Global Warming Deaths on the Rise! When I read this headline yesterday, my first reaction was that it might be a spoof. An attention grabber or an overdue April fool’s Day joke. Surely they are not already claiming large scale death due to alleged warming climates. I thought that was on the table for the next generation, like for my children. Are people already dying?! This must be a shaggy dog story.

But then I read on….

“About 160,000 people die every year from side effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition, a group of WHO scientists said Tuesday. What’s more, they projected the “disease burden caused by climate change could almost double by 2020.”

160,000 deaths year, huh? Every year? Which year? Who was the first guy to die? And wow, how many years has THIS been occurring?!  

You can see where I am taking this. This is exactly the kind of “study” that makes for big headlines. Death and destruction on the rise, backed by credible science. It’s enough to make me run for cover under the Kyote treaty. Or so they’d hope.

WHO is at it once again. They are spreading junk science in the form of a press release. How did WHO make this calculation? Patrick J. Michaels from the CATO Institute sheds some light on it: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5225. Michaels explains how many of these “global warming deaths” occurred in Europe in 2003 when France and neighboring countries shut down in August to vacation. Hospitals were understaffed and broken air conditioners went unfixed. In France alone, 15,000 senior citizens died from neglect, not global warming! These people might have lived if they turned up the fossil fuels a tad and cooled it down.

The people at WHO also included death by tornado, hurricane, flood, and climate related disease. But it makes you wonder how many weather-related deaths would occur annually even at temperatures in, for example, 1990? The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed 20,000 people in the Caribbean. Did that count? And aren’t there many other factors to consider? Surely lots of people died of heat stroke in pre-air conditioning days. It seems possible, even likely, that the advent of air conditioners have substantially reduced death due to weather.

Maybe WHO should converse with the folks at the American Journal of Epidemiology who recently documented that in “hot weather, the death rate for persons who had central air-conditioning was 42 percent lower than the rate for persons who did not have air-conditioning, after confounding variables had been controlled for…” http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/136/1/106

I wonder how many lives would be saved in Africa is we could simply send them more air conditioners.