Tiesitkö, että 100 vuotta sitten puoli miljoonaa ihmistä vuosittain kuoli huonon sään takia ja viimevuosina sääilmiöihin on kuollut vuosittain 18 000 ihmistä?

Weather-fixated television news would make us all think that disasters are all getting worse. They’re not. Around 1900, around 4.5% of the land area of the world would burn every year. Over the last century, this declined to about 3.2%. In the last two decades, satellites show even further decline — in 2021 just 2.5% burned.

But it’s not only weather disasters that are getting less damaging despite dire predictions. A decade ago, environmentalists loudly declared that Australia’s magnificent Great Barrier Reef was nearly dead, killed by bleaching caused by climate change. The UK Guardian even published an obituary.

This year, scientists revealed that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover seen since records began in 1985.

Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. Polar bears even featured in Al Gore’s terrifying movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the reality is that polar bear numbers have been increasing — from somewhere between five and ten thousand polar bears in the 1960s, up to around 26,000 today. We don’t hear this news. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism.

The deadliest environmental problem, air pollution, was four-times more likely to kill you in 1920 than today, mostly through people in poverty cooking and heating with dung and wood.