This essay was sent to me just about the time “climategate” broke. I regret the delay in publishing it but it is still relevant to the upcoming Copenhagen conference. – Anthony
Mr. Ban Ki-moon, get your priorities straight, and quit wasting the world’s resources on third tier problems
Guest post by Indur M. Goklany
“Climate change has been my top priority since I took office,” says UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an open letter to the participants of the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change.
He doesn’t seem to have read the new United Nations World Health Organization report on Global Health Risks. This document allows us to rank climate change among 24 global health risk factors. According to this report, hunger, poverty and a host of diseases easily outrank global warming (AKA climate change) as a global priority. The following two figures rank these health risks based on two different criteria. Depending on which criterion one uses, global warming is either second last or dead last!
Figure 1: Ranking global public health priorities based on disability adjusted life years (DALYs) lost prematurely in 2004. DALYs discount years that would have been spent in a disabled condition based on the severity of disability. Note: underweight = hunger. Many of the risk factors — hunger, unsafe water, vitamin A, iron and zinc deficiencies, indoor smoke — are diseases of poverty.
Figure 2: Ranking global public health priorities based on mortality. Note: underweight = hunger. Many of the risk factors — hunger, unsafe water, vitamin A, iron and zinc deficiencies, indoor smoke — are diseases of poverty.
“ Underweight”, which for practical purposes is synonymous to “hunger”, is ranked first based on the global burden of disease (first chart), and ninth based on global mortality (second chart).
Unfortunately, the United Nations family of agencies, aid agencies, and global “Humanitarian” agencies also subscribe to the notion that climate change should be given priority above other unsolved problems. Not surprisingly, therefore, at the World Food Summit earlier this month, about 60 heads of state and dozens of ministers rejected the U.N.’s call to commit $44 billion annually for agricultural development for developing nations.
According to the Associated Press, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s Assistant Director-General Alexander Mueller said that governments kept away from firm commitments to reduce hunger, “due to the economic crisis and because they expect they will need to channel money to the developing world at next month’s summit on climate change in Copenhagen.”
So there you have it: funds for one of the least significant problems over funds for much higher priority problems.
You reap what you sow.
And Mr Ban Ki-moon should be gratified that the world community takes heed.
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People do not seem to understand that Ban Ki-moon ranks issues based upon how much money they can generate for he and his….
I think the idea is that AGW is expected to become a major issue at some point in the future, that it will eventually outrank the other issues, and will by then be a much more intractable problem.
So, the suggestion is that it is better to act now to prevent a global crisis.
To justify this, they’d have to have some kind of projections for what future AGW impacts are expected to be and when.
Maybe they should try Global Cooling or Ice Age…
Does anyone know the names of 100 people who died in 2004 of global climate change? Or is this based on a computer model? If so, where is the code and data published?
James Hansen just called for Copenhagen to fail.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/02/copenhagen-climate-change-james-hansen
Since most of y’all probably don’t hang out at “The Guardian” – thought I’d let you know.
get in there and write… put this on the blog, Cafferty file on CNN is looking into climategate!
link: http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/02/has-scientific-community-has-been-honest-about-global-warming/#comment-1164097
If the UN cared about the people of the world, those diseases of poverty would be the highest priority. Clean water, sanitary disposal of waste, safe food, adequate immunization, and basic protection from the elements, should be prioritized.
AGW is about the UN getting control of energy, and using it to reward and punish.
If their pay was based on their performance, they would find out what poverty was all about.
Damn, I suffer from most of these.
Aaaaaaaaaarrrrgggggghhhh!
Geez, a problem that isn’t necessarily health related ranks above “child sexual abuse”?
Something certainly not right with this.
I would use this opportunity to thank Dr. Goklany for this publication.
I also want to express my full support to Lord Monckton who stated that we have to clean house, put the reckiteers behind bars and dissolve the entire United Nations because this House of Crime does more harm than good to humanity.
The same goes for the corrupt EU “Government” currently celebrating their victory over all the individual Nations creating the Superstate nobody asked for, ready to rob it’s people.
It will save us billions of dollars to be spend on the real issues of our times.
We the People can do that if we set our minds to it.
So let’s just tank the economies of the developed nations to pay for an unworkable solution to an imaginary problem .
