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I selected this article because it clashes with my claim and appears to be based on facts. To me, the article is saying that of all the positive and negative effects of climate change, the net outcome is positive. The author goes through various ways in which climate change is supposedly beneficial and backs his claims up with various statistics.

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Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don't know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.

There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today - and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends.

To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century - if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it's a long way off.

Now Prof Tol has a new paper, published as a chapter in a new book, called How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, which is edited by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and was reviewed by a group of leading economists. In this paper he casts his gaze backwards to the last century. He concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century.

You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.

Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.

It will still be 1.2 per cent around 2050 and will not turn negative until around 2080. In short, my children will be very old before global warming stops benefiting the world. Note that if the world continues to grow at 3 per cent a year, then the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defences that the Dutch have today.

The chief benefits of global warming include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity. It is a little-known fact that winter deaths exceed summer deaths - not just in countries like Britain but also those with very warm summers, including Greece. Both Britain and Greece see mortality rates rise by 18 per cent each winter. Especially cold winters cause a rise in heart failures far greater than the rise in deaths during heatwaves.

Cold, not the heat, is the biggest killer. For the last decade, Brits have been dying from the cold at the average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter. Compare this to the heatwave ten years ago, which claimed 15,000 lives in France and just 2,000 in Britain. In the ten years since, there has been no summer death spike at all. Excess winter deaths hit the poor harder than the rich for the obvious reason: they cannot afford heating. And it is not just those at risk who benefit from moderate warming. Global warming has so far cut heating bills more than it has raised cooling bills. If it resumes after its current 17-year hiatus, and if the energy efficiency of our homes improves, then at some point the cost of cooling probably will exceed the cost of heating - probably from about 2035, Prof Tol estimates.

The greatest benefit from climate change comes not from temperature change but from carbon dioxide itself. It is not pollution, but the raw material from which plants make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats. As it is an extremely rare trace gas in the air - less than 0.04 per cent of the air on average - plants struggle to absorb enough of it. On a windless, sunny day, a field of corn can suck half the carbon dioxide out of the air. Commercial greenhouse operators therefore pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to raise plant growth rates.

The increase in average carbon dioxide levels over the past century, from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent of the air, has had a measurable impact on plant growth rates. It is responsible for a startling change in the amount of greenery on the planet. As Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has documented, using three decades of satellite data, 31 per cent of the global vegetated area of the planet has become greener and just 3 per cent has become less green. This translates into a 14 per cent increase in productivity of ecosystems and has been observed in all vegetation types.

Dr Randall Donohue and colleagues of the CSIRO Land and Water department in Australia also analysed satellite data and found greening to be clearly attributable in part to the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect. Greening is especially pronounced in dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa, where satellites show a big increase in green vegetation since the 1970s.

It is often argued that global warming will hurt the world's poorest hardest. What is seldom heard is that the decline of famines in the Sahel in recent years is partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to more carbon dioxide itself: more greenery for goats to eat means more greenery left over for gazelles, so entire ecosystems have benefited.

Even polar bears are thriving so far, though this is mainly because of the cessation of hunting. None the less, it's worth noting that the three years with the lowest polar bear cub survival in the western Hudson Bay (1974, 1984 and 1992) were the years when the sea ice was too thick for ringed seals to appear in good numbers in spring. Bears need broken ice.

Well yes, you may argue, but what about all the weather disasters caused by climate change? Entirely mythical - so far. The latest IPCC report is admirably frank about this, reporting 'no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century ... lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale ... low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms'.

In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer: witness the remarkable success of cyclone warnings in India last week. That's the thing about climate change - we will probably pocket the benefits and mitigate at least some of the harm by adapting. For example, experts now agree that malaria will continue its rapid worldwide decline whatever the climate does.

Yet cherry-picking the bad news remains rife. A remarkable example of this was the IPCC's last report in 2007, which said that global warming would cause 'hundreds of millions of people [to be] exposed to increased water stress' under four different scenarios of future warming. It cited a study, which had also counted numbers of people at reduced risk of water stress - and in each case that number was higher. The IPCC simply omitted the positive numbers.

Why does this matter? Even if climate change does produce slightly more welfare for the next 70 years, why take the risk that it will do great harm thereafter? There is one obvious reason: climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations - all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change - have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world's grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.

As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, the European Union will pay £165 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for the next 87 years. Britain's climate policies - subsidising windmills, wood-burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles and all the rest - is due to cost us £1.8 trillion over the course of this century. In exchange for that Brobdingnagian sum, we hope to lower the air temperature by about 0.005˚C - which will be undetectable by normal thermometers. The accepted consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit.

