Fearmongering Around the Globe
Proponents of sharply curbing emissions of greenhouse gases often forecast that climate warming would bring death and disease to the globe. But as past essays have demonstrated, a warmer world would actually reduce deaths in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Still, scaremongers continue to claim that climate change would ravage other parts of the world.
For example, Canada, which would actually benefit from global warming, has been subjected to hyperbolic fear stories concerning climate change’s killing people. A Canadian internet news magazine, CANOE.CA, claimed that one study, "Taking our Breath Away," has found that about 16,000 Canadians die each year from air pollution and global warming. Not only is this absurd, at least in relation to climate change; but the magazine takes that biased report, portraying only the possible negative effects of possible global warming, and then misleads the public about what the "researchers" did claim. Far from asserting that global warming is currently adding to mortality, the authors of this so-called study claim "only" that it might do so in the future. They do, however, resort to apocalyptic language to describe the likely fate of people around the world should the climate become warmer.
Leaving aside the polemic about air pollution, the report insists that higher temperatures will lead to more heat-related deaths in Canada. The writers never consider a possible reduction in cold weather deaths. Last time any one checked, Canada was experiencing very cold winters with many low-temperature related fatalities.
Ignoring the stimulating effects of carbon dioxide on plant growth, the longer growing season and higher rainfall that global warming would bring, the authors allege that global warming "could ultimately jeopardize food security in Canada." Actually virtually all studies have indicated that Canadian agriculture would benefit from a warmer climate.
The report rounds up the usual suspects: malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and seasonal respiratory infections. Respiratory infections are much more common in the winter than in the summer, so shorter and milder winters should diminish, not magnify, their impact. As epidemiologists in Science and this writer have pointed out many times, modern public health is what keeps malaria, yellow fever and dengue fever from ravaging advanced countries. All of those diseases were common throughout North America in the nineteenth century and up to the middle of the twentieth century. As long as we maintain public health, meaning clean water, anti-mosquito programs, screens, and good sanitation, "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself."
Much of the report deals with mortality in the poor tropical portions of the globe. Every feeling person must be concerned with sickness and deaths in Africa and Southeast Asia, but reducing incomes in the industrialized nations is no remedy. Economics is not a zero sum game in which the poor benefit from making the rich less wealthy. Kyoto would do just that. It requires the affluent countries of the world to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by 5 percent from 1990 levels during the years 2008 to 2012. For the United States and Canada as well, this implies a major cutback, over 30 percent, from levels that would exist under a business-as-usual scenario. On a per capita basis, Canada is a more prolific user of energy even than the United States and would suffer much more from slashing fossil fuel consumption.
Since meeting Kyoto would do nothing significant about warming, further and more drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — perhaps as much as 60 to 80 percent — would be necessary to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at levels less than twice pre-industrial concentrations. Even that would result in some warming. According to the Climate System Model of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations at 50 percent above current levels would still lead to a 1.5°C boost in temperatures worldwide. Cutting fossil fuel consumption by enough to stabilize emissions in the next few decades would produce a worldwide depression with falling incomes, rising unemployment, poorer health, and increased mortality.
After examining the impact of global warming on poor countries, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) concluded:
Nearly all of the potential adverse health effects of projected climate change are significant, real-life problems that have long persisted under stable climatic conditions. Bolstering efforts to eliminate or alleviate such problems would both decrease the current incidence of premature death and facilitate dealing with the health risks of any climate change that might occur.
Policies that weaken economies tend to weaken public health programs. Thus, it is likely that implementation of such policies would (a) increase the risk of premature death and (b) exacerbate any adverse health effects of future climate change.
As the authors of the ACSH study point out, infectious diseases have always been a major cause of early mortality. Only in the last two centuries and especially in the one just ending has significant progress been made in reducing and, for some diseases, eliminating the scourges. As a consequence, in the United States, which has largely eliminated afflictions such as malaria and dengue fever, life expectancy over the twentieth century has risen from 46 years to 76. That fantastic 30-year gain is the greatest extension in years of life ever seen in the history of mankind. Over the previous 10,000 years, the number of years a new baby could be expected to survive went up only about 15 years; this hundred-year period has boosted the average life span of a new baby by twice as much.
Even poor Third World countries have made significant progress in extending life. For all developing countries, the average number of years a newborn was expected to live rose from 46 in 1960 to 64 in the early 1990s, a gain of nearly twenty years. Controlling a number of infectious diseases has produced those gains. But preventable infectious diseases, such as malaria and intestinal illnesses, caused half the premature deaths in 1996. Poverty is the principle cause of the 15 million who died of those afflictions.
As the ACHS concludes
From the standpoint of public health, stringently limiting such emissions [greenhouse gases] at present would not be prudent. Fossil-fuel combustion, the main source of human induced greenhouse-gas emissions, is vital to high-yield agriculture and other practices that are fundamental to the well-being of the human population. A significant short-term decline in such actions could have adverse health repercussions.
The optimal approach to dealing with [the] prospect of climate change would (a) include improvement of health infrastructures (especially in developing countries) and (b) exclude any measures that would impair economies and limit public health resources.
Rather than cutting back on the use of energy, the world needs to use more energy to bring better health and improved welfare to human beings across the globe. Reducing the consumption of fossil fuels would only lower living standards and increase mortality everywhere.
In addition, as the global warming models suggest, if climate change were to occur, the poles would warm more than the equator while temperatures would increase more in the winter and at night than during the day. In consequence, the tropics, including Africa, would warm less than the United States or Europe. Any health effects would, therefore, be small.
With or without climate change, public sanitation should be emphasized as the most effective means of attacking water and insect borne-diseases everywhere. A warmer world will not add significantly to morbidity in Third World countries. A poorer world certainly will.
Reference:
CANOE.CA, Inside C-Health. Http://cgi.canoe.ca/Health/welcome.html.
Last, John, Konia Trouton, and David Pengelly. Taking Our Breath Away: The Health Effects of Air Pollution and Climate Change. Vancouver, BC Canada: David Suzuki Foundation. Http://www.davidsuzuki.org.
Shindell, Sidney, and Jack Raso. Gobal Climate Change and Human Health: A Position Paper of the American Council on Science and Health. New York: American Council on Science and Health, October 1997.
Taubes, Gary, Apocalypse Not, Science, Vol 278 (7 November 1997): 1004-1006.
Wigley, Tom M. L. New Climate Predictions from MCAR Climate System Model, National Center for Atmospheric Research. April 12,1999. Http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/ACACIA/csmresults.html