Many of you have probably heard by now of the UN. Report saying that “global warming is killing 300,000 people a year”. There’s a Times Online Story (h/t to Gary Boden) about it today that has some startling admissions. Here are some excerpts:
Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today.
A report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, says that the effects of climate change are growing in such a way that it will have a serious impact on 600 million people, almost ten per cent of the world’s population, within 20 years. Almost all of these will be in developing countries.
“Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” Mr Annan said.
“As this report shows, the first hit and worst affected are the world’s poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem.”
//
The report claims that 90 per cent of the deaths are related to gradual environmental degradation caused by a warming climate, which exacerbates existing threats — mainly malnutrition, diarrhoea and malaria. The rest are said to be the result of weather disasters.
But here is the kicker (emphasis mine):
Mr Annan said the report could never be as rigorous as a scientific study, but said: “We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today.”
Translation: “close enough for government work” (click for definition)
Worse, the U.N. didn’t even do the report themselves. The farmed it out:
The research was carried out by Dalberg Global Advisers, a consultancy firm, who collated all existing statistics on the human impacts of climate change. The report acknowledges a “significant margin of error” in its estimates.
But it is good enough for the MSM to use to scare the crap out of everybody and guilt the gullible into “action”.
‘Bogus’, doesn’t even begin to describe this political ploy.
For a real report, using real data, reflecting the real world situation, please read these reports by WUWT contributor Indur Goklany:
Going Down: Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events
How the IPCC Portrayed a Net Positive Impact of Climate Change as a Negative
Wrong: World Health Organization claims that health goes down as carbon goes up
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What’s the point? We’re all going to be eating global warming hot apple pie soon: http://apocalypsecakes.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/global-warming-hot-apple-pie/
Kum Dollison (10:18:34) :
‘Our Corn “carryover” this year was 1.7 Billion Bushels. This is up 300 Million Bushels from last year, and one of the highest on record.’
Jumped on the old subsidized the farmer ethanol production bandwagon program and produced too much corn?
I’ll say what I want about Galloway. He has no defence and is as easy to read as the back of the Communist Manifesto : Islamist Edition. I don’t want to get political here but my final word on Galloway, Monbiot, the Respect Party and the Greens is I hope they get what is coming to them and by that I mean something really bad. How dare they attempt to bring totalitarianism to us masqueraded as ecology.
Oh dear. George Moonbat has read the press release. Please see the link.
BTW, I am from Zambia, I still have family living there. Monze has NOT had a drought, the rains were good this year. AIDS is brought in by the truck drivers taking produce away from this farming area.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/may/29/monbiot-kofi-annan-climate-change
I was really holding out hope that eventually the truth of what is really happening with global temperatures and melting ice (NOT) would some day turn this global warming jugernaut around. It is really demoralizing to see stories like this. It is apparent that if the facts don’t support the global warming agenda that they are just going to make up whatever they want to keep it going. It appears that the press is so brain washed that they will go along with it too without challenging it. Is all hope for the truth lost????
‘Our Corn “carryover” this year was 1.7 Billion Bushels. This is up 300 Million Bushels from last year, and one of the highest on record.’
Since it’s subsidized, I guess our debt went up…
“Which do you think is the most likely to cause “starvation?” A Two Cent rise in the cost of a daily ration of corn, or a Two Dollar rise in the cost of a gallon of gasoline?”
“No-one knows who I am,” George Hussein Onyango Obama, 26, told the magazine. “I live here on less than a dollar a month.”
It depends on who you are and where you live.
I have been around for more decades than I care to admit, and I have never seen anything quite as appalling as this collective blindness. The ’60s were maybe crazier, but the establishment, however beleaguered, was able to muddle through to some kind of middle ground. There was active, often violent, debate. But today we have the political and media establishments engaged in a kind of millenarian crusade, and the bulk of the population are acquiescing like stupefied sheep.
