Best of Right Opinion

• Tony Perkins: Trump Makes His Move on Jerusalem
• Cal Thomas: Memo to Jared Kushner
• Jeff Jacoby: The Blessings of Climate Change
• Ed Feulner: The President’s Christmas Gift to America
• Paul Kengor: Remembering Fidel Castro’s Death

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Jeff Jacoby: “While climate change brings negatives, it brings positives too. Polar melting may cause dislocation for those who live in low-lying coastal areas, but it will also lead to safe commercial shipping in formerly inhospitable northern seas, and to economic opportunity for high-latitude residents… Shifts in climate are like shifts in the economy: They invariably spell good news for some and bad news for others. Falling interest rates are a blessing to homebuyers but a curse to savers; a strong dollar helps consumers buying imports but hinders exporters selling abroad. In the same way, changes in climate generate winners and losers. Some of global warming’s effects will be disagreeable; others will be very welcome. Worldwide, cold kills 20 times as many people as heat, so a warming planet will save lives. A plethora of data confirms the greater deadliness of cold weather, even in countries with very different climate patterns. One study of mortality rates, for example, found that deaths from cold outnumbered those from heat by a ratio of 33-to-2 in Australia, and 61-to-3 in Britain. Of 2,000 weather-related deaths in America tallied by the Centers for Disease Control, 63 percent were caused by excessive cold vs. 31 percent caused by excessive heat. … Global warming will bring gains as well as losses, upsides no less than downsides. Climate science isn’t a black-and-white morality tale. Our climate discourse shouldn’t be either.”