While half a million people starve each year we feed 6.5% of the world grain to cars. Image credit: "Corn for cars", From Viv Forbes. Click on the image to read the carbonsense post.
After I wrote Wasting money on climate change betrays sick in The Weekend Australian, Fiona Armstrong of the Climate and Health Alliance replied with Climate action has clear public health dividend. Here’s why she’s missing the main point (saving lives).
Fiona Armstrong claims that there are substantial health gains possible from climate action, and waved the banner of scientific integrity and “fact”. Unfortunately for Armstrong, the mortal facts from countries all over the world show that more people die in colder weather. Any statistic that suggests climate change is killing people only survives as long as we ignore the number of people saved.
Medical studies rarely show such unanimity. The results stand whether you look at seasonal or daily temperatures, extremes or averages, cold locations versus warm ones, or the trend in flood deaths and droughts. No matter where you live, whether you ail in your heart, or your lungs: You’re less likely to die in warmer weather.
If we could control the planet’s thermostat, medical groups would surely suggest we ought warm things up.
Armstrong cites a NGO report that guesstimates 300,000 people die each year of climate change, but she doesn’t mention that most of those unnamed people were not struck down by floods, droughts, fires or heatstroke. Instead 95% of them were killed by starvation, diarrhoea or malaria, and a certain percentage of the global death tally in each condition was arbitrarily filed under “climate change”. Curiously in 2003 the death toll was “calculated” as 150,000 assumed deaths, but by 2009 the assigned percentages were recalculated to get 300,000 deaths pa with a tap of the keyboard. Prof Roger Pielke Jnr summed up the 2009 report as “a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics.”.
First do no harm?
Speaking of starvation, while nearly half a million people die from a lack of food each year, some 6.5% of the worlds grains, and 8% of the vegetable oils are now fed to cars instead of people. Arguably action against climate change is a net killer, and we’d save people by doing nothing at all to stop carbon dioxide emissions.
The big perspective
Clearly, if we want to save lives, medical research on our vascular system would save more people than buying solar panels in Sydney and hoping they’ll protect people in Cairns from nasty storms.
If Armstrong and the Climate and Health Action (CAHA) were more concerned about health rather than climate, they would know that the largest killer around the world is cardiovascular disease, which is responsible for some 17 million deaths every year. That’s nearly 30% of all deaths, and 500 times larger than the number who die from extreme weather events (which cause about 0.06%). Clearly, if we want to save lives, medical research on our vascular system would save more people than buying solar panels in Sydney and hoping they’ll protect people in Cairns from nasty storms.
The statistics on cardiovascular disease make it clear that cold weather is deadly. In Russia, ischemic stroke is 32% more likely on colder days; in Norway, cardiovascular deaths are 15% higher in winter months; in Israel, cardiovascular deaths were 50% higher in winter, even though Israeli winters are not exactly cold. Likewise in California heart disease mortality in 220,000 deaths was 33% higher in winter. A study in Brazil found that deaths were 2.6% more likely for every degree the temperature fell below 20°C. Need I go on?
Respiratory diseases kill one hundreds times as many people as extreme weather events, and are not called “colds” for nothing. A Norwegian study found that respiratory deaths were fully 47% more likely in winter. There were 5 major population contractions in China in the last 1000 years and all of them occurred in periods with a cold climate.
What about all the disasters this summer?
When it comes to droughts and floods, the news is bad for the Climate Commission but good for the human race. A report published in the American Journal of Physicians and Surgeons by Indur Goklany in 2009 (so not including the last summer) points out that deaths due to droughts peaked in the 1920s and have since declined by a whopping 99%. Likewise, deaths due to floods peaked in the 1930s and have fallen by 98%. The rate per capita figures are even more impressive. Eighty percent of man made emissions of CO2 have been produced since 1940, and deaths from floods and droughts is lower than ever.
And when it comes to Malaria, the IPCC assumes that it will be worse as the world warms, but history tells us otherwise. One of the largest malaria outbreaks was in Siberia early last century, and then there is that awkward point that malaria deaths in England, of all places, were more common, during — by crikey — the little ice age 300 years ago. Paul Reiter reminds us that the entire area under the British Parliamentary Houses was once a notorious malarial swamp.
Possibly the most disturbing aspect of cold related deaths is not just that they kill so many more people than heat related deaths, but that they increase deaths for up to a month after the cold spell. When a heatwave strikes, the death rate increases, but then it’s often followed by lower death rates. Researchers surmise that while cold weather weakens otherwise healthy people, heat waves speed up the deaths of people who were close to dying anyway.
Atmospheric CO2 is handy for growing crops, in the same sense that breathing is handy for your health. In order to feed billions of people without destroying more forests to create farmland, there is no better yield multiplier than CO2. Indeed it’s so good, it is pumped into commercial greenhouses to enhance yields.
It’s like a form of pagan witchcraft to pretend that adding windfarms is the best way to reduce malaria.
And while Armstrong points out that the coal industry has health issues, she forgets that windfarms have their own depressing toll. (Even installing pink batts can be deadly!) Coal provides 80% of our electricity. Sure we can give it up, but every alternative costs at least twice as much. Coal mining is dangerous, but the obvious answer is to make mining safer, not to slap on a carbon tax.
Likewise if we are concerned about deaths (and who isn’t?) the answer is to research the causes and look for cures. It’s like a form of pagan witchcraft to pretend that adding windfarms is the best way to reduce malaria.
The Climate and Health Alliance is clearly not that interested in health per se. They’ve declared their top priority and don’t even bother to disguise their real aim: “1/ Health: Advocate for a strong emissions reduction scheme…”. A health advocacy group would surely list “longer lives” or “less disease”, but not CAHA. They judge their success not by whether they save anyone, but by whether they get legislation about a trace gas passed. CAHA is just another climate propaganda group.
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FURTHER INFORMATION
Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), June 2009. NIPCC website.
Deaths and Death Rates from Extreme Weather Events: 1900-2008. Indur Golkany, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 14 (4): 102-09 (2009).
Quote from Pielke: “Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the [GHF] forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. Dr. Pielke said that “climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention.” But the report, he said, “will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.”
See also from Pielke: “However, I cannot express how strongly I feel that this report has done a disservice to both issues. It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.”
GHF’s report, titled “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis,”.
My original article on health funding versus solar: The wrong choice kills us either way (my version of The Australian article.)
H/t to Bulldust, Marc Hendrickx and others for the good links and information.
It’s not bad? There’s a mix of positive and negative results to any change, including global warming.
But is an increase in temperatures more positive than negative for health? Perhaps not – here’s some pluses and minuses. Heatwaves seem to have higher mortalities than cold snaps (easier to put on a warmer coat than find an air conditioner), for example.
20
The climate/mortality rate argument may have some merit when considering individual countries, but on a global basis it’s nonsense. Like a lot of the warmist input it’s simply manipulated statistics.
Here in the Northern regions, the deaths of seniors is far higher in the depths of Winter than at any other time of the year. They don’t die from hypothermia (necessarily) but rather from natural causes, especially the flu. Are the flu and climate related? There’s a PhD thesis in there if anyone’s interested…
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
20
I knew you’d have a blast with that one Jo … nice job, even if it was almost too easy to pull apart 🙂 Crickey should read Crikey BTW.
