How more green space could narrow lifespan gap between rich and poor (?)
This study is an all-round joke. I have critiqued many others like it over the years so I will just make the most obvious comment here. How do we know that the causal arrow is not reversed? Could healthier people be better able to move into leafy areas? Healthy people presumably earn more than sickly people so can afford accomodation in more desirable areas.
Controls for income could have been attempted to rule out that possibilty but no controls of any sort appear to have been attempted. It's amazing the unscholarly rubbish that get into the academic journals these days
Greater levels of access to green spaces could have a sufficiently dramatic impact on people’s health that it could help reduce current lifespan gaps between the rich and the poor, new research shows.
A study examining various geographic areas, levels of wealth, and the proximity to private gardens and natural spaces such as woodlands, heathlands, and open water, found that each 10 per cent increase in access to private gardens and natural space is linked to a 7 per cent fall in the incidence of early death among those under 65 years old.
The research team, led by Dr Natalie Nicholls at the University of Glasgow, said their findings "could provide an additional public-health tool to reduce the large health inequities that exist for deprived populations, indigenous peoples, and other ethnic minorities".
While there is a large body of evidence already linking spending time in natural environments with positive health outcomes, the research is the first to explicitly examine whether access to nature protects against an earlier than expected death.
In order to assess whether this is the case, the team used the measure of "years of life lost" (YLL), and drew on YLL data from the 2016 Scottish Burden of Disease report, which recorded the gap between expected and actual lifespan for men and women under 65 who were resident in Scotland, UK, at time of death.
The team then mapped out various "datazones", which plotted geographical areas of between 500-1,000 households each, using physical boundaries and natural communities, which they said ended up dividing areas into units with broadly similar social characteristics.
Using Ordnance Survey mapping, they then assessed the inhabitants of each datazone’s access to natural space or private gardens, measured in square metres.
The researchers found that the areas with the highest income deprivation also had the lowest average percentage cover of natural space and gardens. People living in these areas had the highest levels of ill health.
Increased availability of natural space within local areas was also associated with a reduction in the disparity in YLL between the most and least deprived areas.
"Even moderate levels of natural space seemed to make a difference," the team said.
“In practice, not everyone can live in an area with a high percentage of green or natural space; however, this does not mean that even small amounts of such areas are not beneficial,” they said in the paper, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health – a title published by the British Medical journal.
But the research team cautioned that their observational study can’t establish cause and effect.
They also acknowledged that they didn’t have information on individual lifestyle behaviour and personal economic circumstances, or how much people used their local natural space or its quality, all of which may have influenced their findings.
Nonetheless, they said their findings echo those of other studies.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/green-space-health-lifespan-benefits-b2204559.html
******************************************************It was the energy bailout that blew up Trussonomics
Truss and Kwarteng must have thought it didn't count because it was a political imperative – but it doomed the project from the very start
Liz Truss has done many about-turns – on regional pay boards; corporation tax not rising; income tax being cut from 2023; the top rate being abolished. But far and away her biggest was announced immediately upon her becoming Prime Minister. Having stood on a platform of “no handouts” in response to the energy crisis, relying instead on a mix of benefits rises, short-term tax cuts and allowing market forces such as wage rises to do their job, as soon as she became Prime Minister she abandoned that stance and instead announced an absolutely massive energy price package.
By ministers’ own statements, the household element of that energy package alone was saving the average family around £4,000 per year. With over 25 million such families, that’s a bill of over £100 billion per year. Then there was the business energy package as well – perhaps £60 billion more.
And not only was this hugely expensive each year, it was in practice open-ended unless energy prices fell back dramatically. The household scheme was scheduled to last for two years, but that meant it would expire in late 2024, just before a General Election was due. No-one believed the Government would suddenly tell households their energy bills were going up by £4,000 just weeks before an election. So of course it would have been extended – perhaps made permanent.
Maybe one might have hoped the Government would find some way to curtail the cost once it realised the problem? But ministers immediately made that harder, tweeting out graphs showing that the UK’s energy package was much larger than those implemented in other countries – boasting of it in such a way that it would be even harder, politically, ever to backtrack from it.
