Suddenly there's a lot less talk in climate circles about the pandemic that Sir David Attenborough just complained everyone was talking about instead of climate change. Which is clearly due primarily to the focus on unrest in the United States and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd. But if it were not, it might be due to the fact that, as Indur Goklany put it, based on a new report on the subject, “Death and disease from climate-sensitive diseases and events are small relative to those from all causes, and getting smaller”.

The coronavirus was a bit of a problem for climate alarmists on other grounds as well because of the frightening taste it gave of a world of dramatically reduced consumption including of fossil fuels. As MP Craig Kelly wrote in Australia’s Spectator, those small Pacific islands theoretically sinking beneath the waves and the UN Secretary-General found that without air travel there was no tourism and without tourism there was no money. (Fiji, for instance, gets about 40% of its GDP from tourism which directly or indirectly employs one in six of its people.) And Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute warned that as energy use surged back to pre-quarantine levels in nations emerging from lockdown (like China, which incidentally is still woofing coal in vast quantities), all sorts of behaviour from domestic vacations to social distancing in workplaces would actually increase demand for power, in the latter case for lighting, A/C and heating. The BBC also frets that if commuters avoid public transit gasoline use could surge. It would be nice if they could decide which crisis we’re supposed to panic over, especially since the same people who were against protecting you from disease were also against protecting you from climate catastrophe.

As usual, the bottom line is that every consequence of man-made climate change is bad and every bad thing is a cause or consequence of man-made climate change, which increases the risk of cancer and war, fills fields with weeds, and both results from and causes racism.