I sent JtI at The Australian still hasn’t posted my comment from yesterday so I sent him a short comment mentioning his cowardly ways … for shame. I even checked my blog registration email (which I rarely check) and there is no response there either.
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Saying we need to do more research on our vascular system to save lives, due to cardiovascular disease, is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. We already know a healthy diet and lifestyle will do the trick (in most cases).
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Good letter Jo. I agree that “primum non nocere” (first,do no harm)is the best counter argument to the “precautionary principle”
Many people I talk to are confused about the science and the “cure”. The alarmists use the precautionary principle to gain their support i.e. “we are right, however just in case we are wrong, the measures we recommend will do no harm, and may still be good for you”.
Having come back from working in Vietnam, away from the tourist areas, it is eye opening to see the profound difference in the standard of living between those who have affordable electricity, and those who do not. To the government’s credit, they are implementing an electrification scheme as did the USA in the 1930’s. They see this as vital to ease the misery of those living in abject poverty.
My issue with the Greens is not that they want to stop coal generated electricity, few people in the broad spectrum of the climate change debate would disagree, as coal is a finite resource. Why I think the policies of Greens are not just wrong, but potentially dangerous, is their timetable coupled with an insistence that grid electricity generation be replaced by staggeringly expensive, unreliable, and indeed unavailable “renewable” energy will cause considerable suffering to the most vulnerable.
Ironically, we have an “ally” of sorts in George Monbiot. He is now enlightened enough to see that the cessation of fossil fuel generated electricity is impossible without nuclear. He has even made himself familiar of the vast differences in safety, economics, waste management, and proliferation concerns comparing Generation 4 / Thorium reactors to 60+ year out date early generation reactors.
But yes, enlightening people not just of the futility, but the harm of the Green/Labor policies is a good way to go.
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Do they?
“Somewhere in the range of 310,000 and 480,000 people out of the 2.4 million population are believed to have perished during the extreme weather conditions which swept across the country between 1739 and 1741, according to a new book entitled “Arctic Ireland”.” Irish Central
See also this Jo Nova/Dennis T. Avery page.
.
This happened right at the end of one of the the NEGATIVE TEMPERATURE DIVERGENCES that the warmists have shown to the world here in Fig 2
Phenomenological solar signature in 400 years of reconstructed
Northern Hemisphere temperature record N. Scafetta and B. J. West
No doubt the preceding famines were caused by the CO2 levels getting to low for crops to grow properly.
We should make sure we do not leave a world with too low CO2 levels to feed our grandchildren next time the sun causes cooling.
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[…] Evidence suggests global warming is good for our health […]
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Yet another example of propaganda acknowledging only one side of complementary effects because the other side contradicts their cause. Being gullible enough to fall for this kind of obvious deception is a trait I see in all warmists and few skeptics.
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Hello All, This is similar to the latest from our Government and the greens leader Bob Brown. They would like to reduce the coal fired power stations by replacing them with LNG so to entice them to do that means a Carbon Tax of at least $40.00 per tonne.
We haven’t started the Carbon tax yet and so far it has risen from approximately $25.00 to $40.00 per tonne.
So instead of keeping the reserves for transport, should they be needed, (and I think they will) the intend to make power production even more expensive.
This is surely saving the planet !!
Gross stupidity on the largets scale in my opinion.
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We should remember that if there is a good supply of CHEAP electricty, then either extreme is easily combatted. It is when electritty becomes either TOO EXPENSIVE or UNRELIABLE that death rates climb rapidly. The big issue is that this is what all these so-called “alternative” (to coal for energy) give us, a supply that is far more expensive, and far less robust.
The HYSTERICAL RESPONSE causing the implementation of these alternative energy supplies will undoubtedly lead to increased death rates in both hot and cold weather.
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KR at #1
You must be aware that winter always puts huge pressure on our hospitals? Cold means viruses and airborne bacteria survive longer to infect the next victim. The mortality in winter in much higher than in summer. Putting on a warmer coat does not stop viruses.
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AndyG55 #8
I think the key to this argument is adaption.
We need to prevent disease and pestulence but puting a price on Cabon Dioxide and believeing we can change the climate is mass Hysteria and directs ourefforts away from the problem. It would be wise to prepare for both circumstances but no we want to change the weather.
What nonsense !
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KR @ #1
“But is an increase in temperatures more positive than negative for health? Perhaps not – here’s some pluses and minuses”.
KR @ #75 (previous thread)
“I’m willing to change my opinions given sufficient evidence. Are you?”
So let’s see if I have this right KR. You read an article that quotes example after example of how things like malaria, floods and droughts are NOT climate-dependent, and in reply you post a link to a crank-cultist website that quotes examples of malaria, floods and droughts as examples of the negative effects of global warming.
And pretty-much EVERY example quoted in the article can be refuted – in fact most of them HAVE been refuted – by subsequent observable fact
And through it all you piously claim you’re “willing to change (your) opinion”.
I strongly suggest you actually READ the material at the links you post, especially if you are going to use septical science as a source.
Admit it, KR, you are a CAGW cultist; a fully-fledged member of the Goracle Church of Mann-Made Catastrophic Climate Change, and nothing short of another Ice Age will deflect your belief.
And even then you’d probably try and argue that the cooling was caused by warming.
Oh sorry, what am I thinking – you’ve already used that one to explain away last NH winter and the record snow-falls.
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To various…
From HPA 2007:
• Winter deaths will continue to decline as the climate warms.
…
• Increased exposure to sunshine and to ultraviolet light will lead to an increase in skin cancers.
• The UK population seems to be adapting to increasingly warm conditions
Quite positive, although the UK is a limited area, and even fairly significant warming will not convert the UK into a tropical environment.
However, From Ramón 2007:
Mortality increases associated with both extreme cold (2-day cumulative increase 1.59% (95% CI 0.56 to 2.63)) and extreme heat (5.74% (95% CI 3.38 to 8.15)) were found…
The authors confirmed in a large sample of cities that both cold and hot temperatures increase mortality risk. These findings suggest that increases in heat-related mortality due to global warming are unlikely to be compensated for by decreases in cold-related mortality and that population acclimatisation to heat is still incomplete.
Considerably less enthusiastic (in fact, negative), and covers a much greater area than just the UK. This seems to contradict the statement in this post that “You’re less likely to die in warmer weather.”
I personally do not think the evidence for disease vectors is clear – certainly growth zones are moving (plants and animals), but I haven’t seen a convincing case for major disease changes.
From Rogers 2006:
At high CO2 levels, plants showed greater biomass and reproductive effort compared with those in ambient CO2 but only for later cohorts. In the early cohort, pollen production was similar under ambient and high CO2, but in the middle and late cohorts, high CO2 increased pollen production by 32% and 55%, respectively, compared with ambient CO2 levels.
Higher pollen counts, I believe we’ll survive. There’s always Claritin.
—
So – the only study on heat versus cold deaths I’ve seen (Ramón 2007) covering multiple locales, multiple local climates, indicates that increased deaths from warmth are >3.5x the decreased deaths from cold.
