Climate Change to Have Harsh Effect on Children

You can count on the NYT to keep this arrant nonsense alive. Winter is the time of dying.  Warmth is on balance good for you

The health effects of climate change will be unevenly distributed and children will be among those especially harmed, according to a new report from the medical journal The Lancet.

The report compared human health consequences under two scenarios: one in which the world meets the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement and reins in emissions so that increases in global temperatures remain “well below 2 degrees Celsius” by the end of the century, and one in which it does not.

The report, published Wednesday, found that failing to limit emissions would lead to health problems caused by infectious diseases, worsening air pollution, rising temperatures and malnutrition.

“With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and wellbeing will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world,” said Dr.

Renee N. Salas, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the United States policy brief that accompanied the report.

“Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there,” she said.

Children are especially vulnerable partly because of their physiology.

“Their hearts beat faster than adults’ and their breathing rates are higher than adults,’” said Dr.

Mona Sarfaty, the director of the program on climate and health at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who was not involved in the report.

As a result, children absorb more air pollution given their body size than an adult would in the same situation.

But unless nations halt emissions, air pollution, which, according to the report, killed seven million people worldwide in 2016 alone, will quite likely increase.

The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gas also releases a type of fine air pollution called PM 2.5 that can damage the heart and lungs when inhaled. Exposure to PM 2.5 air pollution is correlated with health problems such as low birth weight and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma.

Research published in The New England Journal of Medicine after the passage of policies designed to improve air quality “shows that the children who grew up when the air was better quality literally had more functioning lung tissue,” Dr. Sarfaty said.

In addition to the emissions associated with burning fossil fuels, the report said future generations would be exposed to a growing source of fine-particulate pollution: wildfires.

As temperatures rise, wildfires are becoming more frequent in part because hotter temperatures dry out vegetation, making it easier to ignite. The smoke, like the smoke that comes from burning fossil fuels, has negative health effects.

According to the report, since the middle of this decade there has been a 77 percent increase in the number of people exposed to wildfire smoke worldwide. Much of that growth has been in India and China. The 2018 California wildfire season, though, when the Camp Fire became the state’s deadliest and most destructive blaze in terms of acres burned, and this year’s wildfire season make it clear that increasing wildfires are also happening in the United States.

Across the Western United States, the rise of giant wildfires has worsened air pollution enough to erode some of the airquality gains from the Clean Air Act.

“You have young kids escaping fires that are going to be, in effect, challenged for life,” said Gina Mc- Carthy, a former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “There are mental health issues happening as a result of these climate events and fires and floods that children have never had to face, certainly not to the frequency and intensity that they have to face now.” The report said that there were many links between climate change and mental health, including the loss of property and the loss of livelihoods but stopped short of quantifying the impact.

Part of the exposure risk that children face is simply that they spend more time outside than adults. Coupled with their differing physiology, it makes them more susceptible to fine particulate pollution. These same factors also mean they are more likely to suffer from the effects of extreme heat associated with climate change; eight of the 10 hottest years on record have happened this decade.

The European heat waves in 2003 lead to the deaths of 70,000 people. “We know that climate change had its fingerprints there and that’s concerning,” said Dr.

Nick Watts, the report’s executive editor, adding that subsequent heat waves have “resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.” While many of those people were elderly, young people suffered, too.

As heat waves become more severe, parents and coaches “may not realize that the children are more exposed and therefore more vulnerable,” Dr. Sarfaty said.

A 2017 report that she helped prepare found that, in the United States, heat related illnesses were the leading cause of death and disability in young athletes.

This is the third time The Lancet has weighed in on the health impacts of climate change, but the first with a focus on children.

“It was our contention, both negatively, that the health costs were huge and underestimated.

But also, more positively, that by putting health first in our response to climate, there were dividends for both the public and for the economy in terms of cleaner and safer cities and healthier diets,” Dr. Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, said.

To that end, the report does contain glimmers of hope. Carbon intensity, or how much energy can be produced for each unit of greenhouse gas released, has increased.

And more cities are filing climate assessments detailing solutions that can be put into place.

But these actions are happening against a backdrop of greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise.

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UK: Climate change: Firms failing to tackle crisis will be delisted from stock exchange, Labour Party says

Companies that fail to act on the climate change they cause will be axed from the stock exchange, under radical Labour plans.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, pledged his government would ensure firms are “pulling their weight” to tackle the “existential threat” to the planet.

And he warned: “For those companies not taking adequate steps under Labour they will be delisted from the London Stock Exchange.”

Vowing to “rewrite the rules” of the economy to benefit workers, Mr McDonnell also insisted curbing the climate crisis would be “Labour’s overriding priority” if it wins the general election.

The Corporate Governance Code would be beefed up to “set out a minimum standard for listing related to evidencing the action being taken to tackle climate change”.

