evidence: The planet has been warming for more than a century. So far, the world has done a decent job at adapting to this change. The yields for many crops have doubled or even quadruped since 1960. Over the past century, the number of deaths per million people from weather and climate catastrophes have dropped by 97%. Losses from global weather disasters as a percent of GDP have declined over the past 30 years. [...] We should work to minimize our impact on the planet, which isn’t simple for a planet with 8 billion inhabitants. We should work to minimize air and water pollution. From time immemorial, humans have adapted to climate change. Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events. [...] Humans do have the ability to solve future crises of this kind. However, they also have the capacity to make things much worse by oversimplifying complex environmental issues and politicizing the science, which can lead to maladaptation and poor policy choices. In 50 years time, we may be looking back on the UN climate policies, and this so-called green economy, as using chemotherapy to try to cure a head cold, all the while ignoring more serious diseases. In other words, the climate crisis narrative gets in the way of real solutions to our societal and environmental problems.