Climate Change Fraud - Because the debate is not over

Scare tactics make me sick

Written by Andrew Bolt, Melbourne Herald Sun

Thursday, 28 August 2008

I STAGGERED into my local hospital's emergency department last Thursday and found out just how sick the global warming alarmists really are.

Not a single bed to be had. Not there, or anywhere near, either, I was told.

No, I'm not saying the beds were all filled with people sick with "climate change delusion" -- described by the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry as a condition that gives victims "visions of apocalyptic events", that leaves them too scared to drink a glass of water for fear "that, due to climate change, (their) own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people".

The people in the trolleys around me didn't have eyes bulging from fear or crazed lips cracked from dehydration.

They seemed just the usual emergency cases, plus a few extra old folk pole-axed by the wheezes and diseases they tend to get in winter.

The hospitals were always this full at this chill time of year, the nurses told me. It was the cold.

Only a few weeks earlier, NSW Premier Morris Iemma had announced a winter health strategy to deal with the fact that admissions to hospital between July and September typically increase by 6 per cent.

That's when I realised just how sick a stunt Mornington Peninsula Shire had pulled on its terrified residents. I was so cross I wasn't sure if I was still trembling from fever or fury.

Let me explain.

Global warming prophets have had great success in screaming at us to repent or die.

Profit of Doom Al Gore, for instance, warned in An Inconvenient Truth that warming risked ending all human civilisation, and no scare is now deemed too extreme to make us cut our satanic gases.

Even Gaia guru Prof James Lovelock is listened to thoughtfully as he wails: "Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

This love of the Big Scare has worked its way down the global-warming food chain. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd even warned Parliament that warming could unleash malaria and dengue fever on us and cause another 1400 Australians a year to die from heatstroke.

It's insane, of course. In the century until 1998, the planet warmed some 0.7 degrees, yet we now live longer than ever and managed to end mass famine.

In the far richer century to come, will we really lose the ability to fight malaria, cure dengue fever or buy more airconditioners for hot grandparents? That's even assuming global warming resumes after a decade of stable -- and now falling -- temperatures.

Yet scaring people to death has now become so standard and so shameless that even our local councils now pay experts to terrify the locals, hoping fear will make them believe a new faith that reason insists they doubt.

Until now, most councils have stuck to hyped-up warnings of floods, rising seas, heat waves and the traditional biblical plagues of warming believers.

But Mornington Peninsula Shire has now upped the ante, sending each ratepayer a glossy magazine warning that warming may well kill them.

I kid you not. The booklet, Climate change: what we are doing about it, includes the following predictions:

"Average annual temperature will rise by up to 3.5 degrees by 2070, placing greater stress on elderly residents and those living in older homes with inadequate insulation . . .

"The increased incidence of extreme heat days and heat waves, in conjunction with a growing and ageing population in the peninsula, has the potential to contribute to significant mortality in future decades."

The booklet even estimates the number of residents risking death: "Potential impacts: ability to affect entire population, especially elderly and infants; 27,000 elderly, 8000 infants and young people; increased mortality and morbidity in vulnerable groups."

You don't often come across scaremongering so brazen -- or so irresponsibly exaggerated.

Nor do you often get such a comical mismatch between threat and salvation. To save themselves from this frying death, residents are advised in the booklet to do such things as compost your kitchen scraps and donate all unwanted magazines to your local seniors' residences.

Compost or die. Donate or fry.

The audacity of these scaremongers.

Let me try to reassure the poor residents of Mornington Peninsula.

Let's leave aside the dodgy science behind these predictions of deadly heatwaves, issued in the midst of a particularly fine and snowy ski season.

Let's ignore also the calming fact that even if temperatures rise, we will still grow so much richer over the decades that we can afford whatever it will take to cope, from more doctors to free insulation for pensioners.

Let's deal only with the claim that Mornington Peninsula residents will die like flies should temperatures rise, improbably, by 3.5 degrees.

For a start, such a rise would still leave Melbourne cooler than is Brisbane, where average daily maximum temperatures are 4.7 degrees higher than ours.

Does Brisbane strike you as a killing field for the young and elderly?

What's more, the lack of hospital beds I found last week hints at an even more basic truth: what most tends to kill people is not hot summers but cold winters. Higher temperatures could actually help us to live longer.

Still wondering whether to trust the terror-porn of the shire and flee the Black Hole of Mornington? The looming Apocalypse on Rye?

Then consider some evidence. First, we are more likely to be killed by cold.

Here, for instance, is a recent Adelaide University study -- Temperature and direct effects on population health in Brisbane, 1986-1995 -- published in the Journal of Environmental Health:

"Death rates were around 50-80 per 100,000 in June, July, and August (winter), while they were around 30-50 per 100,000 in the rest of the year.

"It is understandable that more deaths would occur in winters in cold or temperate regions, but even in a subtropical region . . . a decrease in temperatures (in winters) may increase human mortality."

It's the same story over in New Zealand, a University of Otago study confirmed last year: "From 1980-2000, around 1600 excess winter deaths occurred each year with winter mortality rates 18 per cent higher than expected from non-winter rates."

So winters kill and, yes, your growing suspicions are indeed correct: global warming could cause fewer people to die from the temperature.

Of the many studies I could quote, here is one from the British Medical Journal in 2000, by scientists from Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Finland, that also explains why a cold snap is deadlier than a heat wave:

"All regions showed more annual cold-related mortality than heat-related mortality . . .

"Some of those who died in the heat may not have lived long if a heatwave had not occurred. Mortality often falls below baseline for several days after the end of a heatwave . . . indicating that some of the people dying during the heatwave were already close to death . . .

"Falls in temperature in winter are closely followed by increased mortality, suggesting that most excess winter deaths are due to relatively direct effects of cold on the population."

Heat carries off those already dying, but cold kills the healthy, too.

Concludes that study: "Our data suggest that any increases in mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger short-term declines in cold related mortalities."

Got that? Rising temperatures will actually be healthier.

A review article by University of London researchers in the Southern Medical Journal three years ago makes the same point: "The rise in temperature of 3.6F expected over the next 50 years would increase heat-related deaths in Britain by about 2000 but reduce cold-related deaths by about 20,000."

And residents of Melbourne and such coastal areas have little to fear from warming, either, according to a huge study Climate and mortality in Australia, which tried to predict deaths in our biggest cities by 2030.

Researchers from Adelaide University, the Wellington School of Medicine and even the alarmist CSIRO regretfully concluded: "Given the scenarios of regional warming during the next three decades, the expected changes in mortality due to direct climatic effects in these major coastal Australian cities are minor."

Bottom line: more Peninsula residents are likely to die of fright from their shire's propaganda than are likely to die from global warming. Indeed, some warming could do many of the elderly there the world of good.

So shame on the shire. This politics of fear is enough to make us sick.

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