Is there *any* disaster which climate change can’t make worse?
About three days ago I tweeted this:
Waiting for the inevitable opportunistic BS story that #EbolaOutbreak is a result of climate change.
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) August 4, 2014
Eric Worrall writes:
The Washington Post has in my opinion stooped to a new low, by trying to tie the ongoing Ebola misery in Africa to the issue of Climate Change. According to the Post;
“A 2002 study published in the journal of Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing found that sudden shifts from dry to wet conditions were associated with Ebola outbreaks from 1994 to 1996 in tropical Africa.
As the globe warms, precipitation extremes are projected to increase. Periods of drought are expected to become more frequent in some areas while heavy rain events, when the occur, are forecast to become more intense. Presumably, those areas which see precipitation variability increases – with abrupt shifts from extremely dry to extremely wet periods – would be most vulnerable to Ebola outbreaks.” (h/t Breitbart)
Ebola is a horrible disease which is ravaging the poorest people of Africa. The new outbreak, which has demonstrated a frightening ability to spread to new victims, and to infect and kill health workers, may yet become the new global plague we all fear – with every new victim, Ebola improves its ability to strike at our vulnerabilities. We are all at risk.
To try to tie this continent wide tragedy to the promotion of global warming alarm, to exploit a catastrophe which is afflicting the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, and to play on people’s deepest fears, to advance an unrelated political position, is in my opinion a new and disgusting low point in the current standards of what passes for mainstream journalism.
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More perspective for Bob:
http://haicontroversies.blogspot.com/
http://haicontroversies.blogspot.com/2014/08/dialing-it-up-to-eleven.html
http://reason.com/archives/2014/08/08/ebola-dress-rehearsal-or-show-closer#comment
I think the point is that Bob thinks he’s a warning voice and I think he’s panic-mongering.
Bob’s points are worth pondering in that panic would be the worst reaction to an outbreak outside Africa–he thinks he’s part of the solution, when he is part of the problem.
And from an epidemiological perspective, the very nature of hemorrhagic fevers and how they are transmitted makes them self-limiting compared to influenza or HIV.
False prophets of doom, again, really they are banking that this Ebola crisis will spread from Africa, then they can stand up and say ‘I told ya so’ and weep, as nobody took any notice of them to prevent it.