Thomas Fuller of the San Francisco Examiner has a great piece which summarizes the issue of climate and malaria and Mann. Like with the imagined increase in hurricane frequency due to global warming, so it goes with malaria. There’s no correlation. The premise is false.
On Monday, May 17th, I had the privilege of sitting on a panel at the Heartland Institute Chicago ICCC4 conference with regular WUWT contributor Dr. Indur Goklany. He gave his views on the declining mortality we’ve seen worldwide and has published several pieces here on WUWT. He also the author of the book: “ The Improving State of the World”. “Goks” (as his friends call him) gave a PowerPoint presentation on declining mortality in a warming world and you can view the PPT File here.
I’ve culled one of the slides he presented below. If this doesn’t offer proof that when it comes to mankind that “warmer is better”, I don’t know what would. Note the reversal in the southern hemisphere with Australia and New Zealand.
But the most interesting slide is number 10, showing the drop in Malaria worldwide:
Thomas Fuller covers the Mann-Malaria issue below:
Correspondent Barry Woods has done all the heavy lifting on this story, so if you like it, kudos to him–any errors of course are my responsibility.
In the Guardian today there is an article following on about the story of malaria and climate change. I like the quote from Peter Gething of Oxford: “If we were to go back to the 1900s with the correct climate change predictions for the 20th century, modellers would predict expansion and worsening of malaria and they would have been wrong, and we believe they are wrong now.” That’s because despite global warming for the past 30 years, the geographic extent of malaria has lessened, leading logical thinkers to guess that climate change has not worsened the spread of malaria.
Gething was referring to his study published yesterday in Nature that found that bednets and drugs will influence the spread of malaria far more than will climate change, challenging fears that warming will aggravate the disease in Africa.
Many researchers have predicted that rising temperatures will cause malaria to expand its range and intensify in its current strongholds. But unlike usual models, which aim to predict how climate change will affect malaria in the future, researchers looked at how warming affected the disease throughout the last century.
They used a recent epidemiological map of the global distribution of the major malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and compared this with historical data on malaria’s prevalence in the 1900s.
The researchers — whose work was published in Nature yesterday (20 May) — found that despite global warming, the prevalence of malaria decreased, which they attribute to disease and mosquito control programmes.
Or so you would think. But Matthew Thomas thinks differently. Matthew Thomas said that the study “plays down the potential importance of climate [change]”.
Who is Matthew Thomas? He is a researcher at… Penn State. Matthew Thomas is a researcher… at Penn State… who has just won a $1.8 million grant to study the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases. Think he has a dog in this hunt?
Ask his co-investigator on the project. Michael Mann…
Where do we ask for a refund?
…
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Thank you, Anthony, for posting this. However, I have to apologize to you, your (and my) readers and audience. My slide presentation on the Heartland website does not match what I used at the talk itself. Also, I had some errors in the slide show that I must correct.
First, I mislabeled the malaria figure up above. The caption should say: “Top: left, mid-19th century; right, 1945. Bottom: left, 1977; right, 2007.” Second, due to transcription errors, I had understated the potential deaths and disease estimates from biofuel production by quite a lot. [“It’s worse than I said.”] The corrected slides are available at my website here.
With respect to malaria, I should note that there is a great set of illustrations in the original Nature paper by Gething et al. that set all this off. They are a lot easier on the eyes and have far greater resolution than my malaria slide. Gething et al. also touch on issues raised by Greg Leisner (at May 22, 2010 at 2:13 pm) and Mike (May 22, 2010 at 2:04 pm).
According to Gething et al., endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 2007. P. falciparum malaria, the deadliest of the 4 types of malaria, is today (2007) restricted largely to the tropics. Equally important, within its currently reduced range, its prevalence has decreased, with endemicity falling by one or more classes in over two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission.
They also note that:
This is consistent with what’s in my book, The Precautionary Principle, in which I note that in the early 1940s, malaria used to kill over 3 million people annually. Today the global figure is about 1 million even though the population has almost tripled.
For a long time (well over a decade) many (including myself) have been saying that while malaria might be sensitive to climate/weather, it is far more sensitive to poverty and economic development – which is why it’s called a disease of poverty! This is not rocket science. Even railway engineers and more pedestrian scientists should be able to get it.
I don’t suppose I can get half of that … just a lousy $900,000 to study the effects of DDT on malaria incidence? I think there might be a connection between the two. I believe it is a hypothesis worth looking at…
I’m confused why a warming world would lead to more malaria (more mosquitos). Where I live the cool wet weather seems to benefit their numbers and when its hot and dry – no mosquitos.
Pictures of the oil slick:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/37292878#37292878
What an utter nonsense, till 1905 we had Malaria in Germany.
vukcevic says:
May 22, 2010 at 1:43 pm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET5.htm
The graph shows deference between the summer and winter temperatures (11 year moving average) normalised at +11.5 degrees C. It shows that the 1900-1940 period is (very) odd one out.>>
Interesting. Could you do the graph again but just show the winter anomaly versus the summer anamoly? that they diverge in that specific time period is interesting for a couple of reasons but I wonder if the divergence is driven more by one than the other?