So we are doing real harm now to impede a change that will produce net benefits for 70 years. That's like having radiotherapy because you are feeling too well. I just don't share the certainty of so many in the green establishment that it's worth it. It may be, but it may not.
Disclosure: by virtue of owning shares and land, I have some degree of interests in all almost all forms of energy generation: coal, wood, oil and gas, wind (reluctantly), nuclear, even biofuels, demand for which drives up wheat prices. I could probably make more money out of enthusiastically endorsing green energy than opposing it. So the argument presented here is not special pleading, just honest curiosity.

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Why climate change is good for the world

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Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this.

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I selected this article because it was published in the New York Times, it has personal experience in it, and is related to struggling mentally with climate change. To me, this article is saying that climate change is a difficult challenge to cope with, and to get past it, we must all do our part. The author goes into the details of how she has been affected by climate change and how she sees the world affected, she then applies the wisdom of experts and those close to her to the situation.

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Credit... Illustration by Sam Whitney; images by John Finney, Micha Pawlitzki, and ugurhan, via Getty Images

Dr. Pipher is a clinical psychologist and the author, most recently, of "A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence."

In the morning, I sit with a cup of coffee and organize myself for the day. I watch the sunrise over the lake by my home, and I listen to the sounds of the sparrows and wrens. Orioles come and go from our grape jelly feeder, and each one makes me smile. I breathe deeply for 10 breaths to ground myself in my body. I remind myself of my many blessings and set my attitude to positive. My old calico, Glessie, sits by my side. Even though I am ragged with grief at the news of the world, I am ready to face whatever happens next.

Over the decades, I've acquired skills for building a good day. Especially in the summer, when I can swim, work in my garden, attend outdoor concerts and read in my hammock, life is fun. I have work I enjoy - sponsoring an Afghan family, participating in an environmental group and writing.

Of course, I am leading a double life. Underneath my ordinary good life, I am in despair for the world. Some days, the news is such that I need all my inner strength to avoid exhaustion, anxiety and depression. I rarely discuss this despair. My friends don't, either. We all feel the same. We don't know what to say that is positive. So we keep our conversations to our gardens, our families, books and movies and our work on local projects. We don't want to make one another feel hopeless and helpless.

Many of us feel we are walking through sludge. This strange inertia comes from the continuing pandemic, a world at war and the mass shootings of shoppers, worshipers and schoolchildren. In addition, our country and our planet are rapidly changing in ways that are profoundly disturbing. We live in a time of groundlessness when we can reasonably predict no further than dinnertime. The pandemic was a crash course in that lesson.

As we are pummeled with daily traumatic information, more and more of us shut down emotionally. I can hear the flatness in the newscasters' voices, see the stress in my friends' faces and sense it in the tension of the workers at my sister's nursing home. We are not apathetic; we are overwhelmed. Our symptoms resemble those of combat fatigue.

The most informed and compassionate among us are the most vulnerable to despair. We understand the brokenness and the sorrow in our own and faraway communities. We are also fully aware of all the things we cannot change. Staying focused on the light in the world is hard work.

Of course, America isn't eastern Ukraine, Afghanistan or Yemen, but nonetheless, we are a lonely, frightened people who have lost hope in the future. Any psychologist knows that is a dangerous place to be. We risk losing our ability to think clearly or experience life completely. We lose our vitality and sense of direction. We cannot help others. We cannot fix anything.

In times like these, we need world-class coping skills just to stay fully awake, enjoy our lives and be of service to others. My life lessons come from many places, but I'll focus on three sources - my maternal grandmother, the study of psychology and the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.

My grandmother raised five children on a ranch in eastern Colorado during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. She was an educated woman, but she lived a life of poverty and hard work. When she and my grandfather were in their 60s, they sold their small ranch and moved into a small stucco house in town. They planted a big garden, gooseberry bushes and a peach orchard. They rarely left town, and my grandmother died a widow with less than a thousand dollars to her name. Her life was simple, but her mind was not.

She was my first mentor for building inner resources and developing integrity. She urged me to "be the person you want to live with every day of your life."

As Grandmother and I stemmed green beans or did dishes, we would discuss the moral questions of the day, and with my grandmother, there were always moral questions. I loved these deep conversations with her, and not surprisingly, I adopted many of her ways of thinking.

She was a model of forbearance, always cheerful and curious. Even on her deathbed, she asked about my high school classes and the books I was reading. And the last time I saw her, she told me her life goal had been "to leave the world a better place."