So the Government had hundreds of billions of fiscal exposure in the energy package, in principle potentially lasting for many years ahead. Then, rather than say how any of that was to be paid for, they announced they were implementing all the short-term tax cuts Truss had said were the alternative to having an energy package during her leadership campaign. The energy package alone meant that there would need to be a huge fiscal consolidation – spending cuts and tax rises exceeding £100 billion, perhaps eventually even larger than those implemented in the 2010s. And with Labour way ahead in the polls, no Tory fiscal consolidation would ever be implemented anyway. It wouldn’t start in 2023 during the recession. It wouldn’t start in 2024 in the run-up to the General Election. And a Tory plan wouldn’t get implemented from 2025, because the Tories wouldn’t be in government by then.
So markets were being asked to fund hundreds of billions of extra deficit (mainly in the form of the energy package) with no-one even going to announce how it would be paid for until Labour entered office in 2025. Understandably, they took fright. This happened at the same time other issues were festering, including the Bank of England being too slow to raise interest rates, then announcing quantitative tightening at just the wrong moment, and pension funds getting into trouble with fancy financial instruments called “swaps”.
It was all a mess. But the biggest part of that mess – the Original Sin of Trussonomics – was that energy package. And even when there was massive market turmoil and Kwarteng started reversing elements of his mini-Budget, they still didn’t seem to grasp the real issue – as if some nonsense about the 45p rate, costing maybe £1.5 billion, was the real issue and the energy package, costing over £150 billion, was not. They didn’t circumscribe the energy package in any way – either in time (making it more credible it would end) or in scope (eg by no longer subsidising millionaires for heating their swimming pools). And the turmoil continued.
Only when Jeremy Hunt – acting, as some Twitter wags pointed out, like an IT guy switching the UK finances off and back on again – came in and ditched almost everything about the mini-Budget, including saying that Truss’ energy package would end after 6 months, has market stability been restored, at least for now.
I suspect that, because Truss and Kwarteng felt that the energy package was a political imperative, they thought it somehow “didn’t count” in the deficit, and they could do whatever other measures they fancied regardless of the fact they had introduced it and didn’t need any story as to how they paid for it. Financial markets have taught them, brutally and pitilessly, that that is not how these things work.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/18/energy-bailout-blew-trussonomics/
********************************************New paper shows glaring discrepancies between IPCC science and public statements
A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals how sober factual information in official climate reports is steadily distorted in moving from the original text (written by scientists), to the Summary for Policymakers (written by political hacks), to the official press releases (written by public relations officials), and then to the media coverage (written by journalists).
The paper, by physicist Dr Ralph Alexander, looks at two specific areas of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report: reconstructions of global temperatures over the last two millennia, and the coverage of marine heatwaves.
Dr Alexander explains:
"Take the global temperature reconstructions. The political hacks introduced Michael Mann's famous Hockey Stick graph into the Summary for Policymakers, even though this was not even mentioned by the scientists in the report itself. This graph is then used by the press officers to claim that current temperatures are 'unprecedented', but the scientists who wrote the original report said nothing of the sort, and indeed reported data that would contradict such a claim".
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
"Ralph Alexander's paper is a revelation, demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt that the public are being failed by IPCC officials and the news media. The message is clear. You can't trust the habitual hype and exaggeration the green establishment would like you to believe on climate."
Ralph B. Alexander: "Chinese Whispers: How climate science gets distorted in translation" (pdf)
Contact
Dr Ralph Alexander
e: ralexander@ameritech.net
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The Bank of England's main priority? Net Zero targets
Energy companies looking to take advantage of the Bank of England's latest support package will have to meet climate conditions, the central bank and Treasury announced today.
The new Energy Markets Financing Scheme (EMFS), formally launched today, will provide government-backed guarantees to energy generators, shippers or suppliers facing financial trouble in the wake of soaring gas prices following the Ukraine war,
In a market notice published this morning, the Bank of England confirmed that to be eligible for funding, companies must disclose whether they have a net zero transition plan and, if so, deliver it to the Treasury within six months of drawdown of funds, or before termination of the guarantee.
Within the same timeframe, firms must also deliver "proportionate climate-related financial information" aligned with the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures the Exchequer, according to the update.
The Bank of England and Treasury said the joint scheme had been designed to "address the extraordinary liquidity requirements" faced by energy firms operating in UK gas and electricity markets.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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