My argument is that fossil fuels and industrial civilization yields positive externalities, including longer lifespan and resilience against the impacts of a changing climate.
I agree. Fossil fuels have definitely had benefits in the past but now we have to ability to continue with those benefits, increase them and remove the negatives.
By raising energy prices, which will soak the poor? Not everyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods, drive $100k electric cars, and live in LEED-certified houses (not cheap here in Seattle!)
If society can afford to not include the huge negative externalities inflicted by fossil fuels in the bill, it gets to show that affordable green energy is largely a question of political will.
If you followed the link, you'd see that the raw data for many of the figures, including figure 1.9/5.1, comes from EM-DAT (http://www.emdat.be), as well as other sources including the World Bank's World Development Indicators (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator), and even Scripps! (http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/merged_ice_core/merged_ice_c...)
Your response to this is to make silly jokes. Nice.