Climate Conversation Group

Really?

Er, no. The report making that claim is dodgy. As a piece of scholarship it’s marked by a strong advocacy.

The report is called the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, it was published yesterday and is produced by Dara: “an independent organisation committed to improving the quality and effectiveness of aid for vulnerable populations suffering from conflict, disasters and climate change.”

According to Dara’s 2011 annual report, its total spending that year was €2.1 million.

The Monitor, described in the Sydney Morning Herald, contains regrettably familiar alarmist distortions. Like this:

It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 [killing a total of 100 million by 2030] if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

It thus blatantly conflates climate change with pollution, which is highly misleading and dishonest. Because climate change (aka global warming) isn’t hurting those 5 million people a year, because there’s been no global warming for about 15 years, although some of them might have been harmed by pollution.

Those five million people apparently die annually from “climate change and the carbon economy”. Further “tens of million people globally” become ill from the same cause (or causes?) (I presume that means “tens of millions of people”). They compare those numbers affected by global warming with the mortality and morbidity from smoking tobacco. Serious stuff. Impossible to believe.

This is an odd-looking report, containing few words, in a peculiar graphical format, spread over several documents. It gives no indication of how it calculates the figures it presents and does not name their sources.

Conclusion: it’s an unreliable piece of alarmist propaganda; forget it.

Even if it did impress the SMH.

- h/t Roger Dewhurst