“If we are meet the climate change target to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, we need to ensure that companies are pulling their weight alongside government,” he told an event in London.

And, claiming some support from the corporate world, he added: “Business bodies are calling for companies to improve climate related financial reporting and for all companies to bring forward decarbonisation plans.”

Earlier, the Green Party lashed out at Labour for dropping plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030, as a shadow cabinet minister revealed on Monday.

It said the decision proved only the Greens are willing to wage “a war” on climate change, with a £100bn pledge to end emissions by that date.

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Climate Extremism In The Age Of Disinformation

ROY W. SPENCER

Do the global warming wars ever change anyone’s mind?

I suppose there are a few people whose minds have been changed. As I recall, Judith Curry has said Climategate (now “celebrating” its 10-year anniversary) was her wake-up call that institutionalized climate science might not be all it claims to be.

She is now a well-informed and unabashed skeptic of the modern tendency to blame every bad weather event on humans.

While I’m sure there are other examples, the unfortunate truth is that fewer and fewer people actually care about the truth.

The journalist who broke the Climategate story, James Delingpole, yesterday posted an article entitled The Bastards Have Got Away with It!, James concludes with,

Climategate was the event when, just for a moment, it seemed we’d got the climate scamsters bang to rights, that the world’s biggest scientific (and economic) con trick had been exposed and that the Climate Industrial Complex would be dismantled before it could do any more damage to our freedom and our prosperity.

But the truth, it would seem, is no match for big money, dirty politics and madness-of-crowds groupthink. We’ve lost this one, I think, my friends. And the fact that all those involved in this scam will one day burn in Hell is something, I’m afraid, which gives me all too little consolation.

You see, it does not really matter whether a few bad actors (even if they are leaders of the climate movement) conspired to hide data and methods, and strong-arm scientific journal editors into not publishing papers that might stand in the way of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mission to pin climate change on humans, inflate its seriousness, and lay the groundwork for worldwide governmental efforts to reduce humanity’s access to affordable energy.

The folks were simply trying to Save the Earth™, and we all know that the ends justify the means, right? So what if they cheated? Boys will be boys, you know. The science is sound, and besides, 97% of all scientists agree that…something.

The Roots of Polarization

One would think that the practice of science would be objective. I once believed this, too.

As a fresh post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, when I discovered something new in satellite data, I was surprised to encounter NASA employees who tried to keep my work from being published because they feared it would interfere with a new satellite mission they were working toward.

I eventually got it published as a cover article in the prestigious journal, Nature.

But the subject I was dealing with did not have the profound financial, political, policy, and even religious import that climate change would end up having.

Furthermore, 35 years ago things were different than today. People were less tribal. There is an old saying that one should not discuss politics or religion in polite company, but it turns out that social media is far from polite company.

From a practical standpoint, what we do (or don’t do) about human-caused climate change supports either (1) a statist, top-down governmental control over human affairs that involves a more socialist political framework, or (2) an unconstrained individual-freedom framework where capitalism reigns supreme.

So, one could easily be a believer (or non-believer) in the ‘climate emergency’ based upon their political leanings.

While I know a few socialists who are skeptical of human-caused climate change being a serious issue, this is the exception rather than the rule.

The same is true of capitalists who think that we must transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy (unless they stand to make money off the transition through subsidies, in which case they are financially rather than ideologically driven).

Or, on a spiritual level, a human who desires to worship something must ultimately choose between the Creation or the Creator. There is no third option.

I find that most Earth scientists are nature worshipers (showing various levels of fervor) and consider the Earth to be fragile.

In contrast, those who believe the Earth was created for the purpose of serving humanity tend to view nature as being resilient and less sensitive to lasting damage.

Both of these views have equally religious underpinnings since “fragile” and “resilient” are emotive and qualitative, rather than scientific, terms.

So, I would argue it really does not matter that much to most alarmists or skeptics what the evidence shows.

As long as 8 billion people on the planet have some non-zero effect on climate — no matter how small or unmeasurable — the alarmist can still claim that ‘we shouldn’t be interfering with the climate system’.

As a counterexample, the skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg actually believes the alarmist science from the IPCC, but claims that economics tells us it’s better to live in and adapt to a warmer world until we have more cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels.

For this stance regarding policy, he is labeled a global warming denier despite fully believing in human-caused climate change.

The Role of the Disinformation Superhighway

Baylor Professor Alan Jacobs has an interesting essay entitled On Lost Causes regarding the tendency for people to believe anything they see on the internet if it supports their biases.

He mentions a recent novel in which a high-tech billionaire, fed up with the disinformation he sees on the Web, concocts an elaborate online story that Moab, Utah, has been obliterated by a nuclear explosion.

He has CGI video, actors, witnesses, and an elaborate (but fake) social media presence to support the story.

