Is Global Warming Killing Everyone Already?
November 21, 2005
A new report claims global warming is already killing an extra 150,000 people per year around the world. Dr. Jonathon Patz of the University of Wisconsin warns this is just a down payment on the massive death toll he expects for our overheated Earth during the 21st century.
It’s probably just coincidence that Patz’s paper appeared just before the UN’s next big global warming conference, which starts Nov. 28 in Montreal.
Fortunately, Patz’s global warming death toll fails the logic test. Global warming doesn’t increase summer heat, it mainly makes winter nights milder. If warmer winter temperatures are so deadly, why do so many of Patz’s Wisconsin neighbors spend their winters in Florida?
Patz also fails his history test. He says most of the global warming deaths will come as global warming spreads malaria and yellow fever. He’s forgotten that malaria used to be endemic all over America-including Wisconsin, despite its cold climate. Wisconsin’s early settlers brought malaria with them from Sweden and Germany, where it was also rampant.
The pioneers called malaria “seasoning.” Everybody got it, and thousands died. That’s just the way life was. In 1939, 4,500 malaria mosquitoes were captured in the basement and in the outhouse of one Minnesota home!
As window screens became widespread after 1880, malaria faded as a problem, except for the southern U.S. After World War II, DDT helped eradicate malaria in the American as well as in Sweden and Germany.
If Patz is serious about reducing malaria deaths, he should trade in his global warming hat and campaign for indoor spraying of DDT in the tropics. DDT not only kills mosquitoes, but it’s a powerful mosquito repellent that keeps the insects out of unscreened huts. Given the current 2 million global malaria deaths per year, wider indoor use of DDT is likely to save far more than the 150,000 deaths per year Patz claims for global warming.
In California, Patz predicts heat stroke deaths will double because of global warming. He must believe the Kyoto Protocol will deprive Californians of electricity for their air conditioners. In real-life America, air conditioning helped cut heat-related deaths by 75 percent between the 1960s and the 1990s, according to Robert E. Davis of the University of Virginia.
Patz claims that global warming will drive more powerful coastal storm surges, drowning masses of people. But storms are powered by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. During warmings, the Arctic warms by up to 6 degrees C, while temperatures at the equator stay unchanged. Thus, milder storms.
British Navy records show more than twice as many major landfalling Caribbean hurricanes during the Little Ice Age (1700-1850) as in the Modern Warming (1850-2000).
Patz seems to think we have a choice about global warming. However, in 1983, scientists in Greenland brought up the first of many long ice cores, revealing the earth has a moderate, natural global warming roughly every 1500 years. Antarctic ice cores now verify the cycles over the past one millions years.
Fossilized pollen in the U.S. shows our trees and plants have been completely reshuffled nine times in the past 16,000 years, or once every 1650 years. In Michigan, the winter-tolerant pine trees have been slowly replaced by oak trees, and then the oaks by warmth-loving beech trees hundreds of times as the warming cycles waxed and waned.
Man-made CO2 might be adding to the Modern Warming-but not very much. The vast majority of our warming occurred before 1940. Moreover, the Greenhouse Effect says the Poles will warm first, and they haven’t warmed. The Antarctic has been cooling since the 1960s. The Arctic, except Alaska, was warmer in 1930 than today.
Apparently Patz is a lawyer-type scientist: If you have the facts, argue the facts; if you don’t have the facts, scare everybody with unsubstantiated claims of a big death toll.
He might also focus on the next ice age, due in about 400 years as the second half of the
current 1500-year global warming cycle. Now that is scary.
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