Climate Change Scare continues down-under.
Story submitted by Tarun Singh
I thought it might be worthwhile to highlight another alarmist propaganda being peddled for science.
The below excerpts are from a news item warning on “climate change”
A LEADING Australian disease expert says prompt action on climate change is paramount to our survival on Earth.
Australian National University Epidemiologist Tony McMichael has conducted an historical study that suggests natural climate change over thousands of years has destabilised civilisations via food shortages, disease and unrest.
“We haven’t really grasped the fact that a change in climate presents a quite fundamental threat to the foundations of population health,” Prof McMichael said.
“These things have happened before in response to fairly modest changes to climate.
“Let’s be aware that we really must take early action if we are going to maintain this planet as a liveable habitat for humans.”
I would like to highlight a few things that I noticed :
a- There is no mention of the Paper’s title or reference provided. I went through the online website of PNAS at http://www.pnas.org/content/current#BiologicalSciencesEvolution and couldnt find a refernce to Tony McMichael , so unless I missed somthing most readers like me can’t verify what is IN THE PAPER.
b – The article has an underlying theme that paints “Climate change” , as a variable that can be controlled by Human interference , there is ample evidence against it as not all variables are understood regarding the different climatic changes.
c- The author concedes that this has been happening for thousands of years yet says “”Let’s be aware that we really must take early action if we are going to maintain this planet as a liveable habitat for humans.” early action to mitigate what ????
At this point the narrative proceeds:
“With the exception of a few downward spikes of acute cooling due to massive volcanic eruptions, most of the changes have been within a band of about plus or minus three-quarters of a degree centigrade,” he said today.
“Yet we are talking about the likelihood this century of going beyond two degrees centigrade and quite probably, on current trajectory, reaching a global average increase of three to four degrees.”
This is just plain wrong if not deceptively misleading and alarmist.
It has now been accepted that MWP was warmer than now.
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. As we all know that the 3 – 4 degree estimate is based on IPCC projections based on postive feedback which has scince been argued in various papers (lindzen and choi).
The falsehoods and misleading continues with myths then quoted :
“Warming also leads to an increase in infectious diseases as a result of better growth conditions for bacteria and the proliferation of mosquitoes.”
The entire above statement can be categorically dismissed as alarmist hyperbole. However lets save the laughs for the next:
“Drought can also result in greater contact with rodents searching for scarce food supplies.”
The prof then goes on to explain what he considers important. Prof McMichael has been examining the impact of climate change on population health for 20 years and says it’s not easy to raise awareness of the risk.
“Most of the attention has been of a more limited shorter-term kind relating to things around us like the economy, our property, infrastructure and risks to iconic ecosystems and species.”
So in other words, people are stupid to argue about economy, personal property , infrastructure etc when it comes to CLIMATE CHANGE as its all for GREATER CAUSE.
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A 1/2 degree change has caused some sort of insect, that carries some pathogen, that infects these people……………
Might be that maggot that gets in your ears and eats though to your brain……….
On the other hand, it’s outlandish morons like this one (A LEADING Australian disease expert) that have turned everyone off…..he’s actually a produce clerk a Whole Foods
I think Tony McMichael missed a memo or two….
With solar cycle 25 projections just announced, and with the possibility of the lowest solar minimum in 300 years, this author’s assertion of a 3!! to 4!! C temperature increase this century is absurd; especially in light of negligible global warming since 1997…
Yeah, the Royal MET believes that rising CO2 levels will trump any solar minimum, but that’s a pretty weak hand given all the data to the contrary.
Methinks he doth protest too much….
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9483.full.pdf+html?sid=cb9c4e09-1f9d-4183-9473-df16bf2cd470
Is this ‘Commentary’ the source of his article?
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).
Latitude:
Are you kidding me? He is a produce clerk???????
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.
Anthony McMichael gave a lecture on the above topic on November 1, 2011 in Camberra Australia. I don’t find anything written as this was a lecture attended by the public at large. The lecture report may be here say, to be taken as such and given as much credibility.
