Watts Up With That?

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 »