Can anyone point me to a study that contradicts this? Preferably with reasonable sampling of multiple local climates, so it’s not thrown off by a limited area and limited temperature ranges? I would love to see it if so…
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Well done Jo,
The whole reason for implementing a carbon tax is becoming murkier and murkier and it seems as if carbon tax advocates will stoop very, very low to get it done.
We do actually live in a democracy here and everyone is free to donate to the implementation of renewable energy or to the reduction of CO2 if they so desire. It is not necessary to have a unliteral tax placed on CO2 emissions by a centralised Govt.
It is also underhand and disingenious to claim that it is ‘our greatest challenge’ or that it is for ‘the greater global good’.
I still giggle at Barnaby Joyce’s quip:
‘If taxes cooled the planet, the place would be an icebox by now’!
I cannot work out how Australia implementing a carbon tax will have any significant impact on global CO2 emissions and I am still confused how there is an argument out there, gaining traction, that claims that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant.
Since when?
I think we have far greater challenges and I was taught in science at school and at University that we are carbon life forms and we generate CO2 every time we exhale. I also learnt that plants love the stuff and will grow better and yield better if they have enough of it. They give us back oxygen when they do that.
It wasn’t that long ago when I left University, has the science changed?
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How is it humans can survive and adapt to temperatures of -40Deg C or thereabouts and up to 40Deg C and yet a 1 deg change in either direction is gonna kill us all.
The truth is if we had cheaper power we could supply more air conditioner units and heaters for the people who really need the assistance..Instead we would rather try and change the weather, this is still a lame duck IMO.
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KR @ #14
“. . . increased deaths from warmth are >3.5x the decreased deaths from cold”, and “Can anyone point me to a study that contradicts this?”
You really, really really don’t get it, do you KR?
The entire history of the human race has largely been about surviving or fleeing the cold and moving to and/or prospering in the warm, yet you’re not going to have a bar of it until/unless somebody with acceptable “qualifications” produces a peer-reviewed, published paper to that effect.
Try reading a few history books for information to contradict the absurd claim that “. . . increased deaths from warmth are >3.5x the decreased deaths from cold”.
Unlike anything to do with “climate science” the claims in history books are readily falsifiable and/or verifiable.
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KR @ #14
Let put it to you another way KR.
Every year in winter tens of millions of people travel from places like Great Britain, Russia, France, Canada and the like, to holiday in places like Spain, Greece, Florida and Mexico.
I am not aware of too many people spending their summer holidays traveling to places like Alaska or Antarctica to “escape the heat”.
Now, why do you think that is?
Heck, in the NH even the BIRDS migrate south for the winter.
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Heck, in the NH even the BIRDS migrate south for the winter!
ROTFL!!!
Good one!
That’s as good as Barnaby’s quip!
Also love your comment Bob Massey:
How is it humans can survive and adapt to temperatures of -40Deg C or thereabouts and up to 40Deg C and yet a 1 deg change in either direction is gonna kill us all.
Good one!
Not only is your qualifying comment about cheap power highly relevant, we should also remember that throughout history mankind has been extraordinarily good at converting inhospitable environments into much nicer places for everyone, including fauna and flora.
It is ridiculous to keep trying to argue that we have to stop impacting our environment. That would have to negate our whole history right from the time we were living in caves!
The most natural thing and constant thing mankind has done is convert environment and raw materials to improve lifestyle and longevity.
Have we always got it right?
OF COURSE NOT!
In the big picture however, we really haven’t done a bad job. We’re usually pretty good at fixing up the mistakes as well when governments keep their hands OUT OF OUR POCKETS!
Centralised bureaucratic solutions are historically centralised, bureaucratic, economic disasters!
An Australian tax on CO2 emissions has no more hope of changing global climate than I would if I
stopped breathing!
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If you are simplistic about it, an increase in temperature in Norway is beneficial, while an increase in temperature in the tropics is not.
I am not sure that a warmer world will be better or worse on average. I am sure that the transition to a warmer world will kill a lot of people – through crop failures, mass migrations, floods etc. We will adjust, and plant our crops in the places which work, and after a while the migrations will stop, and cities which become too prone to flooding will move. But it ain’t gonna be easy.
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John Brookes- just saying it don’tmake it so. What mechanisms do you propose for crop failures in a warmer world, not grossly overshadowed by crop diversions to biofuels? for mass migrations? (is this the 50 gazillion climate refugees already wandering your virtual world?) Floods in the world where it never rains because of global warming? (oh sorry, that is so last year)?
“after a while the migrations will stop”?? You haven’t established yet that after a while the migrations will start- let’s get over that hurdle first.
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John Brookes @ #20
“If you are simplistic about it, an increase in temperature in Norway is beneficial, while an increase in temperature in the tropics is not”.
Then I suppose it’s just as well that all the alleged “global warming” we are supposed to have had occurred in the Arctic Region.
Conversely, the TROPICAL tropospheric hot spot seems to remain as elusive as ever.
And forgive me for laboring the point but historically “crop failures, mass migrations, floods etc” have almost always occurred in periods of cooler, not warmer climate.
But I guess a few thousand years of recorded history is no match for a post-modern science computer model.
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gnome @ #21
“after a while the migrations will stop”?? You haven’t established yet that after a while the migrations will start- let’s get over that hurdle first.
Priceless – thanks
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After reading both the “BackRadiation” posts until my eyes bled, I read comments on this post from KR trying to show that ‘warmer’ is worse than ‘cooler’.
What sort of warmer KR?
Isn’t global warming supposed to happen MAINLY at the poles? NOBODY FUCK!NG LIVES THERE.
Isn’t global warming supposed to happen mainly in winter? THAT’S A GOOD THING, LESS COLD WEATHER DEATHS, LONGER GROWING SEASONS.
Isn’t global warming supposed to mainly increase minimum temperatures? NOBODY FRIGGING DIED OF HEAT STROKE AT 5AM IN THE MORNING
Don’t most “backradiation” proponents agree that BR hardly increases daily highs, but reduces heat loss overnight increasing daily lows at a given time of day? AN EXTRA POOFTEENTH OF A DEGREE AT 2 PM AIN’T GUNNA KILL ANYBODY
I have read many of your comments here and at Skeptical KR, you are obviously an intelligent person and you argue your cases quite well. So why do you feel the need to argue against such a lay down misere’ as health and AGW?
@John Brookes
Transition to a warmer world? WTF? Do you really think an increase of 0.7DegC in 150 years has made transition difficult for humans critters and vegetation?
We make a transition from single digit Ts in the morning to 30s in the arvo with no trouble. An extra poofteenth at 2pm at the height of summer in 2100 will only make a difference to advocates, those with agendas, lemmings and various Richard Craniums. Which one are you?
