I see these plots a fair amount from people on the right. They come from Bjorn Lomborg.

They’re a straw man and a distraction. Global warming is a problem, but it’s one of many. As I’ve written, I recommend Only specify fixing climate and carbon if you want to wreck everything else (forests, biodiversity, rivers, etc) because that happens when you do.

There are other places where our behavior mediated through the environment is killing people by the tens of millions. For example, as I wrote in Why I work on sustainability leadership here and now despite other things I could do instead:

• The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals, reports that nine million people have died per year from breathing polluted air since 2015. More recent reports show that that level hasn’t dropped.
• Plastic: “between 400,000 and 1 million people die each year in low- and middle-income countries because of diseases related to mismanaged waste”.

So these graphs present a small piece of how we deprive others of life, liberty, and property without due process of law or consent. Since I used that language, I should clarify that besides deaths, a government that permits, gains revenue, and gains power for allowing what its Constitution specifies it to protect, will cause its society, in Adam Smith’s words, to “crumble to atoms.”

Just looking at the numbers in the graphs, climate change predictions don’t focus on or predict direct deaths from floods, droughts, and what they list. The big problems from climate change (besides from deforestation, extinctions, pollution, aquifer depletion, and so on) are from things like crop failures, migration, and wars over resources, not what the graphs show.

I’d say the numbers are close to irrelevant except that assessment only makes them seem innocuous. From seeing Lomborg talk about them, I think he knows he’s distracting from other issues and misstating predictions as straw men.

Others debunk these graphs for other reasons. Those criticisms seem reasonable to me, though I consider what I wrote above more serious. Here are some example debunks:

• More misinformation and nonsense on climate from Lomborg and Tol, from someone from the not-very liberal London School of Economics
• Posts downplay impact of climate extremes amid July heat records
• Fact-Checking Climate Articles: Dr. Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal

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Here’s a video debunking the graphs:

• ← Having the number of kids you want is freedom. People, especially government, telling you otherwise is usually coercion.
• Have you thought about sanitation systems? They violate ideals of the left and right. They are socialist *and* imperialist. →