American Medical Association prostitutes itself to the climate change scare

And let's be clear that it is just a scare. No-one knows what the future holds.  Warmism enthusiasts thought that on the basis of the slight warming of the last part of the 20th century they could predict warming from that point on.  But their models and predictions were wrong.  There has been no climate change (no warming) in the 21st century and no-one knows if the next change will be towards cooling or warming.   So the scare is no better than religious prophecies of doom.

JAMA is of course not the first medical journal to turn political.  Britain's "Lancet" is notoriously Leftist.  They actually campaigned against George Bush and the Iraq war at one stage.  And there have been many claims that warming is bad for your health.

All such claims however founder on the fact that winter is the great season of dying.  Both warmth and cold can lead to health problems but cold is by far the big killer.  A warmer climate should therefore REDUCE mortality overall.  To give JAMA its due they did not totally ignore that possibility but they went close.  Hidden away in their Method section was a single paragraph of waffle which I reproduce following the abstract below.  Most notably however, they made no attempt to address that possibility in their research.  They looked only at warm weather problems, not cold weather problems.  The entire project was totally one-sided. Not science at all

Climate change: Challenges and Opportunities for Global Health

By Jonathan A. Patz et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance

Health is inextricably linked to climate change. It is important for clinicians to understand this relationship in order to discuss associated health risks with their patients and to inform public policy.

Objectives

To provide new US-based temperature projections from downscaled climate modeling and to review recent studies on health risks related to climate change and the cobenefits of efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

Data Sources, Study Selection, and Data Synthesis

We searched PubMed from 2009 to 2014 for articles related to climate change and health, focused on governmental reports, predictive models, and empirical epidemiological studies. Of the more than 250 abstracts reviewed, 56 articles were selected. In addition, we analyzed climate data averaged over 13 climate models and based future projections on downscaled probability distributions of the daily maximum temperature for 2046-2065. We also compared maximum daily 8-hour average with air temperature data taken from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climate Data Center.

Results

By 2050, many US cities may experience more frequent extreme heat days. For example, New York and Milwaukee may have 3 times their current average number of days hotter than 32øC (90øF). The adverse health aspects related to climate change may include heat-related disorders, such as heat stress and economic consequences of reduced work capacity; and respiratory disorders, including those exacerbated by fine particulate pollutants, such as asthma and allergic disorders; infectious diseases, including vectorborne diseases and water-borne diseases, such as childhood gastrointestinal diseases; food insecurity, including reduced crop yields and an increase in plant diseases; and mental health disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder and depression, that are associated with natural disasters. Substantial health and economic cobenefits could be associated with reductions in fossil fuel combustion. For example, the cost of greenhouse gas emission policies may yield net economic benefit, with health benefits from air quality improvements potentially offsetting the cost of US carbon policies.

Conclusions and Relevance

Evidence over the past 20 years indicates that climate change can be associated with adverse health outcomes. Health care professionals have an important role in understanding and communicating the related potential health concerns and the cobenefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Methods

Might fewer cold-related deaths balance mortality from heat waves? This is a topic of active research and current uncertainty, with results likely differing for climate zone and infrastructure characteristics. Although relative increases in heat-related deaths may exceed relative decreases in cold-related deaths, this may not apply in absolute terms because the balance may depend on location, population structure (proportion of older residents), and amount of warming, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expressed low confidence that modest reductions in cold-related mortality would occur.  Reasons for this include the observation that many deaths related to cold temperatures do not occur during coldest times and that there is a lag between exposure to cold temperatures and increased risk of death typically much longer than 1 or 2 days.

JAMA. Published online September 22, 2014. doi:10.1001/jama.2014.13186.

Dreary climate summit was surely their saddest fiasco yet

The leaden speeches at this year's UN climate summit shows our leaders' gullibility

Apart from the Middle East, there can have been few more depressing places to be in the world last Tuesday than the UN General Assembly in New York, where an endless queue of world leaders, including Barack Obama and David Cameron, treated an increasingly soporific audience to leaden little appeals for humanity to take urgent action to halt global warming. The purpose of this special meeting, summoned by that dim little nonentity Ban Ki-moon, was to issue a desperate last-minute call for a legally binding treaty in Paris next year, whereby they would all agree to save the planet through an 80 per cent cut in those CO₂ emissions, which are inseparable from almost all the activities of modern civilisation.