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debbie –
it’s murkier than u imagine. i’ve mentioned here previously that it was no coincidence the UK Govt appointed the Admiral who visited Australia:
Wikipedia: Neil Morisetti
Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti CB is a senior British Royal Navy officer who is currently the United Kingdom’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy…
After initial training at Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth he held shore postings and attended the University of East Anglia and graduated with a Bachelor of Science…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Morisetti
i’ve also long felt the MSM has been hiding the military’s interest in CAGW/carbon (dioxide) and felt the game will really be up when they have to bring it to the greenie and antiwar CAGW believers’ attention.
now we have liberal jules boykoff heaping praise on the military in the Guardian!!! wonders never cease:
20 May: Guardian: Jules Boykoff: US military goes to war with climate sceptics
Political action on climate change may be mired in Congress, but one arm of government at least is acting: the Pentagon
Five years later feels like a timewarp, with the political promise of 2006 suspended in a molasses haze. 2011 brought a fresh congressional crop content to ignore what the rest of the world accepts: the IPCC’s scientific consensus on climate change…
Enter what some might view as a counterintuitive counterweight: US military brass. A recent report, “A National Strategic Narrative” (pdf), written by two special assistants to chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mike Mullen, argued, “We must recognise that security means more than defence.” Part of this entails pressing past “a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability)”. They went on to assert climate change is “already shaping a ‘new normal’ in our strategic environment”
For years, in fact, high-level national security officials both inside the Pentagon and in thinktank land have been acknowledging climate change is for real and that we need to take action to preserve and enhance US national security interests…
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been holding shambolic hearings on climate change, should invite climate-minded national security gurus to testify. Perhaps they can lob some reality into the ideological fortress of denial before whipsaw climate volatility becomes our everyday reality.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/20/climate-change-climate-change-scepticism
Wikipedia: Jules Boykoff: Boykoff has appeared on various radio shows, including Alternative Radio, Living on Earth, CounterSpin, The Thom Hartmann Program, and Media Matters with Bob McChesney to discuss the intersection of politics, the media, and global warming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Boykoff
Julyes Boykoff’s brother, Maxwell:
Environmental Change Institute, Oxford
Until the summer of 2009, Maxwell T. Boykoff was a Research Fellow in the Environmental Change Institute as well as a Department Lecturer in the School of Geography and the Environment. From 2006-2008, Max was a James Martin 21st Century Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Through this fellowship, he was involved in both the Climate Change Research Cluster and the Environmental Governance and Climate Policy groups. He has also been affiliated with Christ Church College as a Postdoctoral Fellow and with the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment as an Associate Research Fellow.
Max is now an Assistant Professor in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he teaches in the Environmental Studies program…
Max’s research has been mentioned in a range of outlets such as Science, Nature, the Guardian, the New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Grist, Utne Reader, La Rázon (Spain), China Meteorological Administration, and (US) National Public Radio. In addition, research Max co-authored with Jules Boykoff (Pacific University) appeared in the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth…
.. Max is co-editing special issue for Antipode and book with Dr Emily Boyd (Leeds University) and Dr Peter Newell (University of East Anglia) exploring “What is “new” about the carbon economy?” (for 2011 publication). In 2009, Max co-edited a special issue of “Theorising the Carbon Economy” with Dr. Sam Randalls (University College London), Dr. Adam Bumpus (University of British Columbia), Prof. Diana Liverman (University of Arizona) in Environment and Planning A…
he edited a volume called The Politics of Climate Change: A Survey (Routledge/Europa) (now in paperback). This volume gathered together scholars from many disciplines – such as Professor Maria Carmen Lemos (University of Michigan), Dr Heike Schroeder (Oxford University), Dr Chuks Okereke (Oxford University), and the late Professor Stephen Schneider (Stanford University) – to examine pivotal elements shaping attitudes, knowledge, and actions on climate change.
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/boykoffmax.php
this is also why Turnbull is still in the game and the Coalition still have a policy to commodify carbon dioxide while pretending it’s all about saving the earth!
as the US military and others are busily bombing country after country on any and no pretext, it is a tad ironic, as some of the comments in the Guardian have noticed.
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KR @#14
try reading Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg. Like you he has faith in IPCC’s publications but unlike you he recommends that we focus our resources on worthwhile projects concluding CO2 tax and ETS are useless mechanisms to control climate and a waste of resources and effort. In his book he also discusses frequently the huge death rate associated with cold weather versus the smaller death rate due to warmer weather. It really depends where you live. If you live in colder countries, warmer means warmer than the freezing temperatures you already experience. So a few degrees warmer isn’t going to make much difference really! Finally, there is NO empirical scientific evidence, that’s none!, that human CO2 emissions will cause runaway catastrophic global warming. So your argument is mute, because the Earth is not warming out of control contrary to what the tax hungry socialist governments, carbon traders and communist greenies would have you believe. Your persistence in supporting outrageous claims by climate alarmists, which are not supported by science, isn’t helping intelligent Australians fight a government which is destroying our country.
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Yes!
What Baa Humbug said!
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‘Removing our subsidies for fossil fuels (roughly $12bn a year) would free up considerably more funds for health and medical care and research, and deliver improved health outcomes.
There are many health benefits associated with actions to reduce emissions that will improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.
Shifting away from coal as a fuel source for electricity will improve air quality and reduce related deaths from lung cancer and heart disease.’
What is the NGO paper cited please? Additionally what has been the benefit to the health of remote/rural Indigenous peoples with the recent injection of $ 6 billion + ?
Mining IS a remote and rural industry, here in Australia and elsewhere. Considerable $ are invested by these industries to maintain, promote and assist better health of their workers.
And it is likely that MINING provides considerable resources to the remote hospitals and infrastructure, as does the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) for ALL residents/workers. Both govt services and industry are required to deliver to the end user, these days with IT and Networking, outcomes in productivity and employment (legislated in employment bargaining!) and service reporting. Read any ABS report!
Though I am happy to stand corrected, having worked with TELSTRA and the vast benefits accorded to a non-productive remote sector existing on welfare and govt enterprise which resulted in little outcome or benefit. Quite the converse. And unfortunately legislated through the Australian Communication and Media Authority (as it is now) to peoples (tax paying or not) in remote areas of Australia.
http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_2445
The astonishing account of disparity in mortality ACCOUNTED AS AGE OF DEATH/BY SELF-IDENTIFIED RACE here in Australia is attributed to health status, rather than homicide and accident. This statistic is directly attributed to rural/remote regions where age at death is significantly less to that of all other Australians.
Presumably ICD-10 coding has predominated, based on the doctors summation of their care and/or the pathology record which codes disease at discharge and this is reported in the public statistics. Rather than coding at intake, based on narrative and observation. This temporal anomaly stands in stark contrast to the studies in developing nations where mothers have been approached and provided accurate descriptors of disease in the absence of govt collections and datasets.
Yet Australian statistics on mortality, premised on racial dichotomy (death at 55yrs vs 75yrs) implicate mining. The employ or study in environment/ecology or anthropology has been the case for more than 30 years in remote/rural, the geographical area and behaviour of mining [and agricultural] companies has been favoured as contrbitory to death rates. Yet the majority of remote residents DO NOT work, in these industries.
While I can understand, I do not agree with the ill-directed, simplistic argument based on causation attributed to CAGW aka mining and the health status of peoples [workers], cited by the city types here in Australia. I do not see such a direct correlation between aggregated rural deaths and mines. At least the improvements, based on good science, over the last century led by scientists and mining companies have seen vast improvements in workers survival and health status.
