Researchers warn climate change is likely to aggravate brain conditions
The source article:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(24)00087-5/fulltext
Cripes! I was born and bred in the tropics as were all 4 of my grandparents. I must have been walking around amid a herd of morons!More seriously, the writers had NO data on global warming and no global data of any kind. All they showed was that some illnesses are heat sensitive to an unspecified degree within an unspecified range on some occasions in some localities.
Their work was in fact a classic example of a Gish gallop. They also showed no awareness of the need for an experiment-wise error-rate approach to significance testing. Under something like a Bonferroni correction, ALL of their findings would be reduced to a nullity
Researchers warn climate change is likely to aggravate brain conditions
Climate change, and its effects on weather patterns and adverse weather events, is likely to negatively affect the health of people with brain conditions, researchers have warned.
The scientists argue that in order to preserve the health of people with neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s and stroke, there is an urgent need to understand how climate change affects them.
As an example, they say that higher temperatures through the night can disrupt sleep, which could have a negative effect on some brain conditions.
There is clear evidence for an impact of the climate on some brain conditions, especially stroke and infections of the nervous system
Following a review of 332 papers published across the world between 1968 and 2023, the team, led by Professor Sanjay Sisodiya of UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, said they expect the scale of the potential effects of climate change on neurological diseases to be substantial.
Professor Sisodiya, who is also director of genomics at the Epilepsy Society and a founding member of Epilepsy Climate Change, said: “There is clear evidence for an impact of the climate on some brain conditions, especially stroke and infections of the nervous system.
“The climatic variation that was shown to have an effect on brain diseases included extremes of temperature (both low and high), and greater temperature variation throughout the course of day – especially when these measures were seasonally unusual.
“Nighttime temperatures may be particularly important, as higher temperatures through the night can disrupt sleep.
“Poor sleep is known to aggravate a number of brain conditions.”
The researchers considered 19 different nervous system conditions, chosen on the basis of the Global Burden of Disease 2016 study, including stroke, migraine, Alzheimer’s, meningitis, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis.
They also analysed the impact of climate change on several serious but common psychiatric disorders including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.
According to the findings, there was an increase in hospital admissions, disability or death as a result of a stroke in higher ambient temperatures or heatwaves.
The researchers also suggest that people with dementia are susceptible to harm from extremes of temperature and weather events such as flooding or wildfires, as their condition can impact their ability to adapt behaviour to environmental changes.
Writing in The Lancet Neurology, the researchers say: “Reduced awareness of risk is combined with a diminished capacity to seek help or to mitigate potential harm, such as by drinking more in hot weather or by adjusting clothing.
“This susceptibility is compounded by frailty, multimorbidity and psychotropic medications.
“Accordingly, greater temperature variation, hotter days and heatwaves lead to increased dementia-associated hospital admissions and mortality.”
The researchers say it is important to ensure that research is up to date and considers not only the present state of climate change but also the future.
Professor Sisodiya added: “The whole concept of climate anxiety is an added, potentially weighty, influence: many brain conditions are associated with higher risk of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, and such multimorbidities can further complicate impacts of climate change and the adaptations necessary to preserve health.
“But there are actions we can and should take now.”
Funded by the Epilepsy Society and the National Brain Appeal Innovation Fund, the research is being published ahead of The Hot Brain 2: climate change and brain health event, which is led by Professor Sisodiya and jointly organised by UCL and The Lancet Neurology
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ucl-b2545868.html
*******************************************Northern parts of Australia to suffer from ‘lethal heat’ in coming decades
This is just opinion. They have no data on temperatures in Northern Australia
Australia’s north will be “unliveable” in the coming decades because the heat and humidity will be so intense that it will be deadly for humans, experts have warned.
They say the lethal heat will start emerging at certain times of the year, making it impossible for humans to be outdoors for more than six hours.
Climate scientist Bill Hare said areas such as Broome and Katherine, as well as parts of Asia and Africa, would soon be unliveable if the temperature increased by just 1.5 degrees.
“We are already seeing small periods of lethal heat in South Asia, West Asia and South East Asia where there have already been reports of mortality occurring.
“It is already getting toward the limit of human liveability.”
Mr Hare is chief executive and senior scientist with Climate Analytics – a global climate science and policy institute supporting climate action aligned to the 1.5C warming limit.
In 2003, a study published in the scientific journal Comptes Rendus Biologies found more than 70,000 people died in Europe from lethal heat.
