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via JoNova
May 28, 2024 at 09:23AM
Month: May 2024
In Episode 437 of District of Conservation, Gabriella keeps up the theme of incompetent cabinet secretaries and deputies, focusing on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his terrible ‘Face the Nation’ interview. He couldn’t answer why only 8 of 500k EV charging stations, funded by $7.5B, have come online. He also spewed misinformation about turbulence and […]
via CFACT
May 28, 2024 at 09:23AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
I’ve come across plenty of junk climate studies, but this has to be one of the most amateurish:
The study, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature Communications, showed how the death toll from temperature hazards overtook the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the South West region of England, when the UK was in the throes of the pandemic.
Lead author Dr Eunice Lo, Research Fellow in Climate Change and Health at the University’s Cabot Institute for the Environment and Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research, said: “The statistics are stark and illustrate how high the health burden of adverse weather is in the UK in the current climate. I anticipated higher levels of mortality than normal as the country was also experiencing a record heatwave during the peak of the pandemic, but the extent of the increases are surprising and concerning.”
The researchers sprang into action after Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, highlighted at COP26 that the climate crisis was a far bigger problem than COVID-19, which would prove more fatal without immediate changes.
Their findings clearly evidence such claims with analysis revealing temperature-related mortality exceeded COVID-19 mortality by 8% in South West England between 2020 and 2022. Temperature-related deaths were also just a quarter less than deaths from COVID-19 in London and not far from a third less (58%) in East Midlands over the same period.
Dr Lo said: “The pandemic rightfully generated huge media attention with the spotlight on daily briefings announcing the latest death toll and public health interventions. Although many, and in some parts of the country more, people were dying from high and low temperatures, this largely went under the radar.
“Ironically the record temperatures, topping 40 degrees, were associated with positive news of people enjoying the sunshine which perhaps reflects a general lack of awareness about how harmful excess heat can be.”
The research highlighted how the coinciding crises presented by COVID-19 coupled with a heatwave or conversely an extreme cold snap put health services under unprecedented pressure, potentially increasing avoidable loss of life.
Findings showed combined excess deaths from extreme temperatures and COVID-19 between 2020 and 2022 were at least twice as high than the previous decade, depending on the region.
Dr Lo said: “The figures strongly demonstrate how negative consequences compound when there are co-occurring major health and weather-related events. For instance, extreme cold during the outbreak of an unexpected disease puts massive strain on hospital bed availability. This research therefore underscores how the UK must be more robustly prepared for such eventualities, which are likely to coincide more often in future with the growing spectre of a changing climate and other global health threats.”
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2024/may/hot-and-cold-weather-extreme-deaths-paper.html
And this is the paper:
Abstract
Extreme weather and coronavirus-type pandemics are both leading global health concerns. Until now, no study has quantified the compound health consequences of the co-occurrence of them. We estimate the mortality attributable to extreme heat and cold events, which dominate the UK health burden from weather hazards, in England and Wales in the period 2020-2022, during which the COVID-19 pandemic peaked in terms of mortality. We show that temperature-related mortality exceeded COVID-19 mortality by 8% in South West England. Combined, extreme temperatures and COVID-19 led to 19 (95% confidence interval: 16–22 in North West England) to 24 (95% confidence interval: 20–29 in Wales) excess deaths per 100,000 population during heatwaves, and 80 (95% confidence interval: 75–86 in Yorkshire and the Humber) to 127 (95% confidence interval: 123–132 in East of England) excess deaths per 100,000 population during cold snaps. These numbers are at least ~2 times higher than the previous decade. Society must increase preparedness for compound health crises such as extreme weather coinciding with pandemics.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48207-2
For a start, the study rehashes the claim that the UK recorded 40.3 °C unprecedented extreme heat4 and a record number of around 3000 heatwave excess deaths.
But as the ONS clearly explained at the time, these deaths were merely brought forward a few days or so; those people were already dying, and were not killed by the heat, as Eunice Lo implies. Over the summer as a whole, the death rate was by a long way the lowest of any season, so there were never any “excess deaths”.
But Eunice’s paper gets worse, a lot worse!
According to the paper:
Figure 1a shows that heat-related mortality (red lines, with red shading indicating its 95% confidence interval) in England and Wales primarily occurred between July and September during the study period of 30 January 2020 to 31 December 2022. A total of 8481 excess deaths (95% confidence interval: 6387–10,493) were attributable to high temperatures.
In months other than July, August and September, cold-related mortality (blue lines, with blue shading indicating its 95% confidence interval) dominated over heat-related mortality. Over the study period, a total of 128,533 excess deaths (95% confidence interval: 107,430–153,642) were attributable to low temperatures, indicating a fifteen-fold larger cold-than-heat mortality burden.
