Global Warming Policies Might Be Bad For Your Health

The Global Warming Policy Foundation ^ | Dr Indur Goklany

[cartan]

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has released a new report. Here is the executive summary:

Global warming does not currently rank among the top public health threats

• The World Health Organization (WHO) attributes 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) in 2004 to global warming. This is only 0.2% of all deaths and 0.4% of the burden of disease (Figure 1; WHO 2008a, 2009).
• This estimate, however, does not account for the health outcomes that are the major contributors to the long-known phenomenon of excess winter mortality (see Table 1).
• Deaths from excess winter mortality in Japan and the U.S. alone (about 159,000 per year) exceed deaths currently attributed to global warming (141,000 per year) (Table 4).
• WHO analysis indicates that at least 22 other health risks currently outrank global warming as a global public health threat (based on data for 2004) (Figure 1; WHO 2009).
• Global warming would exacerbate existing diseases of poverty rather than create any significant new health risks. More than 99.9% of the burdens of death and disease attributed to global warming by WHO are in developing countries (Figure 1, WHO 2009).

The contribution of much-publicized extreme weather events to global mortality is negligible, and declining.

• Despite the emphasis in the popular press on extreme weather events (e.g., droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, cyclones and other storms), their global contribution to mortality, at 0.07%, is negligible (EM-DAT 2011).
• Global mortality attributed to all such events has declined by 93% since the 1920s, while total mortality rate declined 98% (EM-DAT 2011).
• Mortality from extreme weather events has declined but all-cause mortality has increased. That is, humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems (EM-DAT 2011; UNPD 2011).

Poverty is a much larger public health threat than global warming

• The contribution of diseases of poverty (e.g., underweight, malnutrition, unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene) to the global burden of death and disease is currently 70–80-fold larger than that of global warming. (Table 2; Figure 1; WHO 2009)
• Deaths from diseases of poverty and excess winter mortality are real (WHO 2009; Falagas 2009), whereas those from global warming are based on hypotheses and models which short-circuited the scientific method and have not been tested rigorously (McMichael et al. 2004, p. 1546).

Other factors will outweigh warming as a public health risk in the foreseeable future

• In the foreseeable future, global warming may contribute no more than 13% to mortality from hunger, malaria and extreme weather events, even under the warmest IPCC scenario. Therefore, rolling back climate, i.e. temperature, precipitation and other climatic variables, to 1990 levels— currently infeasible, regardless of cost—would at most reduce mortality from these causes by less than 13% (Figure 6).

Either focused adaptation or economic development would provide greater health benefits at lower costs than mitigation

• By contrast, measures focused on reducing vulnerability to hunger, malaria and extreme weather events would target 100% of the above mortality and cost much less (Goklany 2009b).
• Such “focused adaptation”, designed to reduce vulnerability more broadly to today’s urgent health problems that would be exacerbated by warming, would, therefore, deliver greater reductions in deaths at a lower cost than mitigation.
• Alternatively, reductions in poverty, which depends on greater economic growth, should also help eliminate death and disease from not just hunger, malaria, extreme weather events but all the other diseases of poverty. Poverty, moreover, can be reduced at a fraction of the cost of substantial mitigation.
• No less important, reducing poverty should provide other ancillary benefits beyond improved public health, e.g., better education and economic opportunities.

Emission reduction Policies may add to Death and Disease

• Mitigation policies that would retard economic development or increase the price of agricultural inputs and output would slow down reductions in poverty and, thereby, increase net death and disease, and retard improvements in human welfare.
• Mitigation policies designed to replace fossil fuels with biofuels in particular may have, by adding to world hunger and poverty, contributed 200,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million lost DALYs in 2010 without significantly reducing the public health impact of global warming. (De Hoyos and Medvedev 2009; Goklany 2011)
• Mitigation policies, if successful, would retard progress toward reducing excess winter mortality. If unsuccessful, that too would exacerbate excess winter mortality if it reduces economic development and/or increases heating fuel costs.
• Policies to reduce global warming may be doing more harm than good for public health in both developing and industrialized countries.

[cartan]

Good read. The whole report is available here.

[Graybeard58]

The World Health Organization (WHO) attributes 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) in 2004 to global warming.

A rectal estimate, if I've ever heard one.

They must have used Obama's method of estimating how many jobs he has "saved".

[jimsin]

WELL it’s hard on ma nature if there are numerous people on earth...so if the evil u.s. quits puttin so many people on the planet then our nation would be doin it’s part on the global warmin’ front. trouble is all those other nations would probably just keep on puttin their people on the place (because it’s so much fun to make ‘em, and all)... and pretty soon the little devils, they’d outnumber us and come over and kill us....so you can see where that WOULD be hazardous to the health of all Americans. Therefore i guess we’re stuck but i think it’s ok for us to die for mother nature...I guess....ARRRRGH... and oh MY GODDD !!!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

This article doesn’t explore the other side of the issue. If AGW were real and If there were a serious effort to reduce our carbon usage, then energy prices would go up 10x. The high price of energy would cause serious reductions in life expectancy, especially among the poor. THAT is the biggest health risk from this scam and has never been properly exposed.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

It’s all about being “green”.