Maybe the AG’s shouldn’t go after hobnobs and pseudo scientist like Mann et al but instead hunt down the complete derange people who keep signing over the public funds to ’em.
Brad said on May 22, 2010 at 3:19 pm:
Curious. I’ve seen info before where it’s speculated that under the ice “Greenland” might be three or so smaller islands, the ice layer just makes it look like one land mass. Also, when considering how the 2007 massive loss of Arctic ice was partially due to ice arches failing to form in the Nares strait and hold the ice in the Arctic ocean, and subsequently I noticed there’s a continual hot spot on the temperature maps near there, there might be undersea volcanic activity contributing to these assorted effects in and around Greenland. And yes, geological activity can cause such “sudden” land rises.
It means the article is alarmist-tainted crud, as seen in the misleading first paragraph:
Note how wonderfully it does not say “The increase in the energy stored…” yet it somehow gives that impression. Nor does it give a time for how long those bulbs would be lit. Theoretically you could gather enough energy from the electric service at your house during a day to power those lights for at least a picosecond.
Besides, that’s old data. They analyzed measurements from 1993 to 2008. Dr. Spencer just reported “Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Poised for a Plunge” and the ocean heat content looks to be going down. Thus the value in this heat content analysis is for historical purposes, the oceans are refusing to follow the (C)AGW proponents predictions.
No wonder Mann is now researching malaria. The planet is refusing to comply to his whims. Maybe mosquitoes will prove easier for him to predict and control.
Malaria is not so wide-spread as it was in the 19th Century? Despite increases in average global temperatures – whatever they may be – and nasty, nasty air pollution in the form of soot and carbon dioxide? How did that happen? Three letters: D D T. Period. End of story. Why is malaria still extent where it is today? The ban – official or unofficial, formal or unformal, it was banned – on use of DDT in those parts of the world, backed up by a withholding of aid funds of one sort or another. Want to see malaria disappear? Get rid of the bans on the use of DDT and start selling it around the world, with the same proper old-fashioned instructions and warnings from 50 years ago. Guess what? No malaria. Easy, simple, direct. Even cheap.
jaymam says:
May 22, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Not significantly in either case.
Man…I was just calming down for the weekend when I read this. In this I feel confident – I know MUCH more about malaria (and other infectious diseases) than Michael Mann will ever learn in his lifetime. DDT has proven to be the single most effective intervention for the control of malaria. Bed netting, repellants and antimalarial drugs are far less effective by comparison. Bed netting is only effective when you’re in bed. Agents like DEET repel mosquitoes but do so by masking the CO2 signature mosquitoes are attracted to. I grew up in Michigan. Believe me, if there is one square inch of exposed skin not covered by a recent application of DEET a mosquito (the size of a cat) will find it. Drugs are quite marginal in effectiveness. Plasmodia are eukaryotic organisms (i.e. they look like us to drugs). Hence it is hard to find a drug that it hard on them and not also hard on us. Killing bacteria is child’s play by comparison. They also have this damnable ability to mutate into drug resistant forms. Don’t misunderstand – I’m a “bugs and drugs” guy by profession and the drugs have been a godsend. But on a wide scale DDT does more for more people for a lot less (and with fewer side effects).
OK…anyone with a 6th grade, Jethro Bodine education should know that temperature has little to do with mosquitoes (although apparently altitude does). Walk around in the woods up in Minnesota at dusk in the summer and see if you don’t come back a pint low. Other commenters have pointed this out. Almost the entire USA and southern Canada, southern Europe, Russia, Asia and South America was malarious 100 years ago. We still have mosquitoes in the US, why don’t we have malaria? Because we broke the chain. We still have mosquitoes but they’re not infected with Plasmodia. It’s interesting, once iradicated, malaria tends to stay iradicated.
Given enough DDT, chloroquin, bed nets and political will we could make malaria disappear much like we did small pox. Climate and the Earth’s temperature have nothing to do with it.
$1.8 million is a small price to pay for saving the world. I too could put this sum toward its intended purpose in the same way I expect Mr. Mann and his colleagues to do. After all, the answer is already known – all I have to do is find the magic computer code to prove it.
Not sure yet how I will lose the code though.
Fraud! Again and again.
“Espen says:
May 22, 2010 at 4:12 pm
DirkH: Emden is almost tropical compared to Arkhangelsk, which had cases of malaria until 1930. But this paper argues that it was an “indoor disease” in the northernmost part of Europe.”
Emden is not the northernmost part of Europe so the paper – which talks about Sweden and Finland – doesn’t apply. The link i gave mentions that Schiller caught malaria while traveling through swampland in the proximity of Mannheim in the 18. century, for instance. The old german word for Malaria is “Sumpffieber” – swamp fever; might have to do with the fact that there’s a lot of mosquitos in swamps.
Funnily Jimbo Wales’ encyclopedia says about “Sumpffieber”:
“Sumpffieber ist:
eine Tropenkrankheit, siehe Malaria ”
translation: “swamp fever is a tropical disease, see Malaria”. Well, you can’t always be right…
Brad’s Science Daily link opens with:
“The upper layer of the world’s ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal…”
But today’s official ARGO site shows that sea surface temperatures are flat to declining. It’s not the greatest chart, but it makes me wonder: were these researchers wrong over the past decade? Or are they wrong now?