So deaths from cold far exceed any from heat? Well, yes Eunice, I think we already knew that. But it has nothing to do with climate change.
So where pray did this ridiculous headline come from?
Cold weather is not worsened by global warming. Did you really think it did?
On the contrary a warmer climate must mean that the public health threat is reduced. To claim that excess deaths in winter are only now a “major national public health threat” is grossly dishonest.
What is most interesting though is this sentence in the press release:
The researchers sprang into action after Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, highlighted at COP26 that the climate crisis was a far bigger problem than COVID-19, which would prove more fatal without immediate changes
So perhaps we should put the real blame on Vallance for this shockingly bad study. He was clearly looking for some data to support his climate crisis scare, no matter how dodgy.
No doubt poor Eunice just did what she was asked to do!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 28, 2024 at 09:14AM
The Good News about Climate Change by Judith Curry
Is climate change an existential crisis? Judith Curry, former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has spent her career studying this question. Her answer might surprise you.
A good and recent example of climate and energy realism.
Transcript
Let’s start with the good news.
All things considered, planet Earth is doing fine. In fact, humans are doing better than at any other time in history. Over the last hundred years, when temperatures have warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit:
Global population has increased by 6 billion people…
While Global poverty has substantially declined.
And the number of people killed from weather disasters has decreased by 97% on a per capita basis.
We are obviously not facing an existential crisis.
Anyone who tells you that we are is not paying attention to the historical data. Instead, they are concerned about what “might” happen in the future, based on predictions from inadequate climate models, driven by unrealistic assumptions.
I offer this positive diagnosis after a lifetime of study on the issue. Until recently, I was a professor of climate science and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
But it’s not all good news.
The biggest problem with climate change is not climate change, per se, it’s how we’re dealing with it.
We’re attempting to control the uncontrollable, at great cost, by urgently eliminating fossil fuels. We’ve failed to properly place the risks from climate change in context of other challenges the world is facing.
Climate change has become a convenient scapegoat. As a result, we’re neglecting the real causes of these problems.
There are countless examples, but let me give you just one.
Lake Chad in Africa is shrinking. Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari blames it on you-know-what. “Climate change,” he pronounced, “is largely responsible for the drying up of Lake Chad…”
But it’s not.
Yes, the initial water level decline was caused by long droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. But the lake has remained virtually empty over the past two decades, even while rainfall has recovered. During this time, rivers flowing into the lake from Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria have been diverted by government agencies to irrigate inefficient rice farms.
In short, climate change has little to do with the declining water level of Lake Chad. Instead, bad human decisions are the cause. Climate Change is just a convenient excuse, hiding poor management and governance.
Blaming every major weather disaster on man-made global warming defies common sense, as well as the historical data record.
For the past 50 years, the global climate has been fairly benign. In the US, the worst heat waves, droughts, and hurricane landfalls occurred in the 1930s—much worse than anything we’ve experienced so far in the 21st century.
Population growth, where and how people live, and how governments manage resources are much more likely to create conditions for a disaster than the climate itself. We’ve always had hurricanes, droughts, and floods, and we always will.
Maybe you think I’m being too cavalier about the dangers we face. Isn’t it true that 97% of scientists agree that humans are causing dangerous climate change?
Well, here’s what all climate scientists actually agree on:
• The average global surface temperature has increased over the last 150 years.
• Humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
• And carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet.
However, climate scientists disagree about the most consequential issues:
• How much warming is associated with our emissions
• Whether this warming is larger than natural climate variability.
• And how much the climate will change in the future.
There’s a lot that we still don’t understand about how the climate works. Ocean circulation patterns and variations in clouds have a large impact. But climate models do a poor job of predicting these. Variations in the sun and volcanic eruptions also have a substantial impact, but these are simply unpredictable.
The fact is, we can’t predict the future climate. It’s simply not possible. And everybody should acknowledge that. And every scientist does.
While humans do influence the climate, we can’t control the climate. To think we can is the height of hubris, the Greek word for overconfidence.
What we can do is adapt to whatever Mother Nature throws our way. Human beings have a long history of being very good at that. We can build sea walls, we can better manage our water resources, and implement better disaster warning and management protocols.
These are things we can control.
If we focus on that, there’s every reason to be optimistic about our future.
I’m Judith Curry for Prager University.
Footnote: Dr. Curry deals with alarmist pushback at her blog:
Fact checking the fact checkers on my Prager U video
via Science Matters
May 28, 2024 at 08:39AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 