Climate Change: Bigger health threat than AIDS, malaria

Capps’ district is perhaps the most tortured geographically of the entire Congress. Redistricting will likely fix the problem.

Things like this make me happy to be an EX-Californian.
But then… I’m ashamed that my state re-elected Senator Reid.
I don’t know what’s worse, stupidity or evil.

In spite of being snipped, the direction of the the first comment is blindingly obvious.

[snip – don’t hassle the lady, she can’t help how she looks – Anthony]

Well, if there was any uncertainty left that the Democrats are well on the road to getting thoroughly trounced at the next federal election, then Rep. Capps is doing nothing to dispel it. The way things are going, the Republicans could choose Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich or Groucho Marx as the next presidential candidate and still romp in.

Griz says:
April 6, 2011 at 7:07 pm

Things like this make me happy to be an EX-Californian.
But then… I’m ashamed that my state re-elected Senator Reid.
I don’t know what’s worse, stupidity or evil.

And I have it on good authority that Senator Reid absolutely believes he won his last race to “finish the Lord’s work” in the senate. Now how messed up is that?? (Another example of spin/spin/spin/spin/spin?)

The woman is clearly what Lenin called a
“useful idiot”.

The Lancet is part of the giant publishing house Elsevier. They commissioned a report in 2009 to coincide with Copenhagen. A part of their executive summary……
Climate change could be the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Effects on health of climate change will be felt by most populations in the next decades and put the lives and wellbeing of billions of people at increased risk. During this century, the earth’s average surface temperature rises are likely to exceed the safe threshold of 2°C above pre-industrial average temperature.
This report outlines the major threats—both direct and indirect—to global health from climate change through changing patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, vulnerable shelter and human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population migration. Although vector-borne diseases will expand their reach and death tolls, the indirect effects of climate change on water, food security, and extreme climatic events are likely to have the biggest effect on global health.
A new advocacy and public health movement is needed urgently to bring together governments, international agencies, non-governmental organisations, communities, and academics from all disciplines to adapt to the effects of climate change on health.
Certainly well up there in advocacy, wouldn’t hurt circulation either.
I don’t mind adapting to a change in our climate, it is just that now we can, and should, base this adaptation on sound science.

joe says:
April 6, 2011 at 7:55 pm
lol, was going to comment on the pic but i guess that’s not gonna fly….
i do wonder where they get these folks…
Joe, the answer to your question is: From my district. Now tell me what my penance is. Maybe whenever I leave the state, I should wear two paper bags over my head (in case one of them tears). Although I voted against them both, I sincerely apologize to all Americans for sending Capps (dumb) and Boxer (dumber) to the US Congress. My only mitigating circumstance is that I had nothing to do with Reid.

There is something about all the ‘safe’ levels that really bother me. I moved to Oz from the UK because the UK is cold and pretty dreary, weather wise (I’ll keep my views on people to myself). I am now in Sydney, and it is much warmer.
People brought things to Oz from the UK to over the last couple of centuries. Things have grown. Most of these do pretty well. They did not all die off. Why will a couple of C kill everything and make everything else ill if a good 10C change does not, eh?
Yes, yes, I know that some things may not have adapted well, but can you show me data for anything that did not? Most trees are flourishing, although they do get odd ideas about what season they are in. Some flower in autumn, for example. They live. Our garden has flowers of one kind or another all year round. We even have oranges and lemons which ripen in the middle of winter (since it is a bit too cold for them here to ripen earlier). Things adapt!
Don’t get me started on the rabbits, foxes and cane toads, either!

Where do they get these folks? They are “manufactured… Yes that’s right…
Take this fellow the director of The Canadian Association of Physicians for The Environment (CAPE) — Gideon Foreman:
http://www.themarknews.com/authors/117-gideon-forman

Mr. Forman holds a Master’s degree in philosophy from McGill University. He interned at The Nation – America’s oldest weekly journal – and studied creative writing at the Banff Centre for the Arts. From 1997-2004, he was Vice President of Strategic Communications Inc., a firm that provides political consulting and fundraising advice to the non-profit sector. In 1999, Strategic Communications was named to The Profit 100 as one of Canada’s fastest growing firms.
In 2004, he became Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). Under his leadership, CAPE won a gold medal at the 2006 Canadian Environment Awards. In 2007, he was the co-winner of a Virtuoso Award from the International Association of Business Communicators (London, England). He is currently a Judge for the Green Toronto Awards. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Forum, and The Toronto Star, among other publications.
Now CAPE is involved in many good works — banning pesticides, weed killers, demonizing Coal Generation of Electrical Power…
Their objectives?
http://www.cape.ca/about.html
CAPE’s Objectives
1. To educate physicians on environmental issues, providing them with both accurate information and a framework for thinking about environmental problems
2. To prepare spokespersons to comment on the health implications of environmental issues in an accurate and rigorous manner
3. To serve as a “think tank” for considering the health implications of environmental issues
4. To provide a forum in which physicians can meet and discuss health issues associated with environmental problems together with non-physician colleagues who have the knowledge and insight they need
5. To advocate certain positions or courses of action.
Makes you all warm and fuzzy — doesn’t it? Of course they are the people who claim that the Coal Fired power plants of Ontario are killing thousands of people every year. Dr. Ross McKitrick looked at the claims and found they did not stand up to statistical analysis.
Indeed, he found that if you backcast using their methodology he found that the deaths caused by “coal fired air pollution” exceed the actual number of deaths in previous years.
Beware “Physicians” bearing climate studies. It may actually be someone with a bent for creative writing.