For days the usual cheerleaders, such as the BBC and Channel 4 News, had been beating the drum for this “historic” and “important” gathering. Hundreds of thousands of activists from all over the world, joined by Mr Ban in a baseball cap, on Sunday brought the streets of New York to a halt.

When the great day came, The Guardian published a 43-page running blog, reporting all the speeches from the likes of some Bosnian telling us that his country has had more rain this year than in any for more than a century (did global warming really start that long ago?). The President of Kiribati said, “I’ve been talking about climate change so long I’ve lost my voice”, although he was still somehow able to explain that his tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific is sinking beneath the waves, despite satellite studies showing that sea levels in the area have actually been falling.

As one speaker after another overran their allotted four minutes, even The Guardian could not hide the fact that no one had anything new or interesting to say. “The most powerful speech” apparently came from Leonardo DiCaprio, which recalled a claim made more than 20 years ago by that other Hollywood star, Robert Redford, when he said, on global warming, that it was “time to stop researching and to start acting”. This prompted Richard Lindzen, the physicist and climate-change sceptic, to observe wryly that it seemed “a reasonable suggestion for an actor to make”.

The biggest excitement of the day was the news flash from England that a gaggle of Greenpeace activists had hijacked a train carrying coal to a Nottinghamshire power station. Part of the meeting’s purpose was to demand that the world’s richer nations must honour their pledge at Cancún in 2010 to contribute $100 billion a year to help poorer countries combat climate change. When The Guardian’s blog totted up the cash promised – and despite $5 million pledged by Luxembourg – there was nothing from Obama or Cameron.

Most notably absent among the 120 “heads of government” present were those from China and India, two of the biggest CO₂ emitters in the world. And, of course, this conveyed precisely why Mr Ban’s shindig was as much an empty charade as that far greater fiasco in Copenhagen in 2009, when it became evident that there will never be a global treaty, because the world’s fastest-developing nations, such as China and India, have never had any intention of signing one.

As I showed in my history of the great climate scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster, published just before Copenhagen, the scientific basis for this scare was already falling apart, as temperatures were not rising as the computer models had predicted. The real disaster from all this, I argued, was not the imagined apocalypse of the world frying, as ice caps melted and sea levels soared (thanks to Antarctica, there is more polar sea ice today than at any time since records began). It was the response of all those deluded politicians who had fallen for the scare.

Cameron may last week have drawn The Guardian’s contempt for repeating that boast that his is “the greenest government ever”. But Britain is still stuck, not least thanks to Ed Miliband’s ludicrous Climate Change Act, with a skewed and make-believe energy policy far more dangerous than most people realise.

Until our politicians wake up from this mad dream to think for themselves and pull us back from this suicidal course, we are doomed.

As yet there is little sign of any such miracle bringing them back to the real world.

SOURCE





The United Nations accidentally gets something right

The opening words on the website introducing the United Nations Climate Summit read, “Climate change is not a far-off problem. It is happening now and is having very real consequences on people’s lives. Climate change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow.”

In the spirit of the left-wing newspaper fact checkers who labor under the pretext of objectivity while providing cover to their more honest liberal political advocates, this statement needs to be evaluated for its veracity.

Could the U.N. climate cronies have gotten it right?  Before people scoff at that notion, they need to read what the U.N. says closely.

The U.N. statement is correct that climate change is happening now.  Otherwise we would not need weathermen to tell us when it is likely to rain or not.  The weather is always changing, and the deliberately obfuscatory language of the environmental left is designed to make this natural phenomenon seem like something that needs action to solve.