It was the hottest summer recorded in Europe since 1540, which lead to drought, food shortages and tens of thousands of people dying.
Mr Hare said for cities like Perth, which is currently experiencing its longest period of dry heat and no rain, scientists did not expect to see a lethal combination of humidity and heat in the next 25 years, but northern parts of Australia would.
He said some areas in the Kimberley region had already felt small bursts of lethal heat, killing cattle and native animals.
“It will happen slowly and gradually, the weather will become really extreme and it will get worse and worse,” Mr Hare said.
“There is only one way to limit this damage, but you won’t eliminate it, people will need to adapt to it.”
Mr Hare said carbon emissions needed to reduce by 50 per cent in the next decade and Australia needed to reach net zero by 2050.
“In the last 10 years, the largest increase in carbon dioxide and global warming came from fossil fuel emissions,” he said.
“Coal is being phased out, and the same thing needs to apply to gas, it should already be reducing.
“The federal government needs to step off supporting gas and go full throttle on supporting renewables.
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EPA's lead pipe fix sent about $3 billion to states based on unverified data
The Environmental Protection Agency distributed about $3 billion to states last year to replace harmful lead pipes based on unverified data, according to an agency inspector general's memo, likely meaning some states got too much money and others got too little.
Investigators found two states had submitted inaccurate data, the memo released Wednesday said. It didn't name the states. The EPA has since made changes, but the inspector general said the agency could do more.
“Insufficient internal controls for verifying data led to allotments that did not represent the needs of each state, and if left unaddressed, the Agency runs the risk of using unreliable data for future” infrastructure spending, said EPA Inspector General Sean W. O’Donnell.
The agency has said it will release new information on lead service lines projections later this summer. The EPA did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided $15 billion to find and replace lead pipes over five years. These pipes are especially common in the Midwest and Northeast and are typically found in older homes. Lead can reduce IQ scores in children and stunt their development. It is also linked to higher blood pressure in adults.
To distribute funds based on how many lead pipes states had, the EPA asked for estimates from states and utilities. Then, in April 2023, the agency announced the results — there are about 9.2 million lead pipes nationwide — and adjusted its funding formula.
Tom Neltner, national director with Unleaded Kids, said two states — Texas and Florida — had much higher totals than expected in those estimates. Florida ultimately received the most funding of any state in 2023: $254.8 million after an initial estimate of nearly 1.2 million lead pipes.
“By submitting inflated information, it takes money away from states that really need it,” he said.
Texas and Florida didn't immediately respond to messages left with their governor's offices and Florida's Department of Environmental Quality.
The Biden administration has prioritized delivering safe drinking water to everyone. Earlier this year, the EPA proposed a rule that would require most cities and towns to replace all their lead pipes within a decade. It has also put limits on so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water.
Republicans have repeatedly attacked the Biden administration’s spending on climate and environmental priorities as a handout to left-wing causes without enough accountability.
The EPA’s office of inspector general is in the middle of evaluating federal funding for lead pipe replacement, and had been in contact with agency officials earlier about some of their concerns. The inspector general expects to release a final report in the fall when it will identify each states' inaccuracies.
The inspector general found a water provider in one state sent bad information to the agency and “adjustments made by another state” were also submitted.
Even before the inspector general’s memo was released, some states had already complained to the EPA that its funding decisions weren’t fair.
“We have serious concerns about the quality of the data upon which EPA relied,” a February letter to the EPA from Massachusetts officials said.
In early May, the EPA adjusted its allocation of funds for 2024, which is based on some new information it received from utilities. Funding for Texas dropped the most; its $146.2 million was cut by about $117.6 million. Florida had the second-biggest reduction, cut by $26.1 million. Eight other states or territories saw smaller reductions.
Nineteen states got more money, led by Minnesota with $48.7 million more and New Jersey's $40.1 million more.
Neltner said EPA deserves credit for collecting additional information to improve the accuracy of the funding granted.
The $15 billion is only a fraction of the total amount needed to replace all of the country’s lead pipes. Erik Olson, a health and food expert at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, said inflated estimates by some states can direct a lot of money to the wrong place.
“I’ll just say it is suspicious,” he said.
Olson said it's the obligation of water utilities and states to submit accurate information. But EPA deserves some blame, too, “for not verifying some of these numbers," he said.
When the agency started distributing money, some states like Michigan had a long list of projects they wanted to fund. Others aren't so far along and must first spend the money on inventories to find their lead pipes. A small number of states even declined funding in the first year it was offered.