SST’s are in large part a function of la nina/el nino, and generally fluctuate accordingly. But the deep ocean has much greater heat capacity, and I believe the ARGO buoys still show the deep ocean is losing heat [the ARGO site is very frustrating to navigate. They seem to be making it intentionally difficult to find the information you’re looking for].
The authors are clearly trolling for grants based on climate alarmism. One more example of how climate science is being corrupted by easy grant money.
Mike McMillan says:
May 22, 2010 at 4:07 pm
¨….. Empty food tins, abandoned tires, any trash that will hold water will end up nurturing the critters.
Cleaning up the trash in your environment will have a huge effect on the mosquito population.
Climate change won’t.¨
Please copy this to each person you know who plans a trip to Costa Rica: mosquitos are a big problem here. San Jose, at 1000 meters, might be a good place to test perceptions re altitude and mosquito populations.
Excerpted from: Smokey on May 22, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Which is of course completely unrelated to the Argo data tending to show a general cooling of the oceans, depending on who does the analyses and how they do them, as opposed to an Unequivocal Continuous Warming that matches the CO2 rise. Indeed, it is robustly unrelated.
Where do mosquitos go in the winter?
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2007/09/dumb-question-where-do-mosquitos-go-in-the-winter.html
To ease Dr. Mann’s busy workload, I make the following suggestions:
Develop a new robusted statistical technique.
Declare GW will lead to runaway malaria outbreaks.
Declare man to be the source of GW.
Present your beliefs in the form of a hockey stick.
Write a report that says it’s “worse than we thought.”
Pocket the money.
Request additional money.
Dr. Dave says:
May 22, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Man…I was just calming down for the weekend when I read this. In this I feel confident – I know MUCH more about malaria (and other infectious diseases) than Michael Mann will ever learn in his lifetime.
I’m sure you do but that’s hardly the point is it? The question is do you know more about malaria than Matthew Thomas, professor in the Department of Entomology and Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Penn State University, who is the Principle Investigator of the project. Prof. Thomas wants to “quantify how environmental temperature influences the transmission of vector-borne diseases, and how this in turn determines disease risk, both now and under future climate-change scenarios”. It’s smart when you write a proposal of that sort to include a member of the faculty who has some complementary expertise. In this case that happens to be Mike Mann but don’t think for one minute that is Mann’s 1.8 million malaria grant, it’s Thomas’s (it suits those who dislike Mann to think so though). Most of the money will go on grad students and post-docs.
You guys are all wrong, you are letting historical facts and common sense get in the way of “good science”.
AGW is unprecedented, therefore the medieval ice age did not exist, nor did the little ice age. Any evidence for is just conspiracy talk and bad science.
And here you go again, letting your facts dictate to us scientists what we know to be true and this discussion is over because we know all. AGW causes everything, geez, everyone knows that, and anything bad that happens is because of humans. There is no outside influence on the environment other then us, so please take your “conspiracy” beliefs on malaria and keep them to yourselves. You are misleading the public and should be jailed for war crimes. It is high treason to doubt the great and powerful “Mann”. Malaria was caused in Russia because of local weather patterns that turned it into a tropical jungle for 20 years, everyone knows that…Geez.
Smokey,
They said upper “layer” not surface.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
From 2003 to 2008 it clearly went up. Of course from 2005 to 2010 it clearly went down. Oh and there’s that change from one data set to the argo data set in 2005 or so…?
This whole thing is so corrupt. Mann gets his hands on almost $2 million.
If this was anyone or anything else, these same people would be screaming their heads off.
OT
I’ve been saying this for years, now I finally have some serious backup.
It’s the Sun, Stupid
“Four years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly skeptical that humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were reluctant to go public with their views. Often, they refused to be quoted at all, saying they feared for their funding, or they feared other recriminations from climate scientists in the doomsayer camp. When the skeptics agreed to be quoted at all, they often hedged their statements, to give themselves wiggle room if accused of being a global warming denier. Scant few were outspoken about their skepticism.
No longer.
Scientists, and especially solar scientists, are becoming assertive. Maybe their newfound confidence stems from the Climategate emails, which cast doomsayer-scientists as frauds and diminished their standing within academia. Maybe their confidence stems from the avalanche of errors recently found in the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, destroying its reputation as a gold standard in climate science. Maybe the solar scientists are becoming assertive because the public no longer buys the doomsayer thesis, as seen in public opinion polls throughout the developed world. Whatever it was, solar scientists are increasingly conveying a clear message on the chief cause of climate change: It’s the Sun, Stupid.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/21/its-the-sun-stupid/
It is my impression that Dr. Mann is key to this study not because of his subject expertise but his other qualities:
1 he has skill in formatting information to persuade a broad audience
2 he knows the ropes and has the connections to draw government funding
3 he has name recognition and will guarentee media coverage of the results
4 his study results will be assured to show a causal relationship
5 government will get what it is paying for