From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A recent post at The Daily Climate news website, titled “Op-ed: People need shelter from climate change — their health hangs in the balance,” claims that climate change is making it harder for people to stay safe from the elements and extreme weather, and that federal housing policy is how to fix that problem. This is false on multiple fronts. Climate change is not causing an increase in dangerous conditions for people, and federal policies that involve subsidized housing will not protect homeless people from weather threats.

The authors assert that vice president Kamala Harris’ proposals to expand federal housing policies, including using federal funds to build housing and down payment assistance, “is actually a climate change adaptation policy” because people need shelter from extreme weather. The Daily Climate refers to this summer as the warmest on record and hypes an early start to the Atlantic hurricane season, asserting that “it is growing increasingly difficult to weather the many different catastrophes — a critical threat to health — that climate change is throwing at us.”

Continuing, they write that it is also becoming more difficult for Americans “to take refuge from climate threats at home, as the cost of housing keeps rising.”

They point out correctly that homeless people are more likely to become ill and die from exposure to extreme high temperatures because of a lack of shelter and air conditioning. This, however, is not because of climate change. In fact, none of the things this article asserts as threats to American families because of climate change are genuine.

Regarding the “hottest on record” claims, as always, it depends on what record you look at. As Climate Realism points out here, here, and here, these claims are at best speculative, even though alarmists present them as definite. Prior to satellites, there are almost no records outside of the U.S. and Europe. We are forced to rely on proxy data, which again are location-specific, but even so, many of them indicate that there were several periods in just the last 10,000 years that were warmer than today.

Regarding hurricanes, there was a single early powerful hurricane that came outside the normal window, but the rest of the season has been remarkably quiet. Fearmongering on hurricanes this year, as with many previous above average hurricane season predictions in the past, is falling extremely flat. Global tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is well within normal bounds this year, according to available data.

But the major point of the article is that extreme weather is posing an ever greater threat to an increasing number of people, and especially American families, than before, and this is simply not true.

While it is true that people who are homeless or who don’t have adequate housing and electricity are more susceptible to temperature related illnesses and death, heat and even more so cold, incidences of of people dying from those conditions has declined rapidly around the world over the past hundred plus years of modest warming. It is especially telling that the article focuses on heat, when it is cold that is the real killer. A 2021 Lancet study found that overall deaths due to extreme temperatures have declined in large part due to a massive drop in cold-related deaths. (See figure below)

Likewise, deaths from climate-related disasters in general has also declined. (See figure below)

Ironically, The Daily Climate post complains about the high costs of utility bills, and therefore air conditioning and heating, which are becoming increasingly expensive precisely because of the fossil fuel policies that these same alarmists promote.

Studies have found that Biden’s EPA rules and regulations targeting power plants are expected to cause instability in the electric grid and lead to massive blackouts, because the expectations of the policies are not technologically sound, or even possible, and will only lead to a reduction of power supply. Wind and solar are not dispatchable power, and battery technology is not anywhere near scalable for what is needed. This causes higher prices and less power reliability, which won’t help anyone trying to handle even natural weather extremes. Indeed, real world data suggests that Biden’s energy and climate policies have driven the recent large increases in energy costs across the board, impacting poorer households the most.

Additionally, the idea that federal subsidized housing will help decrease housing prices in general is economically illiterate at best. Policies like low-income housing tax credits have resulted in higher housing costs and fewer choices, and Obama’s Housing First programs have resulted in more homeless people, not fewer.

Handing even more power to government and more subsidized housing will not solve the problem of homelessness. It’s been done for decades and the issue has only become more severe, it has not improved. Fossil fuels for electricity and materials have made human civilizations far more resilient in the face of the fickle nature of the weather, and as long as markets for energy are not limited or constrained by government climate policy, they will continue to do so. All of this is true regardless of climate change, but even on that point, The Daily Climate missed the mark.

Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades.   At the time, it caused me much grief because the Executive Director of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.

It is the case that I was Environment Manager for Queensland Canegrowers Ltd from 1998 through until 2003 – and that I did nothing about all the agricultural pesticides.   That has been a recent accusation across at my official Facebook page.

I was employed to implement the findings of a three-volume audit of the sugar industry and its environmental impacts.  I got off to a good start, but in 2001, with the launch of the WWF Save the Reef campaign everything was blown off course.   I’ve written about that before, including how it begun here:https://jennifermarohasy.com/2018/11/theprinceandhisdumptrucks/

I first became aware of the specific issue of pesticide in dugongs in August 1998, long before the launch of that campaign.

A senior officer with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) phoned me with the news that a soon-to-be-published research study had found that elevated levels of pesticide residue, most likely from cane farming, were accumulating in the fat tissue of dugongs. Media headlines followed, including ‘Pesticide in reef creatures and cane burning link with dioxin in dugong’.

I obtained a copy of the study and found it was primarily an analysis of the type and quantity of dioxins found in the fat tissue of dugong carcasses that had been killed in fishing nets. Dioxins are a group of organochlorine compounds commonly associated with industrial waste incineration. The research paper made reference to a different study that had analyzed the dioxins found in soils under sugarcane cultivation and commented that the cane-land soils and dugong fat samples both had elevated levels of the same type of dioxins.

Concerned by this news, I contacted a dioxin expert at the University of Queensland. Dr Brian Stanmore informed me that the type of dioxin considered by the GBRMPA to be elevated in the dugongs was common and the least toxic of all dioxins. Furthermore, Dr Stanmore indicated that the level of dioxins found in the dugongs was less than the national average in people in the United States. He commented that ‘it looks like the dugong is better off than we are’.

The GBRMPA study clearly stated, ‘All (dugong) carcasses were in good condition at the time of sampling. All animal deaths were confirmed or suspected (fishing) net drowning.’

However, instead of focusing on net fishing practices, the GBRMPA subsequently provided funding for a full investigation by the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (NRCET) into the likely origin of the dioxin considered to be at elevated levels in the dugong carcasses, including possible links with sugarcane production.

Two years later, the NRCET investigation concluded that the dioxin of concern to the GBRMPA was common in soils along the entire Queensland coastline, including in regions beyond sugarcane cultivation.  Analyses of dated marine sediment cores indicated that the chemical was present prior to European settlement in Queensland. In other words, the dioxin is a naturally occurring organochlorine and not a pesticide residue. There are, apparently, many naturally occurring non-toxic dioxins.

That has never made media headlines.

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You can read more of this story in the piece I wrote for the IPA Review back when they regularly published me, the article is called ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation’.