The Warmist epidemiologist below is perfectly correct that past natural climate changes have been disastrous but the disastrous ones were episodes of COOLING. Periods of warming -- as in the Roman warm period -- were periods of prosperity and civilizational advance. Yet he is trying to make the case that history shows warming to be bad. He must know that history indicates the opposite so I say without hesitation that he is a lying crook of zero credibility on anything. I could go on to dispute more of his patently false claims but what's the point?
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."
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof McMichael argues the world faces extreme climate change "without precedent" over the past 10,000 years.
"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."
Prof McMichael's paper states that the greatest recurring health risk over past millennia has been from food shortages mostly caused by drying and drought.
Warming also leads to an increase in infectious diseases as a result of better growth conditions for bacteria and the proliferation of mosquitoes.
Drought can also result in greater contact with rodents searching for scarce food supplies.
The ANU academic says while societies today are better equipped to defend themselves physically and technologically, they lack the flexibility smaller groups had in the past. That's partly because the world is now "over populated", according to Prof McMichael, so there are fewer areas available to retreat too.
Populations are also increasingly packed into large cities on coastlines which are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events.
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."
SOURCE
Electricity blackouts can be fatal
And with their innumerable attacks on reliable forms of electricity generation, Greenies are pushing us towards ever more blackouts
A vast electricity blackout in the United States and Canada in 2003 led to the deaths of nearly 100 people, a study found, linking the deaths — higher than official estimates — to not only accidents caused by lack of power, but also underlying diseases.
Researchers said the study published in the journal Epidemiology was the first to show that the death toll of such a power outage comes not only from accidents, such as carbon monoxide poisoning from using generators, but also from chronic health issues such as cardiovascular and respiratory problems.
“Our results from this study indicate that power outages can immediately and severely harm human health,” said lead author Brooke Anderson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
Little is known about the health impact of power outages, Anderson and a colleague wrote.
To get a sense of the mortality from a blackout, they collected data on New York City’s weather conditions, air pollution levels and causes of deaths reported during the blackout in August 2003.
Though most of New York City was dark for only about a day, August 14 to 15, the blackout affected a wide swath of the northeastern United States and Canada, lasting as long as four days in some cases — including some pockets within the city.
Afterwards, the New York City health department attributed only six deaths to the blackout, most of them from carbon monoxide poisoning.
But Anderson found there was an overall 28 percent spike in deaths during the outage. Twelve of those additional deaths were caused by accidents, 38 by cardiovascular conditions, three from respiratory problems and 37 by various other health conditions.
Conditions during a blackout may explain why health problems can worsen. Many residents in high-rise apartments had no water for the duration, for example, and firefighters had to rescue hundreds of people from elevators.
“People were trapped in the subway in the dark and didn’t know what happened. Especially after September 11, people are more scared, and stress can trigger a heart attack or exacerbate asthma,” said Shao Lin, an epidemiologist with the New York State Department of Health, who was not involved in the study.
Increased air pollution from idling buses or other sources could also aggravate respiratory conditions, Lin said. In a previous study, she and her colleagues found that hospital admissions for respiratory conditions increased during the blackout.
Though pollution monitors didn’t work through the outage, shortly afterward there was an uptick in certain air pollutants, the researchers said.
Anderson said that people with chronic health issues could also have problems managing them.
“Most food sources and pharmacies were closed, which could be a serious problem for someone with diabetes or someone who is low on prescription medicines,” she said in an email.
Ambulances were slower, home medical equipment that used electricity couldn’t operate and cell phones didn’t work during part of the blackout.
Anderson said that while energy companies are working to stop power outages from taking place in the future, such as during heat waves when power grids struggle, increased stress on the grids could make blackouts more common in the future.
“The most direct way to reduce excess deaths from a blackout is to try to prevent blackouts,” she said.
SOURCE
A Really Inconvenient Truth Is Earth Is Not Melting After All
Earth is not warming. According to Big Green enviros, only Luddites and lunatics would believe such a ludicrous statement.
Well, now government scientists must be added to the long list of the so addled. Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horse's mouth, a new report from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies titled "Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects:"
"Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998."
But don't worry. Even as climate scientists -- and an ever-gullible media -- are forced by new data to admit that the Earth is not warming, they take pains to assure us that the Earth is still warming.
The Associated Press was typical in its contortions, as in this Jan. 20 statement: "The world last year wasn't quite as warm as it has been for most of the past decade, government scientists said Thursday, but it continues a general trend of rising temperatures."
Not as warm, but still a "general trend" of rising temperatures. Got that? No? Well, don't worry. The high priests of warming have apparently assumed a plane far above our mere mortal logic.
