STUDY: Climate Change is Real, But Overblown Alarmist Claims Mislead Canadians and Hide True Costs and Trade-Offs of Climate Policies

Climate Change: A Fact-Based Assessment of Costs, Trade-Offs, and Results

Climate Change: A Fact-Based Assessment of Costs, Trade-Offs, and Results is a new multimedia research and educational project by the Fraser Institute in collaboration with Dr. Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus. It offers Canadians a data-driven analysis of the real risks posed by climate change, and measures the substantial costs and trade-offs that accompany many climate policies.

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The first five essays in the series explore the reality of many of the rationales provided by climate activists for extremist measures to combat climate change. Specifically:

Climate Change Is One Policy Concern Among Many: Canadians, like people everywhere, confront a multitude of pressing challenges: soaring housing costs, strained health care, opioid crises, and economic insecurity amid global turbulence. Climate change is undeniably one issue among many—but after years of apocalyptic warnings that the world is about to end, or that rising temperatures signal imminent, irreversible doom, the public is tuning out.
We Are Hyping Up Rising Heat Deaths, but Ignoring Declining Cold Deaths: While rising temperatures explain a 6.0 per cent increase in heat deaths globally, deaths from cold have declined 40 per cent because of rising temperatures.
No, the Planet Is Not on Fire: In the early 2000s, roughly three percent of the world’s land surface burned annually, but by 2022, only 2.17 per cent burned, and in 2025, it was 2.2 per cent.
Are Natural Disasters Increasing Because of Climate Change?: Once we correct for population increases and increased wealth over time, the data show a clear decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability from natural disasters, with global average mortality down 6.5 times and economic loss rates declining five times from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016.
Despite Alarmist Claims, We’re Actually Growing More Food Than Ever Before: Since 1990, the average number of children dying from malnutrition has declined dramatically from 6.5 million to 2.5 million each year. The World Health Organization expects the decline to continue—even with climate change—with annual deaths expected to halve once again by 2050.

Explore the Climate Change Series