Bad Science

Global warming may be real.

I'm willing to concede that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are increasing (probably due to human activity) and that this gas plays a role in trapping heat at the Earth's surface.

But it is also known that the Earth was much hotter 500 hundred years ago, and this was not an ecological disaster. Also unknown is what role the biosystem will play in response to increased CO₂ concentrations. Some research suggests that it will flourish and help mitigate the problem.

Still, global warming may be real. And if it is, there is nothing that we can do about it.

"Solutions" like Kyoto (if it is implemented) will create an oil glut, and the lower prices will encourage poorer nations to use this cheap energy. Not only will they fill the air with CO₂, they will do it in the dirtiest and least efficient ways possible (You think your local power plant pollutes, wait until you see what 10 million West African kersosene stoves can do).

We will burn every drop of cheap oil before we will find renewable power alternatives financially attractive.

So I admit to being something of a global warming agnostic, and stories like this are the reason why:

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- About 160,000 people die every year from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition and the numbers could almost double by 2020, a group of scientists said.

The study, by scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said children in developing nations seemed most vulnerable.

"We estimate that climate change may already be causing in the region of 160,000 deaths...a year," Professor Andrew Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told a climate change conference in Moscow on Tuesday.

Blaming malaria and malnutrition deaths on "global warming" is, at best, extremely bad science.

At worst, it is politically-motivated environmental alarmism masquerading as science.

When are people going to learn that stupid studies like this actually discredit your cause?

- posted by total @ 10/01/2003 09:23:00 PM .