Climate change a 'fundamental' health risk, expert warns – "[act now] if we are going to maintain this planet as a liveable habitat for humans."

Tarun, here’s his bio on the internet. I’m assuming we can post it all, because he did….
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Anthony J McMichael
National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health
College of Medicine, Biology and Environment
The Australian National University
Canberra
ACT 0200
AUSTRALIA
Email: tony.mcmichael@anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 (02) 6125.4578
Fax +61 (02) 6125.5608
Website: http://nceph.anu.edu.au/
Professor Tony McMichael, medical graduate and epidemiologist, holds a national research fellowship at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is also Honorary Professor of Climate Change and Human Health at the University of Copenhagen. He was previously Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1994-2001). He is currently President of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. His past research interests have spanned dietary, social and, in particular, environmental epidemiology. In the 1980s he led a major study in Australia that identified the adverse impact of environmental lead exposure on childhood neurocognitive development. During 1990-1992 he chaired the Scientific Council of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (Lyon, France). His research now focuses particularly on the health risks of climate change. During 1993-2006 he played a leading role in health risk assessment for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. (For this work he shared, approximately, one two-thousandth of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize!) He is a regular advisor and contributor to the climate change-related work of the World Health Organization.
In addition to many published research papers and book chapters, his most recent books are (sole-author) Human Frontiers and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and (senior editor and author) Climate Change and Human Health: Risks and Responses (Geneva: WHO, 2003).

The Sydney Morning herald is full of this sort of trash every day. This rag is ridiculously pro Labor (and the AGW scam). The only reason I buy it is because of the cryptic crosswords.

Our warmist author, like the rest of them, needs a far better understanding of physics in order to realise that there is no warming effect that can be attributed to carbon dioxide et al, for which I herewith (and forever more) refuse to give that name starting with Gr… Indeed it make me grrrrrrrr …h!
The most glaring mistake they make is in saying the atmosphere has warmed the surface (like a blanket) from -18C to +15C. The first figure is a theoretical temperature (call it small t) which is only related to the intensity of radiation via the S-B law which only relates to perfect blackbodies. Such blackbodies are usually other bodies in space which are perfectly insulated by space so there is no heat loss by conduction. In contrast the Earth’s surface is continually losing heat to the first millimetre of the atmosphere by diffusion (see Wikipedia “Heat Transfer” second paragraph) and also into the depths of the Earth’s crust or the oceans. So there is less energy left to radiate.
The actual temperature (call it capital T) is a totally different entity without direction for a start. So you cannot just subtract and get T – t = 33 deg.C, because t is not a real temperature. Without carbon dioxide and its colleagues, thermal energy would still diffuse from the surface into the atmosphere, greatly reducing the radiation, as it does. In fact the net radiation from the surface is probably less than 25 W/m^2, so what value of little t would that give you? Very cold I assure you.
This is why an IR thermometer cannot calculate temperature by measuring the intensity of the radiation and using the Stefan-Boltzmann (S-B) law. It can only do so by measuring the frequency and then using Wien’s Displacement Law which says absolute temperature is proportional to the peak frequency.
So, given the major fallacy in the warmists “science” when they calculated and widely promulgated that 33 degree “difference” between apples and oranges, what confidence could we possibly have in any other deductions of theirs? They are also wrong in assuming radiation from a cold atmosphere can warm an already much warmer surface.
The atmosphere cools the Earth by reducing the amount of incident solar radiation which gets through. Hop out of a spacecraft and see how hot you feel in the sun’s rays. But radiation “temperature” is a very different thing from ambient temperature, both in space and, for example, at the top of a high mountain where the Sun’s rays might feel like 40C but the actual temperature of the air might be -15C.
It is important to remember that a measure of radiation is a measure of energy (Watts) transferred through a unit cross section (one square metre) and it is thus a vector with both magnitude and direction, nothing like a temperature. The only “connection” with temperature can be made if a true blackbody is emitting it, and that body is not also losing thermal energy by conduction, diffusion, convection, evaporation or any other means. If it does lose energy in such ways then, at the very least, you would need much more information before making any inferences about its temperature.
Yes, the whole Earth plus atmosphere system looks like a blackbody from outer space and some average radiating temperature could be calculated by remembering that it is a spinning sphere, not a flat disk as warmists treat it as being. But whatever temperature is calculated is merely an average temperature somewhere in the atmosphere.