And these same areas of disparity, measured as high mortality (and morbidity)- but really the gated Aboriginal communities, do not have the coverage or use the benefits of electricity as other Australians – fossil or otherwise.
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Put more simply- a fallacious argument.
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Baa Humbug @24:
Actually a whole bunch of people live at the South Pole, mainly US scientists. They had to build new quarters because the old one eventually became buried under the ice. The new one is on stilts so it can be raised as necessary.
No-one lives at the North Pole though.
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Heavy metals, aerosols (particulate), sewerage in rivers and water storage, raw sewerage dumped in our seas …
This is pollution. These are not good for the health of nmankind, animals or plants. Limited or unreliable electricity supply is also demonstrably not good for human health.
The farcial part of AGW evangelism is that it (conveniently) steals the dollars and media limelight from issues of substance.
It is time for the non-science of those seeking a cause to move on. JB, MB and others of the ilk. Find yourself a cause that is known to help humanity and the planet.
10
Jo – O/T I suppose, except in the general context of Australian climate bollocks – but was I right in hearing our Opposition Leader Manque, M Turnbull esq., defend the ETS vs the CO2 tax on the grounds “that it could easily be reversed if someone disproved AGW”? If so, could it be, mirabile dictu, that his lawyerly cunning has sniffed the wind, and determined that a man with aspirations to a long public life might just possibly not in the long run find it to his political advantage to be irreversibly associated with CAGW, and might at this point be well-advised to start crafting a means of graceful escape?
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In general, global warming would be good for our health but the global warming movement isn’t. That just kills defenceless people.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/the-big-green-killing-machine-what-is-vad/
Pointman
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But
Fiona Armstrong and her ilk could profit greatly from following that advice. Expecting no harm before the exaggeration and lies are dealt with is like trying to part the Red Sea — you have to be Moses.
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As I (sadly) half expected, nobody has posted any actual evidence contradicting the studies I noted in @14.
Not everyone lives in the Great White North, folks, not everyone will benefit from a few degrees higher temperatures. 3.5X more deaths with heat than decreased deaths from cold? As data across many locations?
That’s science, people – data collected from a reasonable sampling of environments. And actual measurements (not opinions, not anecdotal evidence) show increased deaths with warming.
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Perhaps we are all just bored by your supercilious tone and inability to express yourself clearly.
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KR go to your library and get out Lomborg’s Cool It , then read his links to all the REAL info from the countries involved.
Cold waves kill people by a factor of at least 7 to 1 compared to heat waves.
There is no dispute about this in the official records and he has all the info, charts and graphs to prove it to you.
He gives many examples from govt research in different parts of the world.
If the world warms there will be more people saved from an earlier death because of it and the numbers are substantial.
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KR,
First show me where the temperature has warmed enough to notice.
And in case you haven’t noticed, extreme temperatures in either direction are quite dangerous to the ill prepared. Our own Mojave Desert, just a couple of hours drive away is more than hot enough in the summer to do you in if you don’t have adequate water and shelter from the sun. Phoenix Arizona has summer temperatures that approach 120F (~50C — no, that’s not a typo). Yuma is worse! Death Valley is worse! These are regular daily fare since long before humans ever walked in North America.
The elderly and sick are in danger even at the much lower temperatures common where I live.
Oh! And it occurs to me that with all the money spent on wasted climate research trying to prove a preconceived idea, I could provide enough air conditioning to make heat related death a very rare thing.
I hate to be so blunt but put up or shut up! Where has it become significantly warmer because of global warming?
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KR have a look at Lomborg at the Canberra outlook conference a couple of months ago.
At about 5 minutes he explains all about the small increase in deaths from a warmer world, but the much higher level of people saved because of fewer cold deaths.
In the UK it would be about 10 to 1. Wake up to this silly scam before you go bonkers and please don’t expect the rest of us to believe your silly nonsense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrNB2FZnzeQ
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KR
There will be more deaths due to your side pushing stupid policies like biofuel which has resulted in massive areas once devoted to food production now being used for fuel.
But then many of the fanatics want depopulation so I suppose it does not matter either way to them.
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Ross # 40
On a similar theme, good review of Patrick Moore’s book by Daryl McCann.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/5/the-personal-costs-of-spurning-green-misanthropy
“The most chilling moment in Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout comes when Moore quotes Paul Watson, an early Greenpeace activist who today runs the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion … Cutting a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.” As distinct from their Christian counterparts, the proselytisers of Gaia, daughter of Chaos, do not see humanity needing salvation so much as the planet needing deliverance from humanity. In the light of this I hope Patrick Moore’s testimonial plays no small role in humanity’s deliverance from Greenpeace and all the other eco-fascist outfits that currently plague our world”.
I’ve highlighted my favourite line!
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KR I want to explain a few things about what I call Australia’s bi-polar hypocrisy on the CAGW fantasy.
Over the last few years we’ve had pollies like Rudd, Gillard, Wong Swan, Combet etc, etc telling us that tackling CC is the greatest moral challenge facing us in our lifetime. Total BS of course, but let’s look at the FACTS from the Aussie angle.
We emit just 1.3% of human co2 emissions so reducing that by 5% wouldn’t make a flicker of difference to the climate anytime, anywhere.
But while we wreck our economy and export our industries and jobs overseas we are busy exporting as much coal as possible, so that other countries can emit more co2 and produce more growth and jobs for their benifit.
We export three times as much coal as we use ourselves and we are updating ports etc so we can export more into the future.
BTW this is fine by me but I’m not a CAGW fantasist like the idiot pollies listed above and of course like you as well.
Next have a look at the latest projections from your EIA and you’ll start to educate yourself about the world’s co2 emissions for the next 25 years.
The OECD countries will increase their emissions by a paltry 0.1% per year but non OECD countries will increase by 2.0% per year, or at a ratio of 20 to 1.
By 2035 the non OECD countries will be emitting nearly twice the co2 emissions of the OECD. Ditto total emissions as well.
This isn’t hard to understand and only requires primary school maths and an average IQ. Definitely not rocket science.
We have a resident idiot here called Flannery who has just been named the govts Chief CC Commissioner to explain to we the great unwashed how the govt will bring in their new co2 tax and why.
This numbskull was recently pinned down by Andrew Bolt and finally admitted that if the whole world stoppeed emitting co2 today we wouldn’t see a change in temp for hundreds of years or perhaps a thousand years.
A surprised Bolt said Gee it didn’t seem like a very good deal. ( tongue firmly in cheek I’m sure)
But anyway that’s the sort of garbage we have to put up with here in Aussie land, so we’re not very happy with their embecilic BS and bi-polar hypocrisy.
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KR here’s that latest EIA info, please read it, understand it and start to lift the fog.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/emissions.html
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Joanne, your arguments are very good and we need you to keep presenting material in this objective manner.
I am concerned at the amazing scare-mongering being perpetuated by Gillard and Combet, most recently in South Australia with warnings of massive sea-level rises and so forth. Gillard says she is simply following the science and facts put out by responsible bodies such as NASA and CSIRO. The latter, I believe, has lost all credibility in this area as a scientific organisation and NASA has a proven non-objective person in Hansen as its’ AGW proponent. However, to the ‘great unwashed’ these sound like reputable sources and should be respected. How do we get this message across to a broader public in terms that non-scientifically educated people can understand?
