Let's start with the good news.

All things considered, planet Earth is doing fine.

In fact, humans are doing better than at any other time in history.

Over the last hundred years,

when temperatures have warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit,

global population has increased by 6 billion people,

while global poverty has substantially declined.

And the number of people killed from weather disasters

has decreased by 97% on a per capita basis.

We are obviously not facing an existential crisis.

Anyone who tells you that we are is not paying attention to the historical data.

Instead, they are concerned about what might happen in the future,

based on predictions from inadequate climate models driven by unrealistic assumptions.

I offered this positive diagnosis after a lifetime of study on the issue.

Until recently I was a professor of climate science and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

But it's not all good news. The biggest problem with climate change is not climate change

per se is how we're dealing with it. We're attempting to control the uncontrollable at great cost by urgently eliminating fossil fuels.

We failed to properly place the risks from climate change in context of other challenges the world is facing.

Climate change has become a convenient scapegoat.

As a result, we're neglecting the real causes of these problems.

There are countless examples, but let me give you just one.

Lake Chad in Africa is shrinking.

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