Is this rodent McMichael fishing for an all expense paid holiday in Rio with this? Or does he already have that arranged?

McMichael is like most of our academics here in Australia. They adopt the cause which promises the highest grant money.
The Labor government is ruthless if the right conclusions are not presented.
See the C.S.I.R.O. for true sycophantic science.

McMichael says in the paper linked by Gerald Wilhite, above (I needed a good laugh – thanks) that “For mean temperature increases of 4–6 °C or more, it is implausible that human biology, as currently constituted, could adapt physiologically”. So don’t move from Chicago to Florida ‘cos you’re gonna DIE. He also says that “the hottest places tend to be dry”- he’s not heard of the Amazon basin nor the Congo then? Those dry, hot places he’s fixated on also tend to have very low populations – I wonder why?

Follow the money…..
RESEARCH: Recent and current major grants
Programme grant: Climate change, ozone depletion and human health Investigators AJ McMichael and Graham Bentham (chief investigators), plus /Prof Astrid Fletcher/Dr Mike Hulme/Dr Clive Davies/Professor Andy Haines/Dr Stephen Dorling Funder Medical Research Council & Natural Environment Research Council (UK): 5-year Cooperative Group Programme Grant, held at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Amount £213,924 ($600,000) p.a. Duration Feb/2000 to Feb/2005 Mortality impact of heatwaves in low- and middle-income countries Investigators AJ McMichael (chief inv.), plus Dr Mike Hulme, Professor Graham Bentham, Dr Paul Wilkinson, Dr Ben Armstrong Funder Medical Research Council (UK) (Component Grant) Amount £145,416 ($400,000) p.a. for 2 years Duration May 2000 to April 2004 Environmental and social determinants of vulnerability to mortality in the elderly in winter and during thermal extremes Investigators AJ McMichael (chief inv.), plus Professor Astrid Fletcher/DrPaul Wilkinson/Dr Ben Armstrong/Ms Sari Kovats Funder Medical Research Council (UK) (Strategic Grant) Amount £168,028 ($500,000) p.a. for 2 years Duration May 2000 to April 2004 Health impacts of climate change in Australia and environs Funder Australian Department of Health and Ageing (competitive tender) Investigators AJ McMichael, with collaborators at CSIRO Atmospheric Research and Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre Amount A$60K. Duration April-August 2002.

paul says:January 30, 2012 at 7:08 pm
So he thinks its possible to mitigate CO2 to produce a temperature outcome i.e. control the thermostat. So can I have a 3 degree increase because i hate the cold
It works for me. I’ve been burning wood and the CO2 is keeping my house toasty warm. Still cold as heck outside for some reason; lower concentration of exothermic CO2, I guess.

Isopropyl alcohol freezes at -89C. If someone can find the phase diagram for isopropanol, you have people in AK mix up alcohol-distilled water cups and take pictures of which on freezes as evidence of reaching -80C.

MAGB says:
January 30, 2012 at 7:03 pm
“McMichael is usually a sensible academic ”
He is probably a rational, self-serving, intelligent being who just needs to push the old grant mill some more to be able to maintain his lazy, luxurious lifestyle; i.e. a rent-seeker. When he’s flush with cash, he’s probably willing to do honest research for a while until cash runs out again.

I recently read an article of a similar nature:
“Denying the links between greenhouse gas emissions and man-made climate change “is akin to denying the links between HIV/Aids and unprotected sex, smoking and lung cancer, or alcohol consumption and liver disease”, according the the UK Climate and Health Council.”
http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=20299

It’s just that we’ve got the world’s biggest carbon tax due to start this July and the Prime Minister is on the nose. They are still hoping to convince the electorate that the tax is necessary. I expect lots more silly stories.

“The second statement of reaching average increase of three to four degree in a decade , well that just goes to show the authors ignorance or ideological bend.”
I think this was misread, this was for the century and the statement and article doesn’t contain the word “decade”.

The Sydney Morning Herald is excellent material for the bottom of bird cages. It is so far to the left that it will soon appear on the right as it has nowhere else to go. It is not taken seriously here in Australia except by those who take themselves seriously.The same characters who scream for police protection when people receive dangerous items in the mail and they do not! (Why have I been left out? Do the senders of these items not know who I am?).

