Global warming Policies might be bad for your Health

Indur Goklany.

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Conclusion: reducing the urgent Health risks that global warming would exacerbate.


Even on the basis of speculative analysis that tends to systematically overestimate the threat of global warming, it is now, and for the foreseeable future, outweighed by numerous other health threats. Many of these greater threats are diseases of poverty.


Exaggerating the importance of global warming seriously risks misdirecting the world’s priorities and its resources in efforts to reduce poverty and improve public health. Equally importantly, policies to curb global warming would, by increasing the price of energy and reducing its usage worldwide, slow down, if not reverse, the pace of economic growth. As economic development is central to the fight against poverty, such policies would tend to perpetuate the diseases—and all the other problems—associated with poverty. Specifically, since the diseases of poverty are currently responsible for 70–80 times more death and disease than global warming, such policies may well be counterproductive. They would, moreover, slow advances in society’s adaptive capacity, and otherwise retard improvements in human well-being (Goklany 2009e).


For example, the increase in biofuel production between 2004 and 2010, partly as a consequence of policies designed to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, is estimated to have increased the population in absolute poverty in the developing world by over 35 million, leading to about 200,000 additional deaths in 2010 alone. Moreover, to the extent that mitigation may have reduced the rate of warming (which is the best that mitigation can hope to achieve given current technologies and the inertia of the climate system), it may have slowed the reduction in excess winter mortality, a phenomenon that isn’t only restricted to the higher latitudes.


Since global warming would mostly amplify existing health risks that are associated with poverty, tackling these underlying health risks (e.g., hunger, malaria and other vector-borne diseases listed in Table 1) would also address any incremental health risks attributable to global warming. Accordingly, global health and well-being would, for the foreseeable future, be advanced farther, faster, more surely and more economically through (a) focused adaptation, that is, efforts focused on reducing vulnerability to today’s urgent poverty-related health problems that may be exacerbated by global warming, or (b) increasing adaptive capacity, especially of developing countries, through economic and technological development rather than on (c) quixotic and, most likely, counterproductive, efforts to reduce energy usage.

Goodnight Irene (and Other Natural Disasters). Deaths due to extreme weather are way, way down. Julian Morris

A new Reason Foundation study adds more reason for optimism. In “Wealth and Safety: The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900–2010,” Indur Goklany shows that global deaths from extreme weather events have fallen by over 90 percent since the 1920s, in spite of a more than hundredfold increase in reported incidence of such events. Goklany uses data from the Emergency Events database of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (EM-DAT). To be entered into EM-DAT, one or more of the following criteria must be fulfilled: Ten or more people reported killed; 100 or more people reported affected; declaration of a state of emergency; and a call for international assistance.

Droughts, and floods have long caused widespread death. In the 1920s, for instance, extreme weather was responsible for 485,000 deaths per year. But due to technological developments and related economic growth, deaths have fallen precipitously, even while the world’s population has risen. Between 2000 and 2010 there was an average of only 36 recorded deaths per year from extreme weather.

Deaths from storms, including hurricanes and tornadoes, spiked as recently as the 1970s, when there were 10 deaths a year per million people. Between 2000 and 2010, storms being blamed for just two deaths a year per million people.

Floods were to blame for 30 percent of the deaths during the 1900-2010, making them the second most deadly extreme weather category. The death rate for floods topped out in the 1930s at 204 deaths a year per million people. Deaths from floods have fallen by over 98 percent since then and there was an average of approximately one flood death per year per million people from 2000 to 2010.

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Wealth and Safety: The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900–2010  by Indur M. Goklany. Project Director: Julian Morris. (PDF)

Fuente: Francisco Capella.

Context is all by Matt Ridley and Indur Goklany

Context is all by Matt Ridley and Indur Goklany

How lethal are downpours compared with, say, cold winters? We all agree that global warming will create fewer cold winters, right? And since more people die in cold weather than in hot weather, global warming will reduce deaths. Is that effect bigger or smaller than the extra deaths from downpours? Answer: much, much bigger.

Here are some numbers. The annual excess mortality in winter is over 100,000 in the US, 50,000 in Japan, 25,000 in Britain and even 23,000 in Spain. Just a 10% drop in those numbers and you are saving tens of thousands of lives, far more than die in floods.

[...]

Was this because we controlled the weather? No. It was because we adapted to it. So even if extreme downpours do increase, death rates as a result of them will continue to decline so long as we continue to get more people access to roads, telephones, houses and information. It’s like malaria: it retreated rapidly in the twentieth century despite rising temperatures, and it will retreat rapidly in the twenty-first century despite rising temperatures.