A recent post at The Daily Climate news website, titled “Op-ed: People need shelter from climate change — their health hangs in the balance,” claims that climate change is making it harder for people to stay safe from the elements and extreme weather, and that federal housing policy is how to fix that problem. This is false on multiple fronts. Climate change is not causing an increase in dangerous conditions for people, and federal policies that involve subsidized housing will not protect homeless people from weather threats.
The authors assert that vice president Kamala Harris’ proposals to expand federal housing policies, including using federal funds to build housing and down payment assistance, “is actually a climate change adaptation policy” because people need shelter from extreme weather. The Daily Climate refers to this summer as the warmest on record and hypes an early start to the Atlantic hurricane season, asserting that “it is growing increasingly difficult to weather the many different catastrophes — a critical threat to health — that climate change is throwing at us.”
Continuing, they write that it is also becoming more difficult for Americans “to take refuge from climate threats at home, as the cost of housing keeps rising.”
They point out correctly that homeless people are more likely to become ill and die from exposure to extreme high temperatures because of a lack of shelter and air conditioning. This, however, is not because of climate change. In fact, none of the things this article asserts as threats to American families because of climate change are genuine.
Regarding the “hottest on record” claims, as always, it depends on what record you look at. As Climate Realism points out here, here, and here, these claims are at best speculative, even though alarmists present them as definite. Prior to satellites, there are almost no records outside of the U.S. and Europe. We are forced to rely on proxy data, which again are location-specific, but even so, many of them indicate that there were several periods in just the last 10,000 years that were warmer than today.
Regarding hurricanes, there was a single early powerful hurricane that came outside the normal window, but the rest of the season has been remarkably quiet. Fearmongering on hurricanes this year, as with many previous above average hurricane season predictions in the past, is falling extremely flat. Global tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is well within normal bounds this year, according to available data.
But the major point of the article is that extreme weather is posing an ever greater threat to an increasing number of people, and especially American families, than before, and this is simply not true.
While it is true that people who are homeless or who don’t have adequate housing and electricity are more susceptible to temperature related illnesses and death, heat and even more so cold, incidences of of people dying from those conditions has declined rapidly around the world over the past hundred plus years of modest warming. It is especially telling that the article focuses on heat, when it is cold that is the real killer. A 2021 Lancet study found that overall deaths due to extreme temperatures have declined in large part due to a massive drop in cold-related deaths. (See figure below)
Likewise, deaths from climate-related disasters in general has also declined. (See figure below)
Ironically, The Daily Climate post complains about the high costs of utility bills, and therefore air conditioning and heating, which are becoming increasingly expensive precisely because of the fossil fuel policies that these same alarmists promote.
Studies have found that Biden’s EPA rules and regulations targeting power plants are expected to cause instability in the electric grid and lead to massive blackouts, because the expectations of the policies are not technologically sound, or even possible, and will only lead to a reduction of power supply. Wind and solar are not dispatchable power, and battery technology is not anywhere near scalable for what is needed. This causes higher prices and less power reliability, which won’t help anyone trying to handle even natural weather extremes. Indeed, real world data suggests that Biden’s energy and climate policies have driven the recent large increases in energy costs across the board, impacting poorer households the most.
Additionally, the idea that federal subsidized housing will help decrease housing prices in general is economically illiterate at best. Policies like low-income housing tax credits have resulted in higher housing costs and fewer choices, and Obama’s Housing First programs have resulted in more homeless people, not fewer.
Handing even more power to government and more subsidized housing will not solve the problem of homelessness. It’s been done for decades and the issue has only become more severe, it has not improved. Fossil fuels for electricity and materials have made human civilizations far more resilient in the face of the fickle nature of the weather, and as long as markets for energy are not limited or constrained by government climate policy, they will continue to do so. All of this is true regardless of climate change, but even on that point, The Daily Climate missed the mark.