Oh folks, so sorry…
It grieves me to my soul when people in my profession come out with drivel like this.

To me, the hoot lies in the fact that, not only is public money lavished on combating “climate change”, but a second massive chunk of money is “invested” in seeking and attempting to communicate with other populated planets. Get this straight, SETI: If the mean temperature of any planet that attracts your attention is more than half a degree adrift of that of earth, the place would be a skeleton-strewn, lifeless void. And if CO2 exceeds 390 ppm by volume – Unimaginable! Further consideration would be absurd. Talk of the left hand being out of touch with the right hand!
Geoff Alder

IMHO, CAGW must bere some of the responsibility for the flood events that happened in QLD a year ago, and when I say CAGW I mean the the hysterical scare campaign surrounding it, and the warmers promoting it, as the weather will do, what the weather will do.
As someone living in the area I can tell you that we had been (and still are ) confronted on a daily basis with unfounded, baseless, illogical, and scientifically unsound stories if impending doom.
Up untill late 2010 we had been though a nasty and extended drought, the kind that hit the region a hundred or so years before, this was NOT unusual, but with a much larger population and a complete lack of infrastructure improvements for over 30 years, things were getting tough. At one stage our dams were below 10%, in Toowoomba where I live the enviromentalists and far lefts saw this as a golden opportunity to force their ideals upon us, we were told by Tim Flannery ( Australia’s answer to James Hansan) and others that drought was the new norm, that we would never see regular rains again, and that our dams would never fill again and could no longer be relied upon for water supply,
Heres an example:In 2007,
Flannery predicted cities such as Brisbane would never again have dam-filling rains, as global warming had caused “a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas” and made the soil too hot, “so even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems … “.
Our mayor, pushed by the head water engineer and encouraged by the state Government saw fit to declare our new water supply would be to recycle our sewerage and pump it into one of our pristine dams, this is not the place to go into that, I could write a whole book on the scandels that surrounded the issue, including mis-appropriation of funds, vested interests, lies, manipulation, defamation, use of the terms, “flatearthers”, “deniers”, “ludites” etc, secrecy, figure “adjustment”, (sounding familiar?). Anyhow Toowoomba thankfully rebelled and stopped the project, but the hype didn’t stop there, it continued to Brisbane where a recycled sewerage plant was built against the populations will along with desal plants etc etc. Big green had managed to whip our dumb pollies into a state where they were convinced that they were literally saving our lives and that they were going to be held up as saints. The State of Queensland was in total AGW meltdown and when we finally started to get rain in 2010 it was considered to be too good to be true, while the final results from the enquiry are yet to be aired, it is almost certain this fearmongering lead to the decisions made on January 10 and the events that unfolded.
Toowoomba is in the basin of an extinct volcano, basically a bowl with a little hole that drains north west, we really didn’t get THAT much rain on that day, 4-8 inches depending on who you ask, but it fell very fast, and our drains could not hold it as there had been no allowance or improvements to cope with the massive number of new homes and drainage required for all the extra hard surfaces. But lets face it, it was NEVER going to rain again, Tim Flannery said so, why waste money on that?
I was at work that day, we had experienced minor flooding in our home workshops a week before so I was watching the local radar closely, when I noticed a massive rain event develop, during the morning I rang my wife and said do what you can to divert water, we are going to cop it and brisbane is going to flood, I have never made a prediction like it before and I have never seen a rain event like it in my life. NO one working in meteorology could have missed it. But it was ignored. The Dam above Brisbane (Wivenhoe), built after the 1974 floods was designed to be part water supply and part flood mitigation, but it was already above full water storage capacity and wasn’t being drained fast enough, by the time everyone realised ( later that evening) it was too late, Wivenhoe is a packed earth dam with a concrete “face lining” which works fine untill it’s full, if water flows over the edge it erodes the wall and the dam colapses, by the time action was taken the dam had to have all flood gates opened to prevent “brimming” and a total failure of the dam, Wivenhoe was no longer flood mitigation as the outflows matched or exceeded inflows, something went horribly wrong and people died as a result, IMHO the fear caused by CAGW had a definite role to play, and while the event was natural, and infact nowhere near the biggest flood we have had, the actions of a few resulted in a magnification of the effects and a “needlessly large disaster”
Climate disaster can apparently be man made, we just haven’t been looking at it right.

