A view from the wilderness which justifies ignorance of the here and now!

So the question begging: Is this the Status Quo view from Academia?
I’m inclined to believe it is, which explains the naivety of the elites which leads us blindly into catastrophe!

Babe the pig springs to mind, as he lol’s his way through the perils of the farm yard, to end his day adorning the fried eggs with bacon for breakfast.

Yeah great. Pity about all the flooded cities and unsurvivable climates thanks to your "CO2 fertilizer".

I’d usually be cheering an article that highlights the progress we have made, and continue to make, in improving the human condition. Globally and in most regions we have recorded improvements in most objective measures of quality of life - rising real GDP per capita, falling rates of absolute poverty, falling infant mortality, rising life expectancy and improving literacy rates, for example. It is especially important to highlight these trends given that the economic systems that produced them are under increasing attack from the anti-development left and Trumpian right-wing economic nationalism.

But this article runs some strange and faulty arguments. The data in world food prices it spruiks do not show improving human welfare – quite the opposite. Real food prices reached a record high in 2022. Since then they have fallen a bit – which the chart fails to capture, as it appears to end in that year – but are still high by historical standards.

Even weirder is the attempt to conflate material progress with the consequences of rising CO2 emissions to try to argue that emissions are good for human welfare because CO2 is plant food and global warming extends to growing season. Really? It is notable that the source of the two graphics here is not provided. If they had provided a source - NASA Earth Observatory - we may have been tempted to view the original article and notice the following comment:

‘ “This greening and associated cooling is beneficial,” said Shilong Piao of Peking University, and lead author of the paper. “But reducing carbon emissions is still needed in order to sustain the habitability of our planet.” '

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146296/global-green-up-slows-warming

I expect this level of selectivity and shonkiness from some of the barrow pushers and spin doctors we get on these pages, but not from academics.