Remind Me Again Why Global Warming is Bad?

Longtime readers already know that warmer temperatures lower morbidity and mortality far more than higher temperatures raise them, inverting any moral case that might be made against anthropogenic global warming... if it existed to any significant degree, which it doesn't. John Tierney notes the same thing in his NYT column last week, which I cited here.

About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.

The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn’t mean that more people die — in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.

Now this today, via the AP:

Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record [since 1978], new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage... will become an open shipping lane... The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal [emphasis added].

And the reason that would be a bad thing is what, exactly?