Psychology teaches that the best way to cope with suffering is to face it. We must feel it in our bodies, explore its meaning and then muster our inner resources to move forward. We find ways to balance our despair with joy. We reach out to our friends and family. We find a way to help another person. Action is always an antidote to despair.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and Zen master, witnessed great suffering in Vietnam during both the French and the American wars. To help himself and his followers deal with their anger, fear and heartbreak, he developed mindfulness practices. He taught his followers to breathe deeply and slowly and to anchor themselves in the present moment. As Thich Nhat Hanh would say: "Present moment. Beautiful moment."

Yet even as he emphasized meditation, he created the Youth for Social Service to help his war-torn country. At great risk, his group helped the homeless, set up medical units and rebuilt schools. For this, he was banished from Vietnam. He founded a school of Buddhism called engaged Buddhism, and from his home in Plum Village, France, he worked for peace and a sustainable planet. His deepest teaching concerned our interconnection with all of life. We all share the same consciousness as the frightened schoolchild; the hungry, homeless refugee; the polar bears; and the ravaged forests.

Most of us cannot be great heroes. However, we all have the capacity to be ordinary heroes. We may not be able to stop the global use of plastics, but we can work with local environmental groups. We cannot eliminate prejudice or nuclear weapons. However, we can deliver Meals on Wheels or repair bikes for giveaway programs.

Only with heightened coping skills will we be able to rise above our shell shock and be who we want to be. All of us have the capacity to do this, and when we do, we will increase our own happiness and be of greater service to those around us. Lao-Tse expresses this point in his poem that begins, "If there is to be peace in the world/There must be peace in the nations," and ends with "If there is to be peace in the home/There must be peace in the heart."

Last night I sat on my porch and watched a storm in the southeastern sky. Bolt after bolt of cloud-to-cloud lightning illuminated the towering thunderheads. An owl flew over en route to his favorite pine tree. Frogs croaked. Dogs barked in the distance. As I watched this scene, I thought: Life is so terrible and beautiful at the same time. Do I have the capacity to hold it all in my heart?

Mary Pipher is a clinical psychologist and the author, most recently, of "A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence."

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Opinion | How I Build a Good Day When I'm Full of Despair at the World

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Dr. Pipher is a clinical psychologist and the author, most recently, of "A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence." In the morning, I sit with a cup of coffee and organize myself for the day. I watch the sunrise over the lake by my home, and I listen to the sounds of the sparrows and wrens.

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Formal Source: Peer Reviewed Journal Article

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Formal Source: Peer Reviewed Journal Article

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I selected this article because it is a peer reviewed journal found in a database, uses a survey, and has solid evidence to back up my claim. To me, this article is saying that climate change has a negative effect on mental health, both directly and indirectly, and for all demographics. The authors of the article conduct several very thorough surveys and review the responses to the survey and analyze their significance.

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For my individual source, I decided to Interview my Brother because he has experienced both climate change events around California and observed attitudes towards climate change around the world. I wish he had spoken more on the mental health aspect of the issue. My main takeaways from the interview are that climate change is a difficult event to cope with, climate change is a unifying force in a way, and everyone must do their part to fight climate change effectively.

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Formal Source: Web-Based Scholarly Article

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Formal Source: Web-Based Scholarly Article

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I selected this article because it was written by credible authors, is based on many other detailed articles, and has substantial evidence supporting my claim. To me, the article is saying that climate change has a very wide range of negative effects on mental health. The article delves into the very specific effects on mental health of different events occurring due to climate change.

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The Impact of Climate Change on Mental Health: A Systematic Descriptive Review

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Climate change is one of the great challenges of our time. The consequences of climate change on exposed biological subjects, as well as on vulnerable societies, are a concern for the entire scientific community. Rising temperatures, heat waves, floods, ...

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I selected this video because it supports my claim. To me, Wray is saying that climate change is an urgent issue and mental health needs to be more carefully considered in the conversation. She focuses on people considering whether or not to have children in the age of climate change.

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Britt Wray: How climate change affects your mental health

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"For all that's ever been said about climate change, we haven't heard nearly enough about the psychological impacts of living in a warming world," says science writer Britt Wray. In this quick talk, she explores how climate change is threatening our well-being -- mental, social and spiritual -- and offers a starting point for what we can do about it.

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I chose this article because it includes possible means of coping with climate change. To me, the author is saying that climate anxiety is a very real thing and should not be taken lightly. Collier discusses what climate anxiety is, how common it is, and how to manage it.

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If climate change keeps you up at night, here's how to cope - Harvard Health

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Climate anxiety is distress related to worries about how the effects of climate change. It's more likely to affect adolescents and young adults, leading to chronic stress, depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, and more. What can you do to manage climate anxiety in yourself or a young person in ...