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This is an article worth reading, a whole new version of climate change and CO2 is not part of it.
http://www.scientific-alliance.org/scientific-alliance-newsletter/time-question-received-wisdom-climate-change
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KR- it is because warmists produce studies like that that warmism is such a joke. I can’t produce studies to prove that corals live in warm water, or that base-load solar power is a joke either (perhaps with a faster internet connection- GO NBN!) but some things are too obvious to bother proving. But if you are an academic trying to get onto the warmist rivers of gold any nonsense is good enough.
(How right you are though about the scant lack of evidence for spread of diseases- doesn’t stop the warmists though- a few years ago they said that malaria would be rife in Melbourne when the climate warms and Melbourne has the weather Cairns now enjoys. They didn’t mind that there is no malaria in Cairns- details details.)
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Janama # 44
Thanks for the interesting link. Unfortunately, the net result of a looming alternative hypothesis, complete with hard evidence, will result in a doubling of efforts to get that toxic tax through NOW. Too much money at stake, vested interests and careers on the line to let new scientific findings see the light of day!
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gnome at comment 45, and also all you other readers,
It may be a little away from the main topic, but you mentioned how Base Load Solar Power is a joke, and how you can’t produce a study to prove that.
Try this then:
The Major Physical Impossibility Of Solar Thermal Power
Concentrating Solar Power (the correct terminology for what is erroneously referred to as Solar Baseload) has a major problem that Senators Brown and Milne, their ‘urgers’ and followers, and others who support this have either failed to look into, or just do not tell us.
That problem is that these plants also will be subject to any price on Carbon (Dioxide) emissions, and that’s directly, not indirectly.
To produce their power on that 24 hour basis, they have to have an auxilliary driving mechanism for the Generator when the molten compound is no longer molten enough to produce the large amount of steam required to drive the turbine which then drives the generator.
That auxilliary drive mechanism is a natural gas fired turbine, which emits CO2, and it’s no inconsequential amount.
The Post has some technical explanation, but that is necessary to show just why the plant cannot run on solar power alone.
The post also has some costings in it as well.
Tony.
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incoherent rambler @ 31:
But, you don’t understand. The warmistas are on a divine quest to save the world. Yes. SAVE THE WORLD! Us heretics must step aside lest we be struck down by the vengeful sword of climate justice. The apocalypse is soon upon us people. No, it wasn’t yesterday. But the maths has indeed been done. It’s worse than we thought. Time is running out. Think of the children. It’s for the good of all. Etc, etc, etc.
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I just thought of a new term: warmistadors 🙂
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Waffle: #49
Some of my colleagues have started referring to Climate Fluctuation.
At which point any Warmistas present will say, because they are programmed to, “No, it is all because of man-made emissions”.
To which my colleagues respond, “Really? That means that you are just a Climate Fluctuation [Unbeliever]” (Actually they use the “D” word, but we needn’t go there).
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Change is difficult because things are set up for the conditions that have applied in recent history.
For example, in Western Australia we have areas which have changed from wheat farming to sheep farming, because there is no longer the rainfall we used to have. Some farmers went broke because they were slow to change. No problem here. No one starves. Maybe some more farmers go broke as the cold fronts keep moving further and further south.
What happens in Bangladesh? They starve, and we begrudgingly take too few migrants.
Anyway, don’t worry about it. As long as we lucky ones don’t have to suffer, who cares?
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TonyfromOz@47:
I followed your link, and note that their byline says:
“the relentless pursuit of common sense” A Variety of Opinions From Various Writers
Couldn’t help but laugh. I love common sense. Common sense is the antithesis of science. It involves forming views based on your previous experience of the world. As opposed to actually looking at what happens. Einstein (supposedly) had a quote about common sense, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
So, “the relentless pursuit of common sense”, becomes, “the relentless pursuit of trying to make the world conform to my prejudices”. Beautiful….
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I realize, John, that common sense seems funny to you since you don’t have any.
For instance, have you ever wondered why, when a drought or crop failure occurs in an industrialized democracy it just causes some economic upset, but when it occurs in a totalitarian country (like N. Korea) starvation ensues? (Or even in a nominal “democracy” like Bangladesh which is not very industrialized and suffers from (as Wikipedia notes) “widespread political and bureaucratic corruption”, the results of what would be minor economic upsets in Australia or the US are major disasters.)
Since you have no common sense, you think that the only difference is luck. And of course, you think the solution to all our problems is to de-industrialize the developed world and prevent the non-industrialized world from developing. You have so little common sense that you believe this is the way to utopia.
To top it off, you appear to be proud that you have no (common) sense.
I hope we have enough people with common sense (and luck) for civilization to survive people like you.
The idiocy of “Progressives” is that they think they don’t need to consider “previous experience”, but can just figure everything out anew. Of course, not considering previous experience keeps them from realizing that most every time this is tried it leads to disaster. But they can be proud of not being ruled by common sense.
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JB, once again tell us what you would do that would fix the CC problem as you see it?
Sure SW WA has had a reduction in rainfall over the last 30+ years, but WA overall has much increased rainfall, so what?
The Flannery numbskull says you CAN’T change the climate for perhaps a thousand years even if we produce ZERO human emissions of co2 from now on.
But seriously you can’t even produce a sane argument to show why CC has left your bottom corner dryer for this period and what you can do about it?
So put up or go away.
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waffle @ 49
You right, I do not understand how they can take the stance that they do and sleep at night (maybe ignorance is bliss).
Science is clearly not going to sway the opinions of the warmist brigade (the evidence so far). Maybe an appeal to them, based on the damage that they inflict upon their fellow humans might succeed.
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JB southern Australia has been drying out for at least 5,000 years ( actually 7 to 10 thousand years)and Prof De Deckker has studied crater lakes right across the south for the last 20 plus years to prove it.
Even so South Australia has had increased rainfall over the last half century, must be CAGW as well I suppose?
But just pause graph on this video and you’ll notice a few low points like now. But who knows perhaps we’re due for an uptick as they say in the video.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1848641.htm
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John Brookes 52
Your weather skills are terrible – 1/3 Perths rainfall fell on Friday morning!
The Bureau of Meteorology says two cold fronts that crossed together Thursday night are responsible for the extreme weather conditions. The next cold front is expected to cross the coast late next week. http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/rainy-days-for-wa/17402
This front satrted in WA, was in SA and now moving to NSW http://www.weatherzone.com.au/radar/ .
WA has had an abnormal number of cold fronts this year!
Get your woolies on John Brookes!
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John Brookes at comment 53,
nice comment – fair cop I suppose.
It would seem you read what you wanted to read there.
Perhaps you might read the Post and, er, comment on that.
That’s no prejudice I picked up by age 18.
It’s also not asking people to conform to my prejudices either.
I’m not prejudiced about those who pursue this fantasy.
I just point out facts that they either have not researched, or deliberately ignore, and if you ask me, by deliberately ignoring them, they are in fact asking me to conform to their prejudices.
Tony.