Besides, it all depends on how you define "trend," doesn't it? If you go far enough back, you can prove any trend you like about global temperatures. If you start at about 650 million years ago, when the Earth was covered pole to pole in ice, you can say current data show we are in a "general trend" of rising temperatures. If you go back to 1998, not so much.
It is cute, in a pathetic kind of way, to watch the global warming cult try and fudge and spin this fact like nobody's business. Here's another hilarious example, from the same AP story:
"'It would be premature to make any conclusion that we would see any hiatus of the longer-term warming trend,' said Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. 'Global temperatures are continuing to increase.'"
Yes, it would be premature to draw a conclusion (that global warming is not happening) based on current data (that global temps are lower today than in 1998). That's what we foolish mortals do.
Government scientists, and the functionaries and bureaucrats they serve, however, know better. Aren't we lucky?
In another sickening example, NASA scientists admit that while the new data is "suggestive of a slowdown in global warming, this apparent slowdown may largely disappear as a few more years of data are added."
An apparent slowdown that may disappear. Talk about covering your bases. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
One can understand this disappointment. Lucrative climate-scaremongering careers are at stake. So it is no surprise that many cling to the hope that maybe we will burn up after all, that maybe this new data is just a fluke, a blip, a natural respite from man's descent into an unnatural global conflagration.
The truth is this: There is no such thing as an "average" global temperature. The history of our planet is a history of wildly fluctuating temperatures, locally and globally, from season to season, century to century, epoch to epoch.
Only a generation as narcissistic as the baby boomers would assume that the temperature they were accustomed to as they came of age in the mid-20th century is the "correct" or "average" global temperature, which must be maintained in perpetuity no matter the costs.
Again, from NASA: "Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998." Now there's an inconvenient truth for you.
SOURCE
The Massive NASA & IPCC Embarrassment: Hansen's Abysmal Global Warming Model Predictions
James Hansen has provided proof over the last few decades that climate models are worthless as climate prediction tools - will NASA & the IPCC admit failure?
Using the December-end temperature anomalies (topmost chart), it is readily apparent that NASA's James Hansen is entirely incapable of producing accurate global temperature predictions over the long-term. His predictions have been so bad that even the mainstream press is finally coming around to the realization that the alarmist global warming scenarios are truly without merit.
The second chart exhibits the non-predicted deceleration of global temperatures over the last 15 years using the IPCC's gold-standard HadCRUT dataset.
Whether it is long or short-term, Hansen/NASA models are no better than a Ouija board as a tool to predict global temperatures. This massive failure by Hansen et al can also be seen in his model's prediction of ocean heat content and sea level rise.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
Little Ice Age recognized in top journal
Michael Mann's "hockeystick" says that the LIA did not happen. And in 2007 Phil Jones said "it's important "not to cling to outdated concepts of the past such as the MWP and LIA"
That the "modelling" of the authors below excludes a solar influence as the cause of the LIA need not detain us of course. You can get anything you like out of a model.
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L02708, 5 PP., 2012
Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks
by Gifford H. Miller et al.
Abstract
Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures over the past 8000 years have been paced by the slow decrease in summer insolation resulting from the precession of the equinoxes. However, the causes of superposed century-scale cold summer anomalies, of which the Little Ice Age (LIA) is the most extreme, remain debated, largely because the natural forcings are either weak or, in the case of volcanism, short lived. Here we present precisely dated records of ice-cap growth from Arctic Canada and Iceland showing that LIA summer cold and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300 AD, followed by a substantial intensification 1430–1455 AD. Intervals of sudden ice growth coincide with two of the most volcanically perturbed half centuries of the past millennium. A transient climate model simulation shows that explosive volcanism produces abrupt summer cooling at these times, and that cold summers can be maintained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks long after volcanic aerosols are removed. Our results suggest that the onset of the LIA can be linked to an unusual 50-year-long episode with four large sulfur-rich explosive eruptions, each with global sulfate loading >60 Tg. The persistence of cold summers is best explained by consequent sea-ice/ocean feedbacks during a hemispheric summer insolation minimum; large changes in solar irradiance are not required.
SOURCE
Phil Jones in June 2003 admits to changing his treatment of the data so as to confirm a warming trend
Email 2530
"Also, note that I've changed the way we smooth the series to preserve the late 20th century trend, like we did in the Eos piece. I've always estimated the uncertainties a bit more conservatively as described in text--so they're a bit expanded now. None of the conclusions change, although the globe is actually a bit more anomalous in the late 20th century when you spreserve the late 20th century trend in the smoothing, so I've tweaked the wording there just a bit..."
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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