Not Equal
The MacDoctor often hears Global Warm-mongers talking about the health effects of global warming. I note that these articles fall mainly into two categories. Those that confuse pollution with global warming, either naively or deliberately, and those that confuse facts with speculation, again, naively or deliberately.
A prime example of the first group is the article in today’s Herald entitled What’s good for the climate is also good for our health. It is an article that one instinctively views with great suspicion simply because the author makes his living out of “sustainable household and personal products”. The article makes two of the three basic mistakes of these types of writings. Firstly, it assumes pollution is equal to global warming/climate change. The only problem with this assumption is that it appears to be scientific nonsense. At one time there was much speculation about the effects of pollution on the climate. However, the current climate change theory revolves around the output of carbon dioxide, not pollution per se. Carbon dioxide causes no health problems in the concentrations required for global warming theory. Although toxic pollution does indeed have dreadful effects on human health, it contributes very little to global warming.
Pollution DOES NOT EQUAL Global Warming.
The second false assumption is that fighting global warming somehow has these amazing health benefits. We will all suddenly be eating less meat, cycling to work , eating organic vegetables and wearing sandals. Presumably we will all be voting for the Greens. Unfortunately for the writer of this, and many other articles, this assumption is exactly backwards. Healthy living may improve our carbon footprint, but that is probably the least important benefit of healthy living. Suggesting that combatting global warming may produce health benefits in this way is a little like suggesting that microchipping dogs will reduce dog attacks and banning smacking with reduce child abuse. In other words, it is a typical policy wonk idea with little basis in reality.
Fighting Global Warming DOES NOT EQUAL Healthy Living
A good example of the other type of article that confuses facts and speculation is the Lancet article Managing the health effects of climate change. [note: you may have to set up a (free) account to read this article]. The article makes the same two mistakes as the first article, but then goes into a long explanation about the actual effects of global warming on the population of the planet. Impressive scenarios of massive drought, cyclones, tsunamis and costal inundation are postulated. Deepening inequalities between the first and third world are hypothesized. Massive public health disasters are posited.
There is one fundamental problem with all of this. It is all speculation. While some of the guesses involved are reasonably informed ones, the reality is that they are really no better than the guesses of science fiction writers. Suggesting we base our health planning on these scenarios is the equivalent of suggesting we base our public health response to contagions on the movie 28 Days Later or that we base our policing on Judge Dredd.
Fact DOES NOT EQUAL Fiction
While the science connecting ill-health to pollution is indisputable, pollution is not global warming. Until the science connecting global warming to public ill heath ceases to be speculative and becomes based in hard fact, we would be stupid to plan for expensive health scenarios that may never eventuate. Future health planning should only be based on known needs and predictable problems. Though there is always a place for crisis planning, it is not appropriate that such planning should dominate our thinking to the detriment of sensible health development.
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Nov 2 09 6:55 pm
Missing from too much of this debate are words like "history", interglacial period, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, ENSO and so on. For instance, it doesn't take much to find that recorded instances of ships forcing the Northwest Passages since and including Amundsen have occurred when the PDO was in its (roughly) 30 year warm phases.
One area where pollution may have an effect is reducing the Albedo action of snow.
JC
Nov 3 09 5:37 am
I have also heard the albedo story, but seen no convincing proof that it has any significant effect on climate. Admittedly, I don't exactly keep a close eye on the science.
Nov 3 09 1:23 am
Neither the Herald nor the Lancet wish to acknowledge the elephant in the room: Population growth. Despite the partial reprieve given to sub-saharan Africa by AIDS, population throughout the World (bar a few European countries) continues to outstrip its long-term carrying capacity.
The one and only country which has taken the necessary, if harsh, measures to slow and ultimately reduce population growth is China.
The best hope for saving humanity from a future of famine, mass migration and war is the emergence of a realy effective pandemic (as transmissible as norovirus, as lethal as Ebola).
Nov 3 09 5:41 am
I'm pretty unconvinced it would be preferable to die from super-Ebola rather than starvation, so I deem your "solution" to be a little harsh. And somewhat barmy.
There is every indication that starvation in places like Africa is heavily related to lack of democracy and is little to do with population growth directly.
Nov 3 09 7:13 am
My mistake was in putting two rather disconected ideas in one comment!
Population does matter. The fears which are raised in relation to climate change are all population related.
I am most certainly not suggesting that a pandemic is something that should be voluntarily sought.
It is, however, inevitable.
The frequency of pandemics has increased with world population and with increased population movement. We are going to see ever more frequent pandemics, There is going to be fatigue at repeated crying of "wolf" over SARS, bird flu, swine flu,…., and consequent reluctance to spend public money on preventing/moderating pandemics. Some day there will be a pandemic with really significant case fatality rates (like 1918-19 or more so).
As for famine: over the past few decades the only countries which have suffered famine are those so dangerous because of war or brutal dictatorship that aid cannot get through to those that need it. So there has been some protection from democracy (or maybe democracy and food distribution are not causally related but both outcomes of a basic level of social cohesion and prosperity.