If states don’t spend all of their money, it gets reallocated to states that need it more.
Neltner worries that if states receive more money than they need, they'll spend it on expensive lead pipe inventories, not replacement efforts.
John Rumpler, clean water director with environmental group Environment America, said the important question is how well states are using the money they are given to replace lead pipes.
“Even if all of this money was perfectly allocated,” he said. “It would not remove all the lead pipes.”
https://apnews.com/article/water-lead-pipes-epa-florida-texas-2b725f2ef51bce25c144826c882af970
****************************************************Australia: Huge complexities and costs behind the CO2 allergy
The global warming hoax has much to answer for
This week’s news that energy networks plan to charge households to export excess solar energy to the grid in the middle of the day will affect the two men in very different ways.
In a dynamic mirrored by the nation at large, Horsley is likely to benefit from the new order, while Seton is likely to lose out. Meanwhile, the distributors and the likes of St Vincent de Paul Society say the move protects renters and low-income households without solar.
Sydneysider Nic Seton has solar panels on his roof and is worried about Ausgrid’s new network charge.
Sydneysider Nic Seton has solar panels on his roof and is worried about Ausgrid’s new network charge.CREDIT:LOUIE DOUVIS
It was enabled by a national rule change in August 2021. Australian Energy Market Commission chair Anna Collyer, whose organisation made the decision, says it allows distributors to recoup the cost of paying for upgrades to the grid to remove bottlenecks and allow more solar to be exported.
“A ‘do nothing’ approach would have led to a worse outcome for all,” Collyer says. “There would have been increasing instances where customers are limited in their level of exports or not allowed to export at all.”
Australia leads the world in rooftop solar: the Clean Energy Council estimates it represents 11.2 per cent of the national energy supply.
It’s a great success story that opens up myriad opportunities for the transition to a decarbonised economy, but experts say it also brings challenges with managing grid stability and who should pay for that.
At the heart of the problem is a demand curve that looks like a duck, even if it doesn’t walk and quack like one. Figures from the Australian Energy Market Operator show energy demand starts off neutral in the early morning, plummets during the middle of the day when consumers are either not at home or using their own solar, and then peaks in the evening when people get home and turn on their devices and lights.
Grattan’s director of the energy program, Tony Wood, says: “The dramatic growth in solar PV is breaking the electricity duck’s back. Flattening the load is likely to restore it to good health.”
This is at the heart of the changes announced this week by the three NSW energy distributors – Ausgrid, Essential Energy and Endeavour Energy. The NSW pricing structure was approved by the Australian Energy Regulator last month, and all three companies said it was done after extensive consultation with customers.
Rob Amphlett Lewis, group executive distributed services at Sydney’s main distributor Ausgrid, says: “We want to move as much of our energy [usage] into the middle of the day when we’ve got all of this generation happening, and that effectively squashes the duck.”
The solar duck is a national problem, and NSW is merely at the vanguard of a shift that is likely to come to other states as well. SA Power Networks was one of the proponents of the national rule change in 2021 necessary to bring in the charges and will be able to introduce them in the next AER pricing review in 2025, along with Queensland. Victoria’s next AER cycle is in 2026.
The effect is that the distribution networks, which own the poles and wires but are separate entities from the electricity retailers, will allow a threshold of free exports during the day and charge a penalty beyond that while also providing a reward for energy exports in the evening. The distributors, which have geographic monopolies, have different pricing structures, and the retailers can choose how to package it to customers.
Solar households will still enjoy reduced bills from using their own energy and will still be paid feed-in tariffs from retailers based on wholesale electricity prices. The overall cost is expected to be low for the average customer.
Seton has a modest 4.5-kilowatt battery on the roof of his townhouse in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Newtown, where he lives with his partner and two children. About six years ago, the family paid about $6000 after rebates and has enjoyed large savings on their electricity bills.
He has no control over the fact that the solar panels only work when the sun is shining, cannot justify the cost of a home battery at upwards of $9000, and has already tried to shift his energy usage to the middle of the day as much as possible.
Meanwhile, at the seven-person Horsley household in leafy Wahroonga on the north shore, there is a possibility the family can make money from the situation.
Peter Horsley has spent tens of thousands of dollars on 17 kilowatts of solar panels and three batteries, not including the cost of two electric cars.