The plan is to then show the world how easily they were duped so that people would become less credulous when digesting information.

But instead, people cling to their belief. Even after many years, the ‘Moab truthers’ claim that anyone who disputes that Moab was destroyed is a troll or paid shill. People could actually travel to Moab to see for themselves, but virtually no one does.

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N. Hemisphere In Hypothermic Shock! Record Cold, ‘Historic Snowstorms’

Winter hasn’t even officially arrived, but already large areas of the northern hemisphere are seeing “historic snowfalls,” frigid temperatures, and even avalanche alarms.

The Northern Hemisphere has certainly caught a major cold, one certainly not caused by the human CO2 virus.

Instead of fever, parts of the northern hemisphere are in hypothermia!

Alarmists, media desperate

Though global warming scientists will never admit it, they are really surprised and stunned.

All that is left for them is to make up some cockamamie warming-causes-cold explanations and hope there are enough severely stupid among the media and masses to believe it.

“United States — Rewrite the Record Books”

Beginning in North America, “sub-zero temperatures are now blasting” millions of Americans following “the three historic snowstorms which buried parts of the U.S. last month,” reports weather site electroverse.net here.

Electroverse writes that “lows throughout the week will be more like January temperatures” with readings below zero for many U.S. states and “temps down into the teens are even forecast as far south as Texas.”

Yesterday, 97 records were toppled.

“It’s a big deal,” Electroverse writes in its headline. They also add:

“No, record cold & snow IS NOT made ‘more likely in a warming world.’ In fact, the IPCC’s line—until not that long ago—was that ‘milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms.’”

Solar activity suspected

It’s not the sort of thing we are supposed to be expecting from a “warming planet”.  Some climate experts blame natural factors, like solar activity, for the cold, and that these warnings have long been known since the sun has entered a new period of calm.

Freeze watches and warnings also extend as far south as Florida. And it’s only early November. And don’t expect to see many FFF activists show up at rallies protesting hot weather any time soon.

Polar Bear Science site here also reports that the Hudson Bay in Canada has started freezing up earlier than normal three years in a row!

Europe starting to get clobbered by snow, 2m in the Alps

Meanwhile cold has also spread across Europe, though not quite as brutal as what we’ve been seeing across North America.

In central Europe, the Austrian online Heute here reports that “huge amounts of snow” are on the way for the Alps.

German site Wetteronline.de reports here of “new, severe snowfalls in the Alps” with “up to two meters of fresh snow are possible in places up to the weekend” in Switzerland, Austria, and Northern Italy. “This is good news for winter sports enthusiasts – but the danger of avalanches is increasing.”

Biggest November snowstorm in 40 years

Even global warming child activist Greta Thunberg’s Sweden is getting hard hit by extreme cold and snow. Electroverse reports the Nordic country is suffering “its biggest November snowstorm in 40 years.”

On November 10th, Mika tweeted that temps in northern Sweden fell 10 -34.5°C.

Most snow in 60 years

The German Ruhrkultur site reports how also Finland just saw “the coldest autumn temperature and the highest snow depth in at least 60 years” and that “the temperature in Enontekiö, a municipality in Finnish Lapland, dropped to 28.2°C on Tuesday 5 November.”

Deepening cold across Siberia as well

“On November 11 in Yakutia, the daily temperature never rose above −30°C (-22F),” reports the SOTT site here. “Some parts of Siberia were even colder: In Evenkia and the northern regions of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, the temperature dropped to −41 … −44°C.”

SOTT comments (sarcastically): “I wonder how much ice will melt at −44°C (-47F).

With all the early winter weather, it’s ridiculous to claim the globe is burning up. So it’s no wonder the alarmists have taken their climate ambulance to the far side of the globe, NSW Australia, and kept their narrow focus on brush fires.

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Venice Flood Due To Climate Change – Only It Wasn’t

On November 13th, the BBC website carried an article about the flooding in Venice, quoting the Mayor Luigi Brugnaro. He said “Now the government must listen. These are the effects of climate change… the costs will be high.”

This latest flood in Venice reached 1.87 metres according to the tide monitoring centre. Only once since official records began in 1923 has the tide been higher, reaching 1.94 metres in 1966. The BBC article said ‘Photographs showed people wading through the streets as Venice was hit by a storm’.

Hit by a storm. Hang on, the mayor said it was because of climate change. Storms are natural events, so which is it?

A storm coinciding with a high tide is what it is, and they are surprised it caused a flood? In a city sinking into the ground? A city that has flooded multiple times before?

The BBC article also said it was a result of the highest tide in 50 years. Tides are a natural event, they happen every day, caused by the Moon not the climate. Unless we are now to start blaming the Moon for climate change? It’s also interesting to note that in February 2018 & 2017, after weeks of no rainfall, the canals in Venice almost ran dry. Did the BBC article mention that? No of course not.

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