The Realists have got to find a way to wake people up before the whole society marches blindly off the cliff in search of the solution to chimera of ‘climate change’. But Realists are by their very nature averse to engaging in crusades, even an ‘anti-crusade’.
The Alarmists pushing for world-wide governmental action to stop ‘climate change’ can sway even reluctant believers with appeals to the high priesthood of establishment ‘scientists’, dismissing skeptics as cranks and heretics. Unless the Realists can convince enough of that priesthood to defect and announce that the Alarmists are wrong, that there is no problem with burning fossil fuels and making more CO2, I do not see how the Realists can turn around the march to the cliff.
It is past time for a Martin Luther of Realists to nail a declaration to the doors of Congress and the other parliaments in the West, challenging the priesthood and calling on them to debate in public. Who among Realists is brave enough to take on that role?
/Mr Lynn
No, Old Construction Worker, we didn’t produce “too much” corn. We always carry a billion, or so, bushels forward. It gives insurance against a truly catastrophic harvest. The point is that this was just kind of an “average” year that ended up with, more or less, average prices.
And, no, Mike, the taxpayer did not subsidize corn this year. Nor, last year. We used to subsidize corn to the farmer to about $8 Billion/Yr, but not any more. That extra three, or four cents/lb made all the difference.
As for Mr “Obama:” He’s either a liar, or Pot is awfully cheap in Kenya. When the camera crews finally caught up with him, he and his buddies and a couple of prostitutes were having a ganja party. Don’t expect US to believe everything YOU read.
Koffi is a scammer reinforcing his scam. Yawn.
Here is a fun link list of all of the stuff caused by AGW. Check it out, it has everything from incresed sexual promiscuity to the earth turning upside down.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
For the O/T on the white roofs, don’t knock it ’till ya try it. I painted my galvanized roof with a white sealant and saw an immediate and significant drop (almost 10º F on a sunny 90º August day) in inside temps. It saved me a lot of $$ on running the A/C. That is a real tangible benefit to the AGW effort via less electricity going through my meter. I wouldn’t have a dark colored roof unless I could change it back in the summer.
As far as the reflected heat, that is a non-starter. On the larger scale, it doesn’t really matter if the heat is held on your black roof, or reflected. That heat is still there, just in a different place.
Dave Middleton (10:52:27) :
Thanks for the info.
Completely off topic but todays Non Sequitur comic hits with a ring of truth.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19798680?cat=nq&d=090601
Ray B
“That heat is still there, just in a different place.”
Especially if the greenhouse effect works like the warmists insist. Have they thought this through..? 🙂
Not sure if anyone else has posted these letters from today’s times.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article6400887.ece
Sorry if I’ve come in late on this discussion, or indeed if this point has already been raised, but I originally saw this article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, and was immediately filled with despair. Not because of the apparently vast amount of deaths allegedly due to global warming, but by the appalling lack of what used to be good solid journalism. Instead we get a basic reprint of pure propaganda. If only this journalist had done a little homework and discovered, as in a previous post on this web site, that annual deaths in the world are around the 56 million mark !
Unfortunately, the scare mongers seem to have hijacked the worlds media, and despite the commendable efforts of web site like this, the juggernaut seems to be unstoppable.
I hope this reads coherently, just finished three glasses of wine ‘cos I’m so depressed with it all !!
Nay, nay.
‘Tis coherent, and quite a good rant!
Now, my caution though, it (you!) should NOT be content with a “good” rant, nor even “quite good a rant”.
YOU – as a reader and writer and righter of other readers – must create quite a noisy, non-quiet rant in the local press that you DO get attention by writing about the subject, by writing about it again, and by talking informatively about the subject to others who HAVE only read the media’s propaganda.
(Your bitter whine glass – unless it is read by others who don’t now know, will not matter if it were originally filled with white, red, or blush before it became vinegar.)
Non Sequitur
Good spot! Very apposite.
