Cambridge University is promoting autocracy in the name of Climate Change – Do you want to fight it?

A recent article published by Cambridge University Press titled Political legitimacy, authoritarianism and climate change is raising serious and disturbing questions about the role of academia in our national political debate on climate change.

The article was written by Ross Mittiga, who self-described as “associate professor of political theory at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, specializing in climate ethics. He also describes himself as an “environmentalist, vegan and occasional flycatcher.”

Mittiga’s article clearly argues that society must prioritize climate action over democratic principles and adopt an authoritarian government if society does not take political action on climate change. Or, in the words of the political left: “my way or the highway.”

This is worrisome because it completely ignores the will of the people to self-govern, in favor of an authoritarian approach to solving what Mittiag calls the “climate crisis”.

The main points of the article in the abstract:

Is authoritarian power ever justifiable? Contemporary political theory literature — largely conceptualizing democratic legitimacy or fundamental rights — does not seem to suggest that. However, I argue that there is another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy that concerns government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, the maintenance of democracy and rights is often compatible with ensuring safety, in emergency situations conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do. arise. A prominent example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, in which severe restrictions on free movement and association have become legal government engineering. Climate change poses a major threat to public safety. Thus, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While worrisome, this shows the political importance of climate action. For if we want to avoid legitimizing authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved in such ways.

The problem with Mittiga’s paper is that he doesn’t make a single reference or shred the evidence that a “climate crisis” actually exists. It seems that he was simply assuming that it was based on the facts of how often political discussions have adopted the term over the years.

If the “climate crisis” does indeed exist, there will be human impact data to support the claim. However, Mittiga offered no such evidence.

However, this lack of evidence hasn’t stopped him from making this bold claim:

“A striking example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, in which severe restrictions on free movement and association have become legal government engineering. Climate change poses a serious threat to public safety. ”

We can examine the “major threat to public safety” that the “climate crisis” is said to pose.

If the global “climate crisis” is causing public safety to suffer, we will certainly see an increase in the number of deaths globally related to events that are attributed to climate. To determine if this is true, we turn to data gathered by the most reliable global database of events that generate mortality, International Disaster Database.

This database covers all types of disasters, including meteorology, hydrology, geology, and volcanism.

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg has been tracking climate-related disasters from a database since 1920. This includes floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires and extreme temperatures. His conclusions from the data were clear and simple: fewer and fewer people are dying from climate-related natural disasters today.

As seen in the figure, the trend is clear.

Lomborg write:

Over the past hundred years, the number of annual climate-related deaths has decreased by more than 96%. During the 1920s, the number of deaths from climate-related disasters averaged 485,000 per year. Over the past decade, 2010-2019, an average of 18,362 deaths per year, or 96.2% less.

This is even true in 2021 – despite reports of a breathless climate, the death toll that year was almost 99% less than it did a hundred years ago.

Why is this constantly not being reported?

In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the death toll is even lower at 14,885 – 97% lower than the 1920s average.

For 2021, now complete, we see an even lower total death toll of 6,134 deaths or a drop since the 1920s of 98.7%.

The media has covered many deadly weather and climate related disasters in 2021 – dead people US/Canada Heat Dome and Heatwave, big forest fire in the western United States, December 2021 outbreak of tornadoes in the United States, Large-scale flooding in Europe, and Valentine’s Day winter storm. All of these events and related deaths are included in disaster databases and graphs.

And there are other disasters. Many people in the West have never seen press coverage of the catastrophic flooding in India during the monsoon, killing more than a thousand people. Or Flash floods in Afghanistan killed dozens of people. Or the storms have come China, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, killing a total of 776 people. The database also has more than 200 other disasters in 2021.

The database is known to be biased as more heat-related deaths are reported, but recent science from the prestigious medical journal Fingertips reported that globally, deaths from cold are more than deaths from heat 9:1, suggesting that “global warming” is not as much of a problem for human mortality as we have been told.

The number of reported weather disaster events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting and better accessibility i.e. 24/7/365 CNN effect. Just because such events are more commonly reported today does not directly lead to more events leading to more deaths. In fact, the opposite is observed in the data.

Illustrated by the mortality figures depicted in the figure, it is indisputable that the number of deaths related to disasters has decreased and has done significantly. This is because our wealthier, more technologically advanced and resilient societies are better able to warn of such events, protect their citizens, and minimize damage and deaths. . In fact, recently peer-reviewed science shows a “clear downward trend in both human and economic vulnerabilities.”

So I asked, what is the so-called “climate crisis” that is so firmly described by Mittiga in Cambridge University Press?

According to the disaster database, there isn’t any “climate crisis”. In fact, over the 40+ years of modest warming, during which we’ve been told that global warming or “climate change” will worsen human conditions, mortality rates mortality was significantly improved.

Sad, and terrifying, as exemplified by Mittiga in Cambridge University Press The green socialist left is increasingly accepting autocracy in the form of authoritarian power to act on their views on climate change. But clearly, real-world data doesn’t support their point of view let alone their call to action.