It was so much cleaner when they claimed “global warming,” but as any honest, sentient person knows, the warming has been on pause for the past eighteen years, creating a semantic issue for those in search of a problem to be solved.  Hence the undeniably obtuse climate change description shift.

The U.N. goes on to claim that not only is the weather changing, but it is having very real consequences on people’s lives.  Once again, they are correct.  In the United States electricity costs are rising, and a significant portion of the electric generation plants are scheduled to go off-line due to EPA regulations promulgated under the guise of climate change.

So, yes, the attempt by the U.S. government to deal with climate change, at a time when temperatures have paused for a generation, “is having very real consequences on people’s lives.”  It is having a particularly nasty impact on those who are on fixed incomes and struggling economically, and cannot easily fit a few extra dollars to pay for increased costs regulated into existence by the climate jihadists.

And in this same vein, the U.N. conveniently continues on by claiming, “Climate change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow.”

Once again the U.N. gets it right.

Those creating environmental policies have it as their mission statement to disrupt national economies, particularly developed one’s like those in Europe and the United States.  How else can you explain why the coal rich United Kingdom decided to stop burning coal in one of its largest electric generation plants replacing the local and available fuel for wood chips imported from the United States.  This disruption was not exactly good news for the coal workers or the national economy that their taxes used to support.

Similarly, the tens of thousands of workers who have not been hired due to President Barack Obama’s failure to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built has a disruptive effect on the U.S. economy as these uncreated jobs leave people without alternatives and the hope that a good job provides.

Any objective analysis would reveal that the United Nation’s statement is correct – just not in the way they meant to be.  For this reason, they get a completely accidental four smiley face rating for veracity.  However, the faces are red in the cheeks, because they really didn’t mean to be caught telling the truth

SOURCE





Merchants of Smear

Russell Cook

For about two decades we’ve been told the science behind human-caused global warming is settled, and to ignore skeptic scientists because they’ve been paid by industry to manufacture doubt about the issue.

The truth, however, has every appearance of being exactly the opposite: A clumsy effort to manufacture doubt about the credibility of skeptical climate scientists arose in 1991 with roots in Al Gore’s Senate office; it gained effectiveness and media traction after Ozone Action took over the effort and drew attention to the “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” memo phrase (which they never showed in its full context); and the effort achieved its highest success after being heavily promoted by the “Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter” Ross Gelbspan, who never won a Pulitzer, never displayed any investigative prowess in this matter, and never proved that any skeptic climate scientist had ever knowingly lied as a result of being paid illicit money.

These efforts to portray skeptic scientists as corrupt are swamped with additional credibility problems, far more than can be described in this Policy Brief. Plain presentations of science studies contradicting reports from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have no chance of vindicating skeptic scientists in the face of such viral anti-skeptic rhetoric, as long as the mainstream media and majority of Internet sites remain gatekeepers preventing the release of accurate science information.

This gatekeeping indicates a much larger problem concerning the issue: The evidence presented in this Policy Brief here is something any unqualified, disinterested bystander could find and ask about, and indeed, believers in the theory of human-caused global warming could have explored the problems presented here with each other in order to find out whether their accusation about industry corruption of skeptics survives serious scrutiny.

Instead, this accusation has been unquestioningly accepted since 1991 by the mainstream news media and by officials who want to implement greenhouse gas mitigation regulations. During this time, skeptic scientists and other well-informed experts have revealed devastating problems with IPCC climate assessments. It has been shown time and again that the corruption accusation was riddled with obvious holes from the start. No matter.

The main pillar of support for the notion that humans are causing a dangerous warming of the climate has been the notion of “settled science.” That notion has long been questioned by skeptic scientists. The secondary pillar of support for the alarmist global warming theory has been the notion that industry-corrupted skeptics are unworthy of public consideration. This accusation could easily have been investigated and refuted long ago. That never happened, because of the third pillar: Journalists should not give equal time to skeptic scientists.

We are overdue for the biggest ideology collapse in history, begging for an investigation into why the mainstream media and influential politicians apparently never checked the veracity of claims about “settled science” and “corrupt skeptics.”

