportunities. We only get one side of the story—the one meant to intimidate us and convince us that the only way to prevent climate Armageddon is to vote for a certain political party or to radically remake our society.
Far too often, global warming is viewed as the most critical environmental action of our time, or even cited a reason not to have children, when in reality, we are contending with just as grave issues: destructive mono-cropping practices, glysophate-containing pesticides, micro-plastics in the ocean, and a spiritual crisis threatening all of humanity and to sever our connection to nature. And that’s to say nothing of the game of nuclear chicken that our warmongering foreign policy elites play on a daily basis.
You are being lied to about climate change. Global warming does not mean the end of the world. It means a new world with new challenges. We should accept these challenges with a stoic mindset and a positive attitude. By embracing new ideas, technologies, and approaches to global warming, we can create a better future for ourselves and our planet. In the meantime, I encourage active environmentalism such as picking up trash, working in renewable energy, or exploring your local woods.
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