CCD Editor’s note: If they spent as much time on the economy as they do on global warming, the country would be prospering.
As part of the president’s second-term climate-legacy project, the Obama administration has issued an apocalyptic report this week saying climate change will make billions sick from famine, disease, and heat. In the 332-page report, it claims that “global warming will make the air dirtier, water more contaminated and food more tainted.” It also warns of diseases, “such as those spread by ticks and mosquitoes, longer allergy seasons, and thousands of heat wave deaths.” The five-alarm report, which was unveiled as part of National Health Week (see video here), has no basis in reality. The report is describing smog, not global warming.
No one disputes the negative effects of smog or air pollution, but it wasn’t so long ago that scientists said it would cause global cooling as the particulates would blot out the sun’s rays. Carbon dioxide, which some scientists now claim may warm the Earth at a catastrophic pace, is an odorless, colorless, tasteless gas. It’s also considered a trace gas, as it makes up only .04 percent of our atmosphere. CO2 just isn’t scary enough, so they gave it a little color, bundled it up in a package of lies, deceptions, and half-truths, and called it a science report. Grade: F.
And former environmental activist-turned-EPA head Gina McCarthy said climate change is literally driving people crazy. “It’s not just about polar bears and melting ice caps. It’s about our families. It’s about our future,” she said at the same White House event. And right on schedule, Obama’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced the report allows doctors to better quantify “the sheer number of pathways through which climate affects health.” He goes on to say that includes “air pollution worsened from power plants, pollen, and even wildfires.”
Longtime science advisor John Holdren also chimed in and said climate change can lead to “thousands to tens of thousands of heat-related deaths in the United States each summer.” Surprisingly, Holdren left out the fact that a peer-reviewed study from May 2015 showed “cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather, and it’s not the extreme low or high temperatures that cause the most deaths.” It found that people died from cold or heat on “moderate days,” instead of during extreme temperatures like those in a heatwave.
That study “analyzed data on more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Of those, 5.4 million deaths were related to cold, while 311,000 were related to heat.” It used statistics from countries from differing socioeconomic conditions and climate to get a better representation of “temperature-related deaths worldwide.” This report backs up a 2014 U.S. study from the National Center for Health Statistics, which found that cold kills more than twice as many Americans as heat.
Even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said in 2014 that from 2006 to 2010, “cold weather was responsible for the majority of weather-related fatalities.” Today, and with Obama’s agencies finally walking in lockstep, the very same CDC says “computer simulations of 209 cities show that extra