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John B –from your comments in the past I take it you are a physicist or at least teach physics. I’d be interested in your comments on the last from Svensmark and co’s research on cosmic rays. ( I realisethe full paper is not available yet but the PR is out and the abstract
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL047036.shtml )
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John Brookes at 52
Read up on Bangladesh please John Brookes!
http://www.indexmundi.com/bangladesh/death_rate.html
Their mortality rate has decreased every year (apart from one) over last 11 years – due to education, power, medicine and food. Science is amazing John Brookes!
How do you even equate problems there in relation to your AGW in which you state
More info for you John Brookes at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Bangladesh
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JB check out Bom anomoly graph for southern Aust for last 111 years, just chalk and cheese and certainly much better for last half century.
Just the same for South Australia, but check it out for yourself, just real natural CC I’m afraid, but unfortunately some places just miss out.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rranom&area=saus&season=0112&ave_yr=15
BTW only 4,000 years ago SL was 1.5 metres higher around Aust than today.
Only 5 to 6 thousand years ago the Sahara was a lush area with herds of elephants, rivers
with hippos and crocodiles, plus a sizable human pop.
In the much warmer Eemian inter glacial 130,000 years ago hippos swam in the Rhine and Thames and the SL around Aust was at least 4.5 metres higher than today. Check out coral remains at Margaret river.
In the holocene optimum period boreal forests grew up to the Arctic coastline where today there is only ice and tundra.( for thousands of years)
11,500 years ago temps increased at the end of the Younger Dryas by 10C over a period of 10 years. Yes 1C per year for a decade and can be found in both Greenland and Sth America research as well.
Climate changes “naturally” over time , all the time, get used to it.
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BobC@54:
Gee, any moron reading that would think that I somehow thought that North Korea’s problems were due to bad luck. Which of course is not what I meant. You and I are lucky we live here, and not in North Korea. As for de-industrialising – why not put words in my mouth? As if I’d want that!
David@58:
Friday was wet – but we are still below average rainfall for May (and I’m pretty sure for January, February, March and April). So maybe you are right and we’re getting more cold fronts, but they don’t have much in them when they reach us. Maybe they are too far south?
10
What use is rain in the north to Perth? It can rain ten times as much there, and it will do us no good, because the vast majority of us live a couple of thousand km away from where it is raining. That’s what I’m saying, its adjusting to the change that is difficult.
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Neville@62: I’m talking about SW Australia. That one certainly looks to be declining….
And yes, climate does change naturally, but if the claims of the climate scientists are to be believed, it will continue to change much faster than it has historically over the next 100 years.
And of course natural climate change has also been disastrous in the past. The fall of many civilisations (ancient Egypt, the Mayans and others) has been attributed to changing climate.
Were there any risk of an impending ice age, that is the climate change I would be most scared of!
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John Brookes @ #63
Brookes, you write as though you are a WA resident, possibly in Perth.
If so where were you when the news here over the weekend was that Riverside Drive and parts of the Kwinana Freeway were closed due to flooding (from rain)?
I also understand that much of Willeton was inundated, and my mother-in-law in Kenwick had her street flooded.
Please don’t insult my intelligence by saying it was a “freak” event – I was born and raised in Perth and spent my first 35 years growing up in WA.
Perth and WA represent the epitome of the “droughts and flooding plains” Australia written about in song and verse.
Apart from a small area in the south-west of WA little of the state has ever been exclusively “wheat” farming”; the majority of the grain-growing has ALWAYS been mixed wheat-sheep farming. My great-grandfather was one of the original settler-farmers in the region, establishing properties from York all the way up to Mundaring (Sawyer’s Valley). Even back then these were, in the main, combined wheat-sheep enterprises (with some cattle in the southern-most areas).
This had very little to do with “climate” per se, and even less to do with “climate change”. It was PROFITABLE to grow the wheat, harvest it, bail the hay, put the sheep out onto the stubble, and then feed them on the stored hay when the following year’s crop was sown and growing.
John Brookes you and KR are so full of it, it is starting to seep out all over the place.
Have the good grace to quit while you are behind and save yourself the effort of making even a bigger fool of yourself.
PS – PLEASE tell me you aren’t teaching physics as one poster suggested.
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Now it’s Hockey who rebels
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/not_its_hockey_who_rebels/
What the hell is wrong with this fool Hockey?
Maybe this is the answer?
Deutsche Bank *really* wants us to trade carbon – THE JOE HOCKEY CONNECTION……….
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/deutsche-bank-really-want-us-to-trade-carbon/
Very Interesting That Joe Hockey Was In Favour Of The Ets As Well As Turnbull, Probably Because Hockey’s Wife, Melissa, Is The Managing Director And The Head Of Global Finance & Foreign Exchange For Australia And New Zealand At Deutsche Bank, So Joe Knows All About The $$$$$$$ That Can Be Generated By This Ets Policy.
Maybe Joe Hockey Should Be Called The “Minister For Deutsche Bank”…..
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Charming people, the Greens:-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/charming_people_the_greens/
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Well that sounds nice BUT problem no 1 is that Its (the planet) NOT warming dumbos its COOLING and fast..how much evidence to u need to identify the duck..web feet!
From Icecap.us
“When Will Science Get Serious about Global Cooling?
Fred Dardick Thursday, May 19, 2011
There is a very good chance the Earth is barreling towards another Little Ice Age within the next 10 to 30 years, perhaps sooner, and you wouldn’t know it by turning on the television. A calamitous event that could lead to widespread crop losses and the starvation of millions is being covered up by complicit climate scientists and the main stream media because it doesn’t fit with the politically correct narrative that humans are responsible for out of control global warming.”
have a nice day!
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“John Brookes”,”KR “,
Please quote a reference to even one, just one, Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper, which PROVES, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human beings and carbon Dioxide (Plant Food), are/is causing global warming.
PS Computer Models do not constitute either Proof or Evidence.
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OT but worth having a look.
Julia Gillard An Offensive Bogan…….
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/gillard_asks_labor_for_two_more_years_of_patience/
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Oh John Brookes (52) spare us your crocodile tears, Bangladesh has vast reserves of natural gas which you would presumably advise not to exploit in favour of renewables.
Bangladeshis (as in all underdeveloped countries) don’t want to migrate to foreign countries to relieve their situation (would you?), they would prefer a lifestyle comparable to ours or better where they are and they can only do that by economic development fueled at this stage by known reliable energy sources viz. coal, oil, gas and possibly hydro and nuclear.
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Jo,
People vote in governments.
There is two views politicians have to dance the balancing act.
One is for the good of the people(who vote them in).
The other is for the good of the country.
Most problems created by politicians is ambition of generating a legacy for themselves.
After all, we are all human.
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manalive, I only cite Bangladesh because it is a poor country which may suffer from rising sea levels. Should they exploit their natural gas? Yes for now, because it emits less CO2 than burning coal. In 20 years or so, our understanding of climate will be much better, and we’ll probably be in a position to decide how much CO2 it is sensible to emit. So at that time, we might emit more, or less, depending on what we discover.
And Damian Allen@70. I’m not sure about Julia Gillard being an offensive bogan, but I’m not sure about you either. Please stop your plaintiff pleas for “one paper which proves…..”. Proof is an impossibly high standard. The weight of evidence is against you – but don’t let that stop you posting numerous links that hardly anyone ever follows….