He can charge his batteries during the day from the solar panels and then sell electricity back at higher prices in the evening. With his set-up (Tesla battery and an app from his retailer Amber Electric), Horsley has set this up as a default and can also manually override it when needed, for example, if there is a blackout.
He can even charge his batteries from the grid rather than his solar panels. “The prices can go negative during the day as well, so there have even been cases where we’ve been paid to fill up our batteries and take energy off the grid,” Horsley says.
He has already participated in an Ausgrid trial for two-way pricing, which offered generous evening feed-in tariffs but is not sure what the net effect will be in the future. Despite this, he is confident he won’t be worse off and adds that he does not support the changes, mainly because he believes in solar as a climate change solution and is worried it will slow uptake.
Energy distributors, backed by advocates such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Australian Council of Social Service and the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, say that it is about equity: the networks need to find the money to upgrade the grid to absorb the new solar energy being generated, and they don’t want the poorer non-solar households to bear the entire cost.
Seton, who runs Parents for Climate, says it’s pitting homes without solar and their interests against homes with solar. The better way to address equity is to help low-income households and renters get solar and to help solar households buy batteries.
He is frustrated there is a mandatory levy, however small, on solar households who have tried to contribute to the renewable energy transition.
“At the end of the day for some people, it’s still one more brick in the wall in that cost-of-living crisis,” Seton says.
Campaign groups such as Solar Citizens have described the new charge as a “sun tax” and warned it could put people off buying solar panels, while Rewiring Australia says it’s about the large-scale incumbents “defending their turf” against households getting in on the game.
There are also market analysts, such as Tristan Edis, a green energy and carbon markets economist with Green Energy Markets, who say it is the wrong approach.
Edis says bluntly that “the rule change was bullshit” and the regulators were “snowed” by the energy distributors. “They’ve just given them the keys to a new revenue stream through this rule change, even though there’s not proper evidence here.”
He points to UNSW research from 2020 that suggests so-called solar traffic jams are largely the result of distributors failing to manage voltage, a problem that occurs during the evening peak as well as by day.
Distributors do not effectively measure voltage spikes from solar households anywhere except Victoria, Edis says, so they had not proven the case that solar households were causing the problem.
In Victoria, the government had regulated the distributors to lower voltage, and this had occurred despite high solar penetration. As a result, he predicts that Victorian distributors will not need to introduce two-way pricing in their next AER round in 2026.
But Amphlett Lewis says the UNSW research shows the various ways to manage voltage, and the extensive consultation that Ausgrid and the other distributors carried out, determined that two-way pricing was the best model.
Rewiring Australia chief executive Saul Griffith says there is a bigger picture being lost. “A lot of people are not at home during the day when their house is generating the most electricity,” Griffith says. “In the best of all worlds, the excess electricity they’re making will charge the electric vehicles that are going to be prolific in this country … and the biggest battery in Australia will be our cars.”
The networks are keen on the vehicle-to-grid charging that Griffith is advocating. Essential Energy chief operating officer Luke Jenner says the network “is optimistic about the opportunities electric vehicle charging and vehicle-to-grid charging can offer consumers” and, while it already offers two-way charging for electric vehicles, it is currently testing and developing infrastructure to develop it further.
Home batteries cost from $9000 to $15,000 and the federal budget did not provide any funding to help households buy batteries. Some schemes exist in Victoria and Queensland, while the NSW government will have more to say on this in its consumer energy strategy due in the coming months.
Community batteries are another solution, often touted by the networks themselves, as they can build and own them, often with government subsidies. Ausgrid has five across Sydney and the Central Coast, Endeavour Energy has partnered with Origin Energy for community batteries in western Sydney and Shell Cove in the Illawarra, and Essential Energy says it owns and is developing several energy storage solutions.
Ausgrid’s Amphlett Lewis says both household and community batteries have their place, but “shared batteries will have a big role to play because they’re more cost-effective than behind-the-meter batteries”.
Tristan Edis disputes this, though, saying it’s better to support individual households in getting their own batteries because distributors have a profit motive and a monopoly business structure. That means they are wasteful and do not act in the best interests of consumers, while the locations of community batteries are often chosen “based on where politicians want to cut a ribbon.”
St Vincent de Paul Society’s executive manager of policy and research, Gavin Dufty, says batteries are expensive, but he advocates helping households to shift their usage of appliances, such as increased use of timers so loads of dishes and laundry can be done during the day even if no one is home.
He supports the policy: “It’s putting in the right foundations if we’re going to electrify everything and get to net zero, which we want.“
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