SOURCE





Antarctica ice: Proof they are lying

The New Scientist has gone all in on global warming, the theory that the SINS of MAN are turning the world into HELL ON EARTH.

Repent!

Repent!

Repent!

But just one little problem. It ain't happening. At least not at a pace that should cause us to change our behavior in any way, shape or form.

After 35 years of telling us carbon dioxide is melting ice in Antarctica, New Scientist is now saying carbon dioxide has caused the ice to grow for 35 years.

What they said before:

From January 2, 2001: "Ice in the heart of Antarctica is retreating and causing sea level rise, scientists have shown for the first time."

From June 23, 2007: "Rising sea levels could divide and conquer Antarctic ice."

From March 25, 2008: "Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by a thread'."

From January 21, 2009: "Even Antarctica is now feeling the heat of climate change."

From March 10, 2009: "Sea level rise could bust IPCC estimate: Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice fast and could end up taking sea levels to nearly twice predicted levels by 2100."

From July 31, 2011: "Antarctica rising as ice caps melt."

Got that?

Year-in and year-out, the editors at the New Scientist have warned us that the ice in Antarctica is melting fast.

It's global warming!  As Dr. Zachary Smith used to say on "Lost In Space," we're doomed. Doomed!

All that changed this month. On September 17, New Scientist said the ice is growing.  From the article:

    "Since satellite records began in 1979, the winter maximum sea ice cover around Antarctica has been growing at 1.5 per cent per decade. This year has long been on track for a new annual record, with 150 daily records already set.

    The record was finally broken on 15 September and sea ice extent has increased since, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center analysed by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology in Hobart."

Wait a second, for years New Scientist has said the ice is melting at the South Pole due to global warming.  Now it suddenly claims that it has been growing for 35 years?

The topper is they still blame global warming:

"Record sea ice around Antarctica due to global warming"

    "IT JUST gets bigger. The extent of the sea ice around Antarctica has hit a record high – for the third year running. Counter-intuitively, global warming is responsible.

    Since satellite records began in 1979, the winter maximum sea ice cover around Antarctica has been growing at 1.5 per cent per decade. This year has long been on track for a new annual record, with 150 daily records already set.

    The record was finally broken on 15 September and sea ice extent has increased since, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center analyzed by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology in Hobart.

    More sea ice may seem odd in a warmer world, but new records are expected every few years, says Jan Lieser of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart. That's because the southern hemisphere warms more slowly than the north, as it has less landmass, boosting the winds that circle Antarctica and pulling cold air onto the sea ice.

    The melting of ice on the Antarctic mainland may also be creating more sea ice, by dumping easily frozen fresh water into the ocean, says Nerilie Abram of the Australian National University in Canberra.

    The extra sea ice is a good thing, as it reflects sunlight and slows global warming. But the sea ice is expected to shrink eventually. "By 2100 we will see dramatic reductions," says Lieser. "Once it goes belly-up it's not good for the rest of the world."

As Congressman Joe Wilson might say, they lie.  The debate is indeed over. The side that lies loses.

SOURCE  (See the original for links)





Blathering Eco-Intellectuals

By Alan Caruba

I confess I have always been wary of intellectuals. They love arcane theories that often have little to do with real life and this is particularly true of eco-intellectuals who have embraced a panoply of lies and claims about the “environment”, “fossil fuels”, “sustainability”, and other notions that permit them to bloviate without once addressing reality.

This has been a week of eco-propaganda on a global scale. On Sunday there were “Climate Marches.” On Tuesday there will be a UN “Climate Summit”, and there will likely be an avalanche of nonsense in the media intended to make us believe we have control, influence, or impact on the climate when it is obvious to the rest of us that we—the human race—have none.


In the past nearly two decades we have all been experiencing not a warning, but a cooling of planet Earth. It has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the Sun that has been in a low cycle of radiation—less heat!

A friend alerted me to an article in the August 22nd edition of the New Republic, a famously liberal magazine. “Global Warming Is Just One of Many Environmental Threats That Demand Our Attention” is the title of Amartya Sen’s article. He is a Nobel laureate in economics, a winner of the National Humanities Medal, an author, and teaches at Harvard University.