It also reminded me of this, from Steven Jay Gould, a thought that Hansen, Mann and Co. could usefully have pinned to their respective walls:
“Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny—and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).”
This is off-thread, but I think that it may be worthy of a thread of its own: couldn’t see a better place in recent posts.
In the most recent issue of Geoscientist (the magazine (not journal)) of the Geological Society of London (http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/site/GSL/lang/en/page5546.html) there is a report of recent research published in the Journal of Environmental Quality (abstract at http://jeq.scijournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/38/2/654) concerning the amount of methane released by landfill sites and which is released into the atmosphere.
According to the article, the IPCC currently assumes that between 0 and 10% of the methane produced in landfill sites oxidized before is released into the atmosphere. The new research finds that this figure is far too low, and that in a range of samples, the mean values ranged from 22% oxidation in clayey soil to 55% in sandy soil. The standard error was 6%.
The upshot of this, of course, is that landfill sites may not contribute such a high percentage of their methane emissions into the atmosphere. The methane threat, as the author in Geoscientist writes, may be overblown.
Hi all. I live in Toronto, and I’m just about ready to punch anyone who breaths a single word about how the world is overheating. On the back of the coldest May I’ve seen here in many years, I would like to say that up in cottage country, in the Muskokas, this past weekend, it snowed for 3 hours and left snow on the ground. I have had to turn the furnace on in my house several times in the dying days of May. It is not unusual for it to go down to 4C at night. In short, it is unusually cold, most of the warm spells were immediately cleared out by strong northerlies that gave us brief but violent thunderstorms and then COLD, COLD and more COLD. Most of Canada is well below “normals” for this time of year.
Let me say–the Chinese and the India(n)s will have improved and increased nuclear electric energy before we do, and probably cheaper gosoline and diesel fuel as well–and not so many words about AGW.
I hope India and China both show up with great nuclear electric energy production soon, and slow up the almighty global alwarmists.
I find it hard to listen to the self righteousness of Annan who won a Nobel Prize for presiding over the massacre of about a million Rawandans, especially since the UN was warned in advance by the UN Commander (Canadian) General Romeo D’Allaire. Apparently no one was available to answer the phone when he called and no preparations were made when they finally did get the message.
Also, if 300,000 a year were to be dying from Global Warming, it would be something to be concerned about, but how can our NGO and UN friends calculate this statistic against a background scores of millions killed in conflicts in Africa (one estimate 13million in the last 10 years and this may not be the worst 10 years – I was in Nigeria when over 3million died in the 1960s in civil war and associated disease and starvation:
http://www.arcuk.org/pages/apology-9m-deaths.htm
thats more than four times as many a year as our alleged Global Warming deaths and dwarfs what we call the World Wars. If this was happening in North America, we would be thought to be in need of a head examination if we were to be underscoring such comparatively quiet AGW deaths
Lets see now: there are 53 countries in Africa that works out to 5,660 AGW deaths a year per country on average – meanwhile over the last 50 years ….. Angola, Congo, Rawanda, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Somalia …. definitely the global warming deaths would be hard to count among the bodies there and lets not forget the despots: Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe – try to count the AGW deaths among the untold hundreds of thousands who have been killed, died of starvation and are now dying of cholera in Zimbabwe because the government has run the country down to social and economic ruin. I better snip the rest of this before I get on to the deterioration of the Nobel Prize into a political prize over the past few decades.
Off topic but on topic so to speak. I can’t help but think Non Sequitur is talking about CO2 and the IIPC.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19798680/?cat=nq
Anthony, if you would rather not have humorous posts on your site please tell me.
Not everyone uses such silly language.
Please would you highlight Lord Paul Drayson’s address recently?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6422769.ece?Submitted=true
Lord Drayson is a successful bioscience entrepreneur who became a Government Minister relatively recently in the UK.
Just to keep skeptics grounded in the reality that not ALL Governments are totally in thrall to the extremists’ messages…..?