right. You should all be following Michael Shellenberger on Twitter because he's the only person putting any of this in context. Bjorn Lomborg is doing a good job. He focuses a little more on the economic part of it. But Shellenberger does the best job of putting all this stuff in context. So really for the first time you can sort of understand what's going on. So if you read Shellenberger you're going to finally, finally feel like you understand the situation with climate change.

Here's what he says today, fresh tweet. He says most people think global carbon emissions have been rising. I thought that. I mean, I thought it until a week ago or so. I thought they had risen. But new data shows they actually declined over the last decade. I think natural gas is the reason, replacing coal in a lot of places. And then he says Shellenberger says emissions must still decline further. In other words, if we just kept them the same, because the emissions are already kind of high according to climate scientists that are high, and if you just kept them the same or even if it just went down a little bit, it would still be enough to raise the temperature.

But the temperature rise would be more likely based on this new data to be in the two and a half to three centigrade range, far less than the much feared six degree centigrade prediction. So already the official word on climate change — not me making stuff up, not me being a conspiracy theorist, right, just data — says that the warming will happen and it will cause disruption according to them. This is not me talking. But it will be in that two and a half to three degree centigrade range.

Did you know — let's put that in perspective as Michael Shellenberger goes on — he says did you know that warming is better than cooling for the planet, right? Warming would cause a bunch of problems, but cooling would cause a bunch of problems too. And we don't really live in a world where the temperature stays the same like forever. It's either going to go up or down. So it looks like it's going to go up. Is that more good or more bad?

Well, let's talk to a Yale economist, William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. So that's a recent win. He calculated the optimum temperature rise when accounting for both the costs and the benefits. Because rising temperatures also give you more plants, better farming, there's more land to farm, it becomes farmable when it wasn't. So those are the benefits. And then the negatives would be rising sea levels and maybe more storms and stuff.

So when he calculates all the possible bad stuff with all the possible good stuff, he finds that the ideal temperature rise to get the most benefits would be a little bit more than what's predicted to happen. This is the first time I've heard that based on the most current information we have. And then a Yale economist, Nobel Prize winner, calculating the costs and the benefits. It would be better if it got a little warmer. Better economically, better in terms of life quality, better in terms of number of people dying.

We've actually overshot the mark already. Climate change is over. It was the biggest problem in the world like six months ago. Turns out it's just done. Now how confident am I of this? Well, not. If anybody's confident about a long-range economic prediction the