Schlessinger was given a rebuttal time on NYT by Revkin. This extract shows how dillusional this crowd is:
“As documented in the IPCC AR4, it is not possible to replicate the observed warming due to natural causes – the sun and volcanoes – alone. Such replication can be done only by including the effects of the human-generated increase in the concentrations of greenhouse gases.”
WELL, SINCE WE KNOW NOW WHAT TO THINK OF HADCRUT…
“Thus the case of the causes of the observed climate change is closed, period – RPS or any other climate skeptic notwithstanding.”
STILL CLOSED… MINDED
“What remains is to decide what to do about this, bury our collective heads in the sand and pretend that reality is otherwise, or take on the hard task before us of making the transition this century from the fossil-fuel age to the post fossil-fuel age.
As I am an engineer as well as a scientist, I challenge humanity to this great and singular task.
I will not be here much longer, so I can at most see only the beginning of this voyage.
But my 3 children and 6 grandchildren will be here to see whether or not we now behave in a responsible way to them and their progeny, and to our one-and-only planet.
To not do so would be to condemn billions of human beings, now and in the future, to death by climate.
THIS WE MUST NOT DO!
Michael”
HOLD THE TEMPERATURE OR FACE EXTINCTION! I WONDER HOW MANY MORE WILL PERISH FROM LAUGHING OUT LOUD READING THIS ONE AND HE FORGOT THE POTENTIAL CHILDREN OF HIS GRANDCHILDREN TO ADD TO THE GUILT SPEWING. IS THIS REALLY WHAT WE CALL A SCIENTIST IN THE XXI CENTURY?
Are people dying in desserts when it rains and in rain forrests when it becomes dry?
They have no idea about their claims. I did read it was raining a lot this last few days in
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Rare, heavy rainstorms soaked pilgrims and flooded the road into Mecca, snarling Islam’s annual hajj as millions of Muslims headed for the holy sites. The downpours add an extra hazard on top of intense concerns about the spread of swine flu.
The UN was created for purposes of ending war. When do they plan to do what they were created to do?
OT: I find it hard to believe that even the hard-core AGW faithfull can still think that there is legitimate scientific evidence for Mann-made Gorebull climate change. Do you really think the CRU-crew would be refusing FOI requests? I think everyone knows that if they had anything, they would be rubbing our noses in it, 24/7.
Instead they are hiding and distroying data, refusing to debate, using intimidation tactics, and appealing to authority. Does that sound like what you would expect from someone, with a convincing argument?
/rant – off
Yeah, it’s time to dump global warming and get onto the next crisis. I propose Anthropogenic Sunspot Depletion brought about by all those solar energy installations proposed by Gore and company.
Next best one I have seen in forum is the moral justification for spending $79billions in 20 years in climate science was that even if the science was wrong we could save energy through better home insulation…
Between the billions who will die because of a possible warmer planet and those who will save on their energy bill, the vast scope of climate science and of its consequences never stops to amaze me…
Just like with the biofuels fiasco where land is being used to produce fuel instead of food so money for agriculture is going to reduce the trace gas co2 (plant food) with certainly zero direct effect on temperatures.
Remember the law of unintended consequences.
The developing world needs to realise that any funding they get at Copenhagen might be cut from agricultural or health development aid.
I repeat: remember the law of unintended consequences.
Just like with the biofuels fiasco where land is being used to produce fuel instead of food so money for agriculture is going to reduce the trace gas co2 (plant food) with certainly zero direct effect on temperatures. Meanwhile food prices rocketed leading to riots in some countries.
Remember the law of unintended consequences.
The developing world needs to realise that any funding they get at Copenhagen might be cut from agricultural or health development aid.
I repeat: remember the law of unintended consequences.
Well said Peter Lilley on RT. Now try and get the rest of your party in parliament to listen and I might decide to vote Conservative for the first time.
The weirdest thing of all is that malaria isn’t even on the list!
On Fox News earlier – Markey’s committee is already addressing ocean acidification . Of course Holdren testified , and some other scientist had a bubbling beaker on the table before her . Please , any of you who can speak to this , try to nip it in the bud via emails , fax , or letter to your Representative .
I noticed that 3 self inflicted activities are near the top of the list:
unsafe sex, alcohol, and tobacco, 2 of which are ahead of unsafe water in the first chart.
Tobacco use?
Schizophrenia and Tobacco
In other words: punish schizophrenics.