Comments on: All the trusting children of the world

By: Mike Jowsey

Mike Jowsey — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:49:39 +0000

Thanks Richard – I missed that table. Mea culpa. It concludes 167,000 deaths caused by AGW. (And, yes – your calculations were one zero out). However in the paragraph immediately following the table we learn that they do not in fact have much of a clue what they are talking about or whether the models are reliable. More wool pulling, eh?

5. Discussion
The collective scientiﬁc evidence indicates that anthropogenic climate
change has already begun and will continue, with potential consequences
for human health. Global warming over the past quarter-century was of
the order of half a degree centigrade. Such a gradual change is partly
obscured by natural climate variability and affects health through
complex causal pathways. These characteristics, coupled with considerably larger effects of other factors in the most vulnerable populations,
mean that it is inherently difﬁcult to measure directly net health losses
or gains attributable to the climate change that have occurred until now.

And further down…

Such modelling is at a relatively early stage. Few modelling studies
have estimated health effects at the global scale, and not all of these
directly estimate incidence or prevalence of GBD outcomes. . However,
they provide the best current basis for making indicative forecasts in
order to inform policy decisions. These models nevertheless make only
crude adjustments for the effects of other variables (such as decreasing
poverty), which may both determine the vulnerability of populations to
potential health effects of climate change, and exert much larger independent effects on health.

By: Richard Treadgold

Richard Treadgold — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:09:26 +0000

So that’s what he meant when he said: “the WHO concluded that it could not identify the influence of GHG emissions on health”?

It’s worse than I thought!

Ta!

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:04:23 +0000

Richard,
Pielke’s point was that no deaths are attributable to climate change using any scientific method. The WHO report originally stated this.

Then another NGO came along and provided the attribution, and doubled all the numbers along the way.

By: Richard Treadgold

Richard Treadgold — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:29:17 +0000

They’ve forgotten their original aim and they’ve forgotten we can think.

By: Richard Treadgold

Richard Treadgold — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:27:39 +0000

It’s easy to forget that global warming promises some good things among the bad. I believe far more good than bad. Sorry to hear about your sniffles!

By: Richard Treadgold

Richard Treadgold — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:22:30 +0000

Thanks Andy, this is great. So did Pielke go through all the individual causes of death and refute or reduce them? Did he arrive at a total of global deaths attributable to cc?

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:55:16 +0000

The issues around the WHO report that Mike references are covered in Roger Pielke Jnr’s book “The Climate Fix” (pp 177).

In this, he states:

In 2002, the WHO concluded that it could not identify the influence of GHG emissions on health.

However, a year later, another WHO study argued that even though the data did not allow specific conclusions about the influence of GHG emissions, speculative guesses were necessary.

These guesses then formed the basis of a 2009 report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum, an NGO run by Kofi Annan.

The GHF concluded that GHG emission-induced climate change was responsible for 154,000 deaths per year due to malnutrition, 94,000 deaths per year due to diarrhoea, and 54,000 deaths due to malaria.

Pielke then notes

A close look at the health related numbers shows that they are exactly two times the values presented in the 2002 WHO report, which according to WHO, “do not accord with the canons of empirical science”. In other words, the numbers appear to be a guess on top of another speculation

By: Richard Treadgold

Richard Treadgold — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:27:59 +0000

Thanks Mike, I’d like to publish this. But Table 20.16, in the Results section of the paper, on page 1606, Estimated mortality (000s) attributable to climate change in the year 2000, gives 27.82 deaths per million for the world population. Trouble is, global pop in 2000 was 6 billion, and multiplying by 6000 gives 167 million, far too many. Unless I’ve mucked up the magnitudes. Sounds like you’d have to pick apart all the different causes they examine and I don’t have the time for that. You might like to have a look. Cheers.

By: Mike Jowsey

Mike Jowsey — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:42:45 +0000

Drilling down into one of the references made by the Scientific American piece, it was not long before I found this: "The WHO estimates that climate change is already contributing to 150,000 deaths per year." Drilling down further, there is absolutely no basis for this number, or any number. A paper is cited in support of it, but said paper discusses in broad terms the likely impact of climate change on disease and nowhere says that already 150,000 deaths per year are caused by climate change. It seems that this number is entirely fictional. Made up by WHO. Repeated by Health Care Without Harm as if it is fact. It is pure fantasy.

By: Alexander K

Alexander K — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:47:33 +0000

I have been annoyed by hay fever for decades. It gets quite severe in London during Spring, but I am inhaling pollen from the vast number of lovely evergreen trees, dust from Africa and Europe, Diesel particulates, Aviation fuel, (we live under a major Heathrow flight path) petrol fumes and, surprisingly, a large amount of very fine and abrasive dust from brake pads which invades every nook and cranny here. We find London dustier than we did living on a gravel back road north of Auckland!
Climate Change? I am waiting for the squadron of Large Whites to be fuelled for take-off right now!