Watts Up With That?

Part III: Where does global warming rank among future risks to environmental health?

Guest essay by Indur M. Goklany

NOTE: Entire 3 part series is now available as a PDF here

In Part 1 of this series we saw that even if one gives credence to the oft-repeated but flawed estimates from the World Health Organization of the present-day contribution of climate change to global mortality, other factors contribute many times more to the global death toll. For example, hunger’s contribution is over twenty times larger, unsafe water’s is ten times greater, and malaria’s is six times larger. With respect to ecological factors, habitat conversion continues to be the single largest demonstrated threat to species and biodiversity. Thus climate change is not the most important problem facing today’s population.

In Part 2 we saw that even if we assume that the world follows the IPCC’s warmest (A1FI) scenario that the UK’s Hadley Center projects will increase average global temperature by 4°C between 1990 and 2085, climate change will at most contribute no more than 10% of the cumulative death toll from hunger, malaria and flooding into the foreseeable future. It would simultaneously reduce the net population at risk of water stress.

Clearly, climate change would, through the foreseeable future, be a bit-player with respect to human well-being.

Here I will examine whether climate change is likely to be the most important global ecological problem in the foreseeable future. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II: Where does global warming rank among future risks to public health?

Guest essay by Indur M. Goklany

In Part 1, we saw that at present climate change is responsible for less than 0.3% of the global death toll. At least 12 other factors related to food, nutrition and the environment contribute more. All this, despite using the World Health Organization’s scientifically suspect estimates of the present-day death toll “attributable” to climate change,

Here I will examine whether climate change is likely to be the most important global public health problem if not today, at least in the foreseeable future.

This examination draws upon results generated by researchers who are prominent contributors to the IPCC consensus view of climate change.  I do this despite the tendency of their analyses to overstate the net negative impacts of climate change as detailed, for instance, here, here and here. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I: Ranking global warming among present-day risks to public health.

Guest essay by Indur M. Goklany

There seems to be no limit to the hyperbole surrounding climate change – and that’s no hyperbole. Numerous politicians have informed us over the years that climate change is one of the most important problems facing mankind.  In fact, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called it the defining challenge of our age.”

But is it?

I answer this question in a paper just published in the refereed section of Energy & Environment.

A 2005 review article in Nature on the health impacts of climate change estimated that 166,000 deaths were “attributable” to climate change in 2000. This estimate was derived from a World Health Organization (WHO) sponsored study that even the study’s authors acknowledge may not “accord with the canons of empirical science” (see here). But I will accept this flawed estimate as gospel for the sake of argument.

In the year 2000, however, there were a total of 56 million deaths worldwide. Thus, climate change may be responsible for less than 0.3% of all deaths globally (based on data for the year 2000). This places climate change no higher than 13th among mortality risk factors related to food, nutrition and environment, as shown in the following table. Read the rest of this entry »