First ask what it means

and then how anyone could know

"Climate change will cause more extreme weather events and rising sea levels globally." ("Global Strategic Trends Through 2055")

It is a common claim. Before asking if it is true one should first ask what it means. Warming implies more extreme highs, fewer extreme lows, a pattern that can be seen in the IPCC reports. How do you define what qualifies as an extreme to let you determine if the increase in extreme heat events is more or less than the decrease in extreme cold?

Some people, seeing the claim, may assume that all or almost all extreme events will become more common, but that is not the case, at least if one accepts the IPCC projections. Greenhouse warming tends to warm cold times and places by more than it warms hot, so if we define “extreme” as more than one degree above (heat) or below (cold) the previous record temperature for that time and place, the number of extreme cold events probably goes down by more than the number of extreme hot goes up, reducing the total. Other definitions might change that. According to the IPCC projections, climate change will make tropical cyclones¹ somewhat fewer but somewhat more extreme. If you count any tropical cyclone as an extreme weather event that means there will be fewer extreme events, if you count only high end ones, more.

A second thing to ask, when confronted with an asserted factoid, is how, if it is true, anyone would know. Sometimes there is an answer that has not occurred to you, possibly an interesting one,² but often there is not.

“Healthcare Is A Human Right”

If not being murdered is a human right, someone who attempts murder may be stopped by force, someone who succeeds may be punished. Applying that to healthcare, someone who fails to provide it, a doctor or nurse who refuses to treat someone in need of healthcare, may be forced to do so, one who has failed to do so may be punished. That implies that health care workers may be compelled to work for others, whether or not they are willing. I doubt that most people who use the slogan intend that implication but what else can it mean? If it is only that healthcare is a good thing, something governments should be willing to spend money on, why call it a right? There are lots of good things.

For another example of an ambiguous use of “rights,” consider the claim that everyone has a right to marry. Taken literally, that would mean that, if no woman is willing to marry me, one may be compelled to. Almost nobody believes that. Someone who makes the claim is adding an invisible qualification; the right is not to get married but to marry anyone willing to marry you. Most would add the qualification “of marriageable age,” some would, and some would not, add “of the opposite sex.”

If we interpret the right to healthcare similarly, it becomes the right to receive medical care from anyone willing to provide it to you. That is unobjectionable but not very interesting, although one can imagine special cases, such as sex change surgery or prescribing opioids as pain medication, where some would disagree.

A further problem with the slogan is the lack of quantification. A right to receive some healthcare is satisfied with an aspirin or a band aid. A right to receive any healthcare that benefits you costs more than even a rich country can pay.

The Freest Country in the World

Before arguing about whether Switzerland is freer than Estonia or the US you have to decide what freer means. Whether abortion is legal is less important to an 80 year old man or a celibate woman than to a sexually active woman or, in the other direction, a believing Catholic who views abortion as murder and considers the failure to ban it as a reduction in the freedom of the unborn. Whether it is permitted to argue that the Koran is uncreate, has existed forever, a live controversy in ninth century Islam, is of little importance to a modern Christian or atheist. Laws against heroin are of little importance to me, since I have no interest in using heroin, although not of no interest; the enforcement of drug laws against other people imposes cost on me.

A Living Wage

It sounds as though it means something — a wage sufficient to live on. That ought to mean a wage below which you would die but that is not how the term is usually used.

Someone reasonably ingenious and energetic living in a warm climate might be able to keep himself alive with no income at all, given the existence of food banks, dinners for the poor, and other sources of free food; some homeless people probably do. Even for someone without those advantages, enough income to stay alive is much less than people who use the term imagine. The estimate of economic historians is that the average real income of the world was about one twentieth of the current US average through most of history, which means that a sizable fraction of all the people who ever lived did it on the equivalent of less than two thousand dollars a year. Of course, even if someone on that income could stay alive in the modern US, his life would probably be shorter than the lives most modern Americans live.

As were the lives of most people in the past.

If we are looking for an objective definition and abandon the idea of taking the term literally as enough income not to die of hunger or exposure, it is tempting to interpret it as enough so that your life expectancy is not reduced by your low income. That, however, is more than the US average income, since there are multiple ways in which additional income could increase life expectancy, even if only slightly, beyond the income most of us live on. A chauffeur expert in safe driving and the safest car money could buy. A week every year in an elite medical facility being tested for everything that could possibly go wrong.

What people actually mean by a living wage, as best I can tell, is a wage at which they can imagine themselves living a tolerable life. That varies a lot depending both on one’s standard of tolerable and how wide a range of alternatives one considers, whether it includes lentils instead of meat, sharing a single room with four roommates, buying only used clothing.³

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1

In the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, and eastern North Pacific, the term hurricane is used. The same type of disturbance in the Northwest Pacific is called a typhoon. Meanwhile, in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, the generic term tropical cyclone is used, regardless of the strength of the wind associated with the weather system. (NOAA page)

2. An online archery enthusiast responded to a claim about how fast a medieval archer could shoot with skepticism; they didn’t have stop watches so how could they know? The answer is a text in a Mameluke archery manual which described how many arrows a trained archer should be able to loose at a target a given distance away before the first one hit.

3. I calculated an estimate of the cost of a very minimal lifestyle as part of an old blog post, concluded that “it looks as though a serious estimate of the cost of “basic needs” in the U.S. at present, taking the term seriously as describing what it takes to stay alive, would come to something around $500/year.” That was eleven years ago, so about $660/year now, allowing for inflation since then.