What, however, happens when (not if) there is coincident failure of the Canadian wheat crop with drought in Africa and South Asia? No amount of democracy is going to distribute food which isn't there.
Back to my main point – only one country has taken steps, reasonably humanely, to limit population growth.
[ as a bit of an aside - there is a body of opinion, impossible to test, that Europe's transition from a feudal subsistence economy to the renaissance was not unrelated to the population collapse caused by the plague]
Nov 3 09 8:57 pm
Good post.
Re: population, people forget what things used to be like in places like London, where everyone burnt dirty coal and streets were crowded.
Nowadays there are far more people living in London, but it's a far, far better place to live.
Humans can change local climate, but whether we can make changes to the global climate is quite another question.
Whether we can (or should try to) reverse any changes (assuming they exist) is yet another question, and that's quickly becoming less of a scientific question and more of a political one.
Nov 5 09 6:53 am
Hi Paracelsus,
If you would like to actually have a clue about the 'reasonably humane' One-child policy, have a read of this article,
The Cardozo Journal of International & Comparative Law, Volume 15, Fall 2007,
"The dysfunctional progeny of eugenics"
http://www.cjicl.com/issues/15-2-Martin.pdf
Skip ahead to page 403 to start reading the fun stuff if you like,
"Being born is simply the first hurdle Chinese females face. Infanticide and abandonment, on the rise since the mid-1980s, led to the murder of an estimated fifteen million children from the initia- tion of the One-Child Policy until 1995, and one million females are left in orphanages every year. Many of the young girls who are turned over to state-controlled orphanages are destined to die from neglect, starvation, and exposure. In 1991, at the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute, China’s most prestigious orphanage, the death-to-admissions ratio was 77.6%. Additionally, the likelihood that an orphan would survive more than one year was less than fifty percent in 1989, and in some provinces the mortality rate among institutionalized orphans ranged from 59.2% to 72.5%. Females comprise ninety-five percent of the children in orphan- ages, and unlike many of their male counterparts, these abandoned girls are completely healthy. Nor are these girls always infants. In rural China, girls as old as five have been abandoned after family-planning officials began a “mobilization campaign” to enforce the policy. According to the Human Rights Watch of Asia, once these girls are admitted to an orphanage they are subjected to deliberately cruel treatment, including starvation, torture, and sexual abuse. Moreover, in a fashion reminiscent of Nazi Germany, children are selected through a process known as “summary resolution” whereby unwanted children are subjected to intentional starvation and dehydration."
Nov 5 09 9:29 am
Johnnieboy,
The attitudes to women in China, and the subordination of the individual to society, long predate the one child policy, and cannot be blamed on it. I suppose you regard the pro-natalist Mao, who murdered tens of millions, as a paragon of virtue in comparison to his successors, who reversed Maoist doctrine in introducing the one child policy.
The Chinese have grasped the nettle of overpopulation and are doing something about it.
It is an issue which all societies will eventually have to face, and my guess is that many of the solutions will be far worse than China's one child policy.
By the way, by whose say-so is producing children ad libitum a "human right"?
The article you present very mischieviously confuses the (at least in intention) evenly applied one child policy with eugenic policies which have sought and still seek to promote the fecundity of the chosen and limit that of the unwanted – a very different matter. If you want a current example of that look at Putin's Russia, or indeed at New Zealand abortion law.
Nov 5 09 11:12 am
Hi Paracelsus,
You are asserting that the genocide that China is perpetuating on its own female children stems solely due to its favouring of boys over girls. How about you read a bit more of the article!
From page 407,
“China’s population controls aim to reduce the number of births while ensuring that children born are only of the highest quality. Centuries of inbreeding in rural communities, a high prevalence of congenital hypothyroidism resulting from lower than normal iodine content in the soil of many rural areas, and hereditary diseases have contributed to higher than normal rates of mental retardation in many rural provinces. In an effort to eliminate this problem, the Chinese government instituted a series of measures including restrictive marriage laws, compulsory (or coercive) sterilizations, and forced abortions”.
From page 408,
“Interest in eugenic principles to promote a mentally and physically fit society is not a new phenomenon in China”.
This is the very definition of eugenics, as originating from the US to Nazi Germany and then back to China, and the floodgate is opened wide when we take it upon ourselves to minimise outputs, but also to maximise the quality of human beings.
So what are the methods that are universally employed whenever population control is deemed necessary, regardless of the motivation?
From page 399,
“This has led to the use of local informants to discover unauthorized pregnancies, monitoring women’s menses at the work place, and the implementation of draconian measures which include violence against women, forcible late-term abortions, forced IUD insertion, forced sterilization, the detention of pregnant women or their family members, and the destruction of “over-birth” families’ homes”.
Sound like the wonderful utopian vision you desire for NZ society in the years to come?