There were two immediate red flags that caught my attention. First was that he is an economist and the second was that he was writing about “global warming” as of it was happening.

In early September I had written about another economist who had an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal. It was ludicrous in terms of his complete lack of even the most basic science he was either addressing or ignoring as he too warned of horrid environmental portents to come.  Economists should stick to economics.

If you suffer from insomnia or have a fondness for reading sentences filled with words rarely used in common communication, you will find that Sen’s article will either put you to sleep or, more likely, give you a migraine headache. The article is an insufferable platform for him to demonstrate his Nobel certified intellectual brilliance, while possessing very little understanding of science or what we ordinary people call common sense.

“Our global environment has many problems. If the high volume of carbon emission is one, the low level of intellectual engagement with some of the major environmental challenges is surely another.” That’s how Sen began his article and, in the very first sentence, he reveals his ignorance by referring to “carbon emissions” instead of “carbon dioxide” (CO2) emissions.

The latter is a so-called “greenhouse” gas that the Greens keep telling us is trapping huge amounts of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere that will surely kill us all. CO2 is about 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, the least of the gases of which it is composed. It doesn’t trap heat, but it does provide the “food” that all vegetation requires to grow. We carbon-based humans exhale CO2 after we breathe in oxygen. It is part of the natural cycle of life between animals and the vegetation that releases oxygen; a perfect balance of nature.

Suffice to say that Sen’s very lengthy article is typical of the eco-intellectual disdain for virtually any form of energy to serve humanity except for the two least reliable, wind and solar energy. There’s a reason why mankind turned to coal, oil and natural gas. It was vastly abundant and released large amounts of energy for transportation and other benefits that include the production of electricity.

There was a time not that long ago when people used whale oil to light their homes. And wood was used to heat them. Walt Whitman, a famed poet who lived in Lincoln’s time, never turned on an electrical switch in his life. It didn’t exist 150 years ago. There were no autos, no telephones, et cetera. If you define a generation as 25 years, that’s only six generations ago. And Sen wants us to abandon “fossil fuels” because he fears “the dangers of global pollution from fossil fuels…”

He’s no fan of nuclear power either. (I guess we should all go back to whale oil, only we won’t because we love the whales.) “There are at least five different kinds of externalities that add significantly to the social costs of nuclear power” writes Sen, but who else refers to “externalities” of nuclear power? Okay, why not just say there have been two bad accidents, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and leave it at that. That still leaves a lot of safely performing nuclear plants here and worldwide.

We do not live in a world without risk or trade-offs. For lack of enough pipelines, a lot of oil is being transported by rail and there have been accidents. Around the world there are coal mining accidents. Even solar farms literally sizzle birds to death that fly over them and wind turbines chop them into little pieces.

Mother Nature does not care what happens to us when she conjures up a volcanic eruption, a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane or blizzard.

Humans have learned to either flee these things or wait them out in the safety of their homes. That’s what modern life is all about and it is a hundred times better than in the past when people were lucky to live to the age of sixty. Many died much younger from plagues of disease and we are watching that occur with Ebola in Africa. Even simple injuries caused death a scant time ago.

“There are empirical gaps in our knowledge as well as analytical difficulties in dealing with the evaluation of uncertainty.” Huh? What? This is intellectual gobbledygook, a substitute for saying that much of the time we don’t know what the future holds.

What we do know is that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and that we humans have developed what we call civilization over the past 5,000 years, a blink of time in eternity.

We should know by now to accept the Earth, the Sun and the galaxy in which we live for what it is and stop bothering to embrace idiotic notions that we have any control or that we are causing so much “pollution” the Earth cannot exist much longer.

You know what we do with the mess of stuff we produce and throw away? We burn it or we bury it. We even recycle some of it.

This keeps archeologists busy as they examine the garbage our not-too-distant ancestors left behind in their caves. Thankfully, none of them were economists.

SOURCE

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