I thought I was unelectable, but I was very very wrong. Bless her heart. She looks happy in there.

Bedtime here, but she looks like a certifible, complete loon to me, ala Nancy P from the same geographic neighborhood. What is it about Californians that makes me want to??? L

Is it another case of ‘band wagon climbing’?
The Lancet may be correct in this case though, cold weather produces more deaths than warm. Oh for a little global warming.

The Lancet article that Mrs Capps worked from is based on nonsense. Humans have always thrived when not battling cold climates.
As an example, the district where I grew up in New Zealand is oddly similar to the South-East of the UK where I currently reside, but has a slightly warmer climate with a much higher rainfall. The first English and European settlers cleared the standing native bush (forests) to create grassland farms and planted English trees to shelter their stock and to provide reminders of their home country. Both trees and settlers flourished in the warmer, wetter climate. During WWI, medical surveys of troops noted that the Colonial troops were taller, broader and with fewer health problems than their cold-country cousins. No doubt the diet the colonials enjoyed was a significant factor, but warmer climates suits humans admirably.
To gain an inkling of the effects of climactic cooling, read some of the histories of English villages that were recorded during the LIA. Cooling is scary.

The climate change to worry about is cold.
As one drives about the central UK, it’s pretty obvious that the warmth-needing plants, we’ve been planting in our gardens over the past decade or so, haven’t done too well over this last winter especially.
The eucalyptus we planted in our garden about 15 years ago, split its trunk bark and expired, several other shrubs (can’t say what type, labels have long gone!) have succumbed too. I’ve seen no end of dead palm-type trees in city gardens, many of my circle of friends have noted that they’ve had to replant this spring, as the effects of last winter have become apparent.

The same lunacy is happening in the UK corridors of the British Veterinary Association. Watch this space.

CRS, Dr.P.H. says: April 6, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Pardon my ignorance of epidemiology Dr P.H., but would you explain how tobacco has killed more human (souls) than injury, inc direct human violence and industrial illnesses/accidents and other infectious diseases?
In regard to doctors, given the expectations of living from the abundant slice of a GDP how could anyone doubt that they expand their repertoire to accommodate the latest ‘findings in research? Freudian to say the least.
In many other countries, where number of sorcerers/per head population is more prevalent these peddlars make their living from ‘healing’ by directly dealing with the ‘illnesses’ they instil or allow construction of. Use of [alleviation of] fear, guilt, the denial of individual expression and/or negation of science are promulgated. Such use of cultural devices and real bodily practices framed in local lores (laws) are extremely powerful and extremely painful. And [communally] humiliating, as intended, generally to the women and youth. Sorcery, like rubbish science ensures maintenance of maximum control over swathes of the local human population and, naturally control of a local economy.
Dr P.H would understand this if he has worked with Hiatian people.

A few years ago the head of the AMA got on a gun control kick on the basis that guns in the home killed children. When I noted my doctor’s questionnaire asked how many guns I owned I asked him why he didn’t include swimming pools and automobiles. After all, they kill children too. He answered that the AMA had urged its members to give gun safety talks to patients who owned guns.
I am an antique gun collector and a retired Marine. I don’t need no stinking doctor to give me safety lectures.
I fired him.
Surely human health is a subject difficult enough to master. Let’s encourage the medical profession to stick to that.
Perhaps if your doctor gives you a lecture on global warming it is time to find another doctor.

The real threat from ‘climate change’ is global cooling. That is the threat. Warmth is good, just ask the Romans who lived through their warm period.

Your first mistake is expecting rational thinking from an elected California Democrat.

By far the greatest killer of mankind is socialism. A pretty good top limit of the number of people that have ever existed is about 20 billion. How many people died in the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, WW I, WWII, Communist China cultural revolution, Latin American wars, SE Asian wars, African famines and malaria outbreaks, Former Soviet Union internal programs and pogroms, etc. The list goes on. Just a quick estimate, it looks like we could be talking about 5 to 10 % of all of mankind!

