Climate Shift Tied To 150,000 Fatalities

Washington Post ^ | 11/17/5 | Juliet Eilperin

[Crackingham]

Earth's warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year, according to the World Health Organization, a toll that could double by 2030. The data, being published today in the journal Nature, indicate that climate change is driving up rates of malaria, malnutrition and diarrhea throughout the world.

Health and climate scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who conducted one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure the impact of global warming on health, said the WHO data also show that rising temperatures disproportionately affect poor countries that have done little to create the problem. They reached their conclusions after entering data on climate-sensitive diseases into mapping software.

"Those most vulnerable to climate change are not the ones responsible for causing it," said the study's lead author, Jonathan Patz, a professor at the university's Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and its department of population health sciences. "Our energy-consumptive lifestyles are having lethal impacts on other people around the world, especially the poor."

The regions most at risk from climate change include the Asian and South American Pacific coasts, as well as the Indian Ocean coast and sub-Saharan Africa. Patz said that was because climate-sensitive diseases are more prevalent there and because those regions are most vulnerable to abrupt shifts in climate. Large cities are also likely to experience more severe health problems because they produce what scientists refer to as the urban "heat island" effect.

Just this week, WHO officials reported that warmer temperatures and heavy rain in South Asia have led to the worst outbreak of dengue fever there in years. The mosquito-borne illness, which is now beginning to subside, has infected 120,000 South Asians this year and killed at least 1,000, WHO said.

[Publius6961]

Isn't the full moon over?
Lots of moonbat threads this morning...

[SlowBoat407]

Just think, if it weren't for Bush, all those folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum would be alive today, not to mention the dinosaurs.

[.cnI redruM]

>>>>Earth's warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year,


Baloney! Everything being done in so-called climate change science is estimation. It's being done by modeling and simulation that can be driven by a priori assumptions. In the real world, there is no modeler playing "Dungeon Master."

This is precisely the sort of garbage that scientists and political action committees the world over start predicting when they get short on funding and media attention. These people's results were paid for, not their analysis.

[BigYellowDog]

There are so many broad sweeping assumptions of facts in this article. I'd love to see the data backing the study.

And a doubling of deaths by 2030? I'm taking wagers against it. It'll setup my 2030 retirement very well. To double in 2030, would likely mean 5,640,000 deaths over 25 years. If only I had wagered on all the estimates when the world supply of oil would be depleted.

[newcthem]

And does anyone want to guess the number of fatalities caused by the bumbling corupt UN every year?

[coloradan]

Leftist policies have killed 30,000,000 people from malaria alone, by banning DDT. Next, shall we talk about the number of people directly murdered at the hands of leftist dictators? Over a hundred million more. The WaPo should shove it.

[Joe Miner]

what would she suggest we do about the amount of sunshine falling upon the Earth???

If all 7 billion people wear a 6m by 6m tinfoil hat that would reflect back into space 0.1% of the incident sunshine.

Unfortunately all 7 billion people aren't on the sunny side at one time and 6mx6m is a bit large so the solution is we need more people.

[wildcatf4f3]

well the good news is they won't be buying any gasoline---supply and demand

[MEGoody]

LOL What a crock.

[Joe Brower]

[WmCraven_Wk]

"If all 7 billion people wear a 6m by 6m tinfoil hat that would reflect back into space 0.1% of the incident sunshine."

SHHhhhh!!! Don't say this too loud or the enviro-lunies may take is seriously.
ROFL!!

[Wuli]

"Earth's warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year, according to the World Health Organization, a toll that could double by 2030. The data, being published today in the journal Nature, indicate that climate change is driving up rates of malaria, malnutrition and diarrhea throughout the world."

Malaria can be eradicated with DDT and other insecticides. We did it a long time ago in Panama, when we built the canal down there.

Diarrhea is totally treatable and its source, bad water, does not take billions to solve either. I remember one late night infomercial for a charity that helps develop new wells for villages in poor rural areas in Africa and Asia. They use modern know how but 100% local labor and resources. It was like $250 dollars would buy a new well for a village.

Malnutrition comes from economic failures, which in most poor countries comes from lousy and/or corrupt government.

In fact, all three of these problems are managable, in even the poorest country with a good government, "global warming" or not. And, with the lousy government's that many poor countries continue to have there will be much more than "150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year", just because of how badly the lousy and corrupt governments manage everything.

Here, the media is pushing its agenda, as usual.

[Kokojmudd]

Eeeek. It is really time to blow up the sun.

[Wonder Warthog]

Big whoop!!!!

Call me when "global warming"'s impact gets up to 5,000,000 per year, as that is what the current eco-freak ban on DDT causes yearly in malaria deaths---ALSO "in poor countries".

[Piquaboy]

Someone needs to turn the sun out. What a crock of BS!

[bboop]

Liberals want to control, they LOVE feeling guilty, and they want money coming from the US to go to their pet causes. WHO, another fine org./sarc/

[The_Reader_David]

Hear! hear! for the folks who pointed out the excess early deaths due to the DDT ban.

But all you folks making fun of 'nice round numbers', get a clue. What would be risable would be an assertion that climate change (or second-hand smoke, or salmonella poisoning, . . .) caused 149,723 early deaths world-wide.

You don't laugh when the speed of light is reported as 186,000 miles per second because it got rounded off in the thousands column, and the lyric 'twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is' in the song from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life is perfectly respectable, even
if less precise.

Things get rounded off in science because we can't measure them precisely.

Make the anti-capitalist idiots who think industrialization is the cause of warmer global temperatures, rather than increased solar output or a cycle based on the melting and freezing of methane hydrates, erect their own strawmen, rather than providing them with easy targets by misplaced mocking of estimates.
Sheesh!

[randog]

We've sentenced millions of Third World people to death so that environmental groups can sit smugly in the US and feel good about themselves.

If you look at the left's policies on the whole, it's not so much looking out for the little guy as it is making sure there aren't too many of them.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Let's not forget about the hundreds of millions of lives SAVED by the energy made from fossil fuels."

You don't expect the MSM to notice a basic, obvious fact like that, do you? Fossil fuels provide heat and transportation that bring food and shelter to countless millions of people. An addition, plastics and other materials derived from petroleum are essential components of medical and other technologies which save thousands of lives every day, all around the world.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Imagine the catastrophe if the earth were cooling."

I can NEVER get a liberal to even address that issue. The climate never stays exactly the same over the centuries; it either goes up or down, yet liberals talk as if (1) the temperature say - 80 years ago - was the optimal temperature; (2) we have some human way of keeping that temperature the same; and (3) a world that was getting colder would be better than a world that is getting warmer. I think that all of these are false opinions, yet they are never questioned.