Anthony McMichael has “form” – as the Brits would say – when it comes to commitment to the cause”. Nonetheless his dedication has been “honoured” by the IPCC, who – as Donna Laframboise noted in The Delinquent Teenager …, [p. 69 in .pdf, Chapter 29: The Cut-and-Paste Job] – was selected to “oversee the writing of a chapter examining how climate
change might impact human health” in the early ’90’s, notwithstanding his lack of expertise in “climate change”. In a 1993 polemic:
Camburn says:
January 30, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Latitude:
Are you kidding me? He is a produce clerk???????
===============================
yes and no…….. 😉
I was being a jerk…….the part about the maggots is true though
He’s a writer for the IPCC………
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.
The warmist seem to be praying for a large number of large volcanoes in order to explain the effect the coming solar minimum is going to have on the climate. We have seen this in the past month or so of publications, and the reference rate is accelerating. Do they have a backlog of papers sorted by disaster type that they draw from when the data is not going their way?
Is there any recent data to suggest that they will get ‘lucky’ and a series of large volcanoes will occur in the next 7 years and kill millions of people and thus let them off the hook for their lies about carbon dioxide?
On behalf of the majority of normal intelligent Australians let me offer a sincere apology for the continuing torrent of AGW nonsense emerging from this Australian Troll Refuge. I’m sorry but we have no other location in which to put them.
“A LEADING Australian disease expert says prompt action on climate change is paramount to our survival on Earth.”
Yes, many “scientists” and politicians have been shouting “prompt action is needed” since February 2005, when Kyoto Protocol was enacted.
Their SOLE TARGET should have been to suppress the increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentrarion.
However, the time course of CO2 concentration shows NO CHANGE at all over the past SEVEN YEARS:
http://junksciencearchive.com/MSU_Temps/MaunaLoaCO2.png
The upshot is, EVERY ONE OF THEM IS HYPOCRITE.
Is this rodent McMichael fishing for an all expense paid holiday in Rio with this? Or does he already have that arranged?
Thanks Gerald, i’l try and go through the article to see if it relates to the published story.
@Latitude – Thanks , The interesting part is the following
“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.:”
Since Donna Laframboise (the delinquent teenager…) has done such a wonderfull job in cross referencing how the IPCC works (or not), it may be worthwhile to crosscheck the work of prof mcmohan.
And that also probaby explains the penchant to peddle the 3 – 4 degree rise alarmism!
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 is usually a sensible academic but he’s gone off the rails on this. He led a global project called Isothurm,( http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/5/1121.short) which found: “Estimates of the temperature threshold below which cold-related mortality began to increase ranged from 15°C to 29°C; the threshold for heat-related deaths ranged from 16°C to 31°C”.
Which means that people are well-adjusted to temperature – the complete opposite of what he has been saying ever since. The rest of the nonsense about infectious diseases has been demolished by people like Paul Reiter. Australian experts have politely refuted the scare talk on Dengue fever: http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/190_05_020309/rus10887_fm.html
In short, all the talk about health effects of climate change can be safely ignored, together with any health inputs to economic models.
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?
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
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.
With his educational backgroud perhaps he may be qualified to be a clerk, but he obviously knows how to stock a grant. Can anyone find his pea display?
Anyone who has read The Delinquent Teenager knows the name McMichael. His completely debunked malaria scare story is quoted in this PNAS article.
Scratch anything of value in that paper.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that some bright spark associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, declared that a 2C increase in temperature in SE Queensland would lead to a higher death rate.
This was news to all of the folk from the colder southern states of Australia who have migrated to the tropical north of Queensland … that they will now all die.
What is it with academics and stupidity … clearly common sense is not an academic subject !
PS – my wife is an academic with common sense.
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.
What I have understood from
PNAS | May 25, 2010 | vol. 107 | no. 21 | 9483–9484
suggests we cut Anthony J McMichael some slack, until we have a more recent essay / publication.
We are talking about history.