As always consider the source. The Lancet is hardly to be trusted anymore.
Remember the 2004 and 2006 articles about casualties in Iraq that came out just before the elections in those years? The 2006 article “estimate the number of “excess” Iraqi deaths after the 2003 invasion at 426,369 to 793,663; the study said the most likely figure was near the middle of that range: 654,965. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs, or U.S. air strikes. ”
I’ve never trusted them since.

I remember a paleontology professor talking about how a given genus often evolves weird, flamboyant, almost absurd species just before going extinct. The alarmists are in that phase.

They will surely find a few academic types willing to take paid work as part of the “physicians against climate change” advertising campaign. Most front line workers, however, are probably too busy dealing with injury and disease. In fact, I imagine at least a few doctors would be insulted at the suggestion they spend time away from their patient’s health concerns to champion the cause of climate change. I would ask my own doctor about it just for laughs, but I suspect it would’nt much brighten his day.

@Jessie says:
April 7, 2011 at 3:53 am
CRS, Dr.P.H. says: April 6, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Pardon my ignorance of epidemiology Dr P.H., but would you explain how tobacco has killed more human (souls) than injury, inc direct human violence and industrial illnesses/accidents and other infectious diseases?
———
REPLY Please re-read my post, I said that tobacco has killed more souls than global warming is ever likely to. I’ll stick by that, thanks.
Here’s some reading if interested: http://www.who.int/tobacco/health_priority/en/index.html
As an ex-smoker, I have a license to be grumpy & mean about the topic.
Regardless, the claims about AGW being a public health problem are just sheer hoo-ha. My expectation is that a slightly warmer world will increase crop productivity in many areas (Univ of IL’s conclusion, not mine), and have other benefits.

DesertYote says: “No wonder our elitist class is terrified of change!”
April 7, 2011 at 9:16 am
There has been no change . . . the elitist class has it’s own behavioral cycles that the “commoners” have fallen for . . . . for thousands of years . . .
I’ll give you a clue . . . all the wealth is in the hands of the few . . . . again . . . . they are the “players club”. . . .
I just can not give this subject justice . . . . your “elitist class” have already taken the money and ran . . .
Even now, Congress does not understand fully that they are trying to pick up the piece’s . . . . of what got broken 50 years ago . . . The very fact that Al Gore got away with what he got away with is a symptom . . . not the cause . . .
When an issue, any issue, comes up . . . you don’t ask who’s saying it until you first ask . . . . Is what they are saying Right or Wrong?. . . .

I worked in Lois Capps’ district for 15 years and know that she inherited her position from her husband, and enjoys wide support from the rich liberals of the Santa Barbara area and the ignorant majority of students and faculty from the local UC campus, so we will be stuck with her “until death do us part”.

As a physician myself, I advise my colleagues to remember that there is no FDA to audit the truth of Climate Change industry’s claims. If that is OK, then they should be arguing to get rid of the FDA approval process for drug company products.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the photograph of Lois Capps (D Calif) appears to be a picture that was released by by her.
If that is the case, I have to consider her judgement so bad that I would have to completely disregard her judgement on any subject.
Before you judge me a misogynist, would you like to look at that over your morning ham and eggs?

Dave Andrews. I am quite sure you realise the perspective of the great majority of posters on WUWT. If not, I’ll recap for you –
warming = good = less health hazards
cooling = not good = more health hazards
Is that clear enough for you?

Instead of questioning the hypothetical effects of global warming, one should put the question “What is the effect on health of the measures already taken to ban the carbon emisson?”
1. Several diesel engines are more economical in consumption than gasoline engines and eject less CO2. On an annual basis, the difference in emission reaches 0.2 to 0.5 ton CO2 per car (mean distance about 15,000 kilometers a year). So, some governments grant large fiscal advantages to owners of diesel engines.
But diesel engines pump out a lot of harmful particles: NOx (nitrous oxides) and particulate matter (“fine dust”). Thus, the effect of such policy is air pollution with harmful consequences for all road users: bronchitis, asthma, heart infarct, cancer, shorter life. In Belgium, more than 60% of the cars are diesel engines. There are thousands of victims due to the noxious air in cities.
2. And which are the effects of the introduction of biofuel? Vast and increasing amounts of land and agricultural production are diverted into making ethanol. This leads to higher cost for food production and to more poverty.
“One way or the other, agricultural lands and forests are being diverted away from smallhold producers, fishers and pastoralists to commercial purposes, and leading to displacement, hunger and poverty.”
“Land grabbing – even where there are no related forced evictions – denies land for local communities, destroys livelihoods, reduces the political space for peasant oriented agricultural policies and distorts markets towards increasingly concentrated agribusiness interests and global trade rather than towards sustainable peasant/smallhold production for local and national markets.”
(http://farmlandgrab.org/12200 )
3. I hope that in the coming winters, enough electricity will still be available in countries that promote green energy (such as the United Kingdom).
Are these measures taken by the governments not much more harmful for health than the phantom that Capps points out? She should know better.