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And ffs memoryvault, so it rained heavily in Perth on Friday! I know that – I was soft and drove to work rather than cycled. I don’t cycle to save the environment – I cycle for enjoyment, fitness and to save money. But today (Sunday) it didn’t rain at all, not one little bit – shall I declare a drought? Perth rainfall has been dropping since the 70’s, and a wet day here or a dry day there will make no difference.
Do you teach anything memoryvault? I look after 1st year physics students at uni – but I don’t teach, because I don’t have a PhD. But I bet I understand physics better than you (though I suspect that isn’t hard…..).
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2 things John. The title of the post is “Evidence suggests global warming is good for our health”, a reminder that contrary opionions are best kept on topic. The weather in Perth this week is not on topic.
If you hang around young physicists, you might ask them what value they see in and how they would describe an “unverifiable hypothesis”.
Education is a wonderful thing.
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John at 74. If you do a Ph D and link it to
Global Warming, Climate Changeor now Climate Catastrophe you may be not too late to get the grant funding.10
[…] is global warming good for our health? Jo Nova […]
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John Brookes @ 74:
But if Bangladesh exploits its gas then that would raise their wealth(via natural resources) meaning, they will consume more. This in turn will lead to burning more gas and exporting their carbon emissions(sic) as they import manufactured goods. Surely this is not for the greater good and they should be content to live closer to nature than us. /sarc
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Can you see the flaw in your logic?
Btw, nuclear power already exists and after construction is almost C02 neutral. Will you advocate the nuclear option? If not, why?
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It scares me that John Brookes has any influence of any kind over physics students.
All fanatics scare me. And John is one, right down to the last hair on his head.
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Neville @ 39
Thank you very much for the video link. Watching this closely, and following the links to some of Bjorn’s references (@ 6 minutes, in particular) was very informative. Some of the references (Bosello 2006 in particular) did not express much of a position on this issue, but the various Keatinge papers did (although they did note that air conditioning played a role, and not everyone has AC!).
Given the mixed evidence, I’m going to drop any claim that heat death differences outweigh cold death differences. But (again) given the mixed evidence, I don’t think there’s a real case for saying that increased warmth is clearly better in this case either – I’ll stay with “undecided” until there’s a bit more evidence, in particular from more investigators.
10
From:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13439093
“Some 1,800 years after they first moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture, around 1100AD, a bout of prolonged warmer weather allowed the civilisation to really flourish, leading to the building of large stone settlements like Ollaytaytambo and Machu Picchu.”
Yet another MWP which the alarmists say only happened in Greenland.
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Slightly off topic but still….
Just saw Steffan on the ABC (ALP JG Cheer Squad).
The autopsy of whatever scientific discussion has taken place will be interesting.
The following dialogue between the presenters had a comment that the use of brown coal will be un-tenable.
SE QLD had better get ready for the biggest migration of cold southerners it has ever seen.
I can’t imagine there would be too many who could afford to live in Vic (or SA through load sharing) if the state gets forced to shut down Hazlewood & build or buy alternatives.
And for KR:-
Back in the good old days when Joh used to trumpet “They are all coming to Queensland!!” he was talking up the temperate local conditions & the fact ( with the death duty ploy) that a lot of southerners were coming to QLD to retire. The oldies tended to last longer in the warmth but of course statistically with an imported older population the demographic got skewed along with ultimately, the mortality.
Isn’t it funny how there is always a willing spin-doctor available to build/skew/mis-represent arguments. I am not amused with Mr Steffan though.
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Still waiting for Evidence and Proof from “John Brookes”,”KR “, as per my post at (70).
Oh well, obviously there is none and the whole thing is a FRAUD perpertrated by Conmen(and women) !!!!!!!
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Mercy, Mercy, Mercy: Lord have mercy, Climate change is irrefutable and the next 10 years are all we have to stop a 7 degree Celsius increase in temperature and an rise in sea levels by the end of the century Gillard’s climate committee has spoken, and we all know they are infallible.
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pattoh @ 83
We have the same thing happening in Florida and Arizona – those states are retirement destinations. It really throws off any statistics if you don’t correct for it…
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Bob Malloy @ 85
Huh. I don’t expect more than around 1 (+/-) meter sea rise by centuries end, or more than ~2C warming, and I don’t know anyone reputable who says otherwise.
Hansen pointed out that a pure extrapolation of exponential growth in sea level rise could be 5-6 meters, but that was in order to note that linear increases are not really a reasonable expectation, it wasn’t a prediction, more of a reductio argument.
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Waffle@79:
In which you neatly identify the need to reduce the current rampant population growth. Well done for being so smart!
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Roy Hogue@80, you think I’m a fanatic! Oh boy, we’d better write to the Oxford Dictionary people right away and tell them that the definition of fanatic needs amending…….
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KR:
May 23rd, 2011 at 8:11 am
The 7C was quoted on channel 9 today show, Bruce of Newcastle also refers to an ABC report that also mentions 7C here post 12
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Ah, so we get to the crux of your agenda. You’re a misanthropist who advocates genocide, the denial of people’s reproductive rights and the dismantling of the family institution as the cultural underpinning of our society. That’s the contradiction of your position. You are pro-choice as long as you are the one who gets to choose.
I challenge any misanthropist to off themselves as proof of their ideological commitment.
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There is also the fact that increased CO2 improves plant growth (as much as 20% for the current increase according to experiment) which means improved crop growth and increased temperature, even without CO2 does the same (hence the Sahara was fertile during the Climate optimum of 9-5,000BC). Nore food grown is not exactly a catastrophe.
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More along these lines comes from this essay nby Princeton Physicist, William Happer:
http://thetruthpeddler.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/noted-princeton-scientist-blasts-global-warming-alarmists/
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Now Waffle, I’m not a misanthropisty type of person! Its just a fact that there are too many people. Interestingly enough, the best way to reduce population growth is to educate and employ women, and to improve the overall standard of living. These things I agree with, which may make me a bit anthropisty.
One wonders if locusts every think, “Hey, there are too many of us for our own good!”.
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The revamping of MONEY as a resourse vector not a profit scam will SAVE US. The planet has no idea this is happening. WAKE UP GREENIES.
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Much of the concern about health impacts, and specifically the references in the health chapters in the Garnaut and Stern reports, can be traced back to the Australian epidemiologist Tony McMichael. He found some money to lead a big study into temperature mortality called the Isothurm project.
The results were less than exciting, and so have had no publicity at all:
“Most cities showed a U-shaped temperature-mortality relationship…..estimates of the temperature threshold below which cold-related mortality began to increase ranged from 15°C to 29°C; the threshold for heat-related deaths ranged from 16°C to 31°C”.
And of course: “Additional research is needed….”
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/5/1121.short
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Without reading the entire post, anyone thinking its good policy to use our food supply to fuel our vehicles is nothing but a blithering fool. With a domestic oil supply in the USA at the potential it is, I think the middle east could be turned into a glass parking lot with little consequence. The rub?? Our politicians won’t allow extraction of our own resources.
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Using food to make fuel especially alcohol is absurd. Hunger is bad for our health!
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