THE rIGHT/lEFT PICKED AN ODD TIME TO TURN AGAINST LIBERALISM:

Indeed, in the 1920s, half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade, the death toll averaged 18,000. This year, just like 2020 and 2021, is tracking below that. Why? Because when people get richer, they get more resilient.

Weather-fixated television news would make us all think that disasters are getting worse. They're not. Around 1900, 4.5 percent of the land area of the world would burn every year. Over the last century, this declined to 3.2 percent. In the previous two decades, satellites have shown further decline -- in 2021, just 2.5 percent burned. This has happened mostly because richer societies prevent fires. Models show that, despite climate change, human adaptation will mean even less burning by the end of the century.

And despite what you may have heard about record-breaking costs from weather disasters (mainly because wealthier populations build more expensive houses along coastlines), damage costs are declining, not increasing, as a percent of GDP. 

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 U.K. Guardian even published an obituary. This year, scientists revealed that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover since records began in 1985. The good-news report got a fraction of the attention.

Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. Polar bears are 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 5,000 and 10,000 in the 1960s to 26,000 today. We don't hear this news. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism.

There are so many bad-news stories that we seldom stop to consider that life is getting much better on the most important indicators.

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