Perhaps the Gentleman concerned should also consider, as an epidemiologist, the effect of the forthcoming food shortage caused by the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. As a worshipper at the altar of CAGW, he will be aware that the draft agreement tabled by the UN at Durban targetted 300 ppmv CO2 eq as the desirable level of greenhouse gases. [ para 24(h) ]
388.8ppmv CO2 plus 1.774 x 25 CH4 plus 0.319 x 298 N2O = 531.5 ppmv CO2 eq
Reducing that to 300 ppmv is a 43.55% reduction.
Assuming [ but unlikely ] that all greenhouse gases reduce proportionately, the desired CO2 level becomes 219.3ppmv. However, I suggest it likely that putting impervious covers over bogs for methane reduction, and culling methane-producing animals would hit strenuous resistance from the Green elements, so CO2 would have to be further reduced to compensate. For discussion, say 200 ppmv of CO2 would be necessary.
University of Illinois – 29 June 2006 – CO2 increase in open-field trials does show an increase in production, but not as much as enclosed volumes such as greenhouses.
Ohio State University – 3 October 2008 – CO2 is a mixed blessing in that crop plants did increase production under increased CO2 but, apart from legumes, did not take up nitrogen proportionately, so people and animals would have to eat a greater volume for the same nutritional uptake.
Peres-Lopez, in a defended PhD thesis studying barley, showed that CO2 increased crop production, increased resistance to saline environments { a curse of irrigation }, and reduced water demand by plants.
Gerhard & Ward, University of Kansas – Biomass reduction in C3 plants [ about 85% of all plants ] ranges from 40% to 70% if CO2 reduces to 180 – 220 ppmv, and as much as 92% at 150ppmv. The trials were carried out with all other plant requirements held at optimum.
Craig D. Idso – Centre for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change – 8 June 2011 – is essentially a summary of trials, and a projection to 2050 when world population is expected to reach about 9 billion. The conclusion is that, as plant life is the foundation of the food chain, there is no way that 9 billion people can be fed without INCREASING carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere.
The question to be decide appears to me to be :- Do we allow a doubling of CO2 and adapt to the 1.25 degree temperature increase which the evidence seems to show, and have some chance of feeding the expected population, or do we proceed with mass starvation on a genocidal scale that Stalin, Hitler, Pol-Pot, et al could do no more than fantasise about ? I wonder if the Gentleman concerned would dare answer it.

During the Dark Ages, after the Romans abandoned England in 400AD because it was getting colder and Rome was under threat, any small temperature change would spawn famine and pestilence but we have advanced since then and we do not live in mud huts without sewage disposal. ( Africa has millions living in these conditions but that is down to corrupt government not climate change)
We are now well able to adapt to climate change because of technology and knowledge gained since 400AD. There are more problems to sort out than climate change which will continue in its own natural way.

Surely if the Australians were really worried about climate change they would be thinking about its implications for cricket – or are your sports scientists still waiting to hear if their applications for grants for research in this area have been successful or not?

There’s a little known argument that the expansion of the bubonic plague and other diseases in the mediaeval period was more related to legal changes that anything climatological. The theory argues that prior to the plague most urban and riral settlements used wild harvested reed, fern and herb bedding and thatch. These crop came from unowned commons and comercial church or freeman run farms.
Reed thatch is rat and insect repellent. Fern and herb bedding either fresh or soaked and dryed is also insect and rat repellent. Over the years taxes were inposed on there’s wild crops and people switched hay wicth was not rat and insect repellant.
Kings etc also taxed rabit hunting and effecivily claimed ownership of such game, not just the kings deer. This was unenforcable without banning weases and stotes, both semi domesicated for the purpose. With these rat eating animals caged, banned or taxed the way was cleared for the rats speared carrying the plague. Where these laws were early the plague was early. Where they were late it was late. The laws became popular as the crisis made normal tax revenues plumite. The trade with the east was also inpart due to government interferance, exhaustive taxation of some europian markets forcing merchants to look to the middle east where the rats and the plague was already endemic. http://mises.org/daily/3861
Sorry I can’t find the main reference the theory was raised many years ago and it was obcure then.

Sorry about the typos in my post for some reason firefoxes spell checker has not survived the latest up date. lol. …legal changes that anything climatological. should be than not that.
“…switched hay wicth was not rat…” Which not wicth. Dyslexia stinks.

Let Australia commit suicide if it wants. It’s part of the natural process. The conspiracy of speculators and pseudo-scientists was able to flourish in most Western countries because there was lots of surplus wealth around. In many Euro countries the conspiracy has eliminated manufacturing, thus smashing the economy down to bankruptcy, which eliminated the food for the conspiracy. (Also eliminated food and fuel for lots of poor people, but the elites don’t notice that.)
Obviously Australia hasn’t collapsed yet, so we just have to give the conspiracy time. It will smash the country sooner or later, and when that happens the Carbon Exchanges and the Government Grants will dry up.

Y’know, going back over my history books, I’m sure it said that most modern Australians can trace their family histories back to the UK. Summers in England rarely exceed 30*C; the yearly average is around 10*C. WINTER temperatures in Australia don’t usually average below about 18*C, and in the summer it’s usually 32-40*C.
Mr McMichael presumably must subscribe to some odd theories about human evolution if 18th-19th Century Brits could survive – and thrive – in spite of such massive temperature changes, yet modern humans cannot. Ditto all the crops & domesticated animals we’ve transported around the world in the last few thousand years of history.
Note: UK & Aus temperatures from Wikipedia.
McMichael declares that “humans cannot live apart from nature, remote from the great web of life.” He frets that we are too distant “from the rhythms of natural systems.” He speaks of environmental degradation as “an unprecedented moral problem” and says people in rich countries live a wasteful, “ecologically distorted lifestyle.”
Nature, insofar as it can be assigned human values at all, is cruel, capricious, and utterly, ruthlessly devoted to evolution by natural selection. Personally, I’m looking forwards to the day when I can enjoy a vat-grown steak on demand, whilst living in a Lagrange point colony (or maybe Olympus Mons… whichever takes my fancy, really). And the steak will taste better, be healthier, and cheaper, than any cow-sourced steak that’s ever existed.

sorry, should be “biggest recorded since 1974 – no mention of the floods in 1890’s, which were higher”

The real “Herald” of Sydney is the Member for the seat of Warringah since 1994. Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition in the Australian House of Representatives and federal leader of the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. Abbott has blasted Gillard’s fantasy politics, with some straight talikng at the NPC, and laid out the ground for the abolition of Carbon Taxes, and a revival of Australia’s Coal Mining, Steel, and Heavy Engineering Industries.

“The Coalition’s plan to reduce the cost of living pressures on families, is to
take the carbon tax off their power and transport and make government
live within its means.” – Tony Abbott MHR (Sydney – Warringah)

Morons like this continue their nonsense and will until there are SANCTIONS.
Worse, thes self serving alarmists bring both the Scientific and Academic community into disrepute, and that just may be genuinely and really harmful … The boy who cried Wolf!
MFG, omb

having been on the receiving end of such verbiage (the latest here in Greece is that if it get very hot, wheat growth will be a problem, or mammals will shrink, or whatever) it sounds like the wind and photovoltaics crowd are doing some target softening ahead of electricity rate hikes

A read of “The Little Ice Age” shows how destructive climate change can be when it heads toward the colder side. On the other hand a bit more CO2 and a longer growing season would probably be beneficial. Methinks the gentleman is barking up the wrong tree.
But then again, he lives in the Land of The Harrop™ so what do you expect? Thankfully there are at least some Australians that are sane even if Barrie and Julia aren’t.

Please note that Dr. McMichael is not a physicist or climate scientist. He just takes the “consensus,” assumes all impacts of higher temperatures are bad and then runs with it. So the comments about the physics of CAGW in this thread are a bit off the mark, since he is not addressing that issue. There is plenty of criticism that can be heaped upon him, however, for the health conclusions he has reached. Like that ridiculous malaria issue. I thought we had gotten beyond that……

Perhaps his next bout of flatus will dislodge his head from its present uncomfortable enclosure.

Meanwhile, a lot of people have died as a result of the severely cold conditions in Eastern Europe…

Mosquitoes are not the problem, it is the epidemic of intellectual parasites that threaten our future that proliferate the swanky apartment blocks and chic restaurants of Canberra and build their nests like this one:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/department-of-hot-air-costing-90-million/story-e6freuy9-1225859616207
But I have a strong feeling that a massive delousing program may soon be starting and we may see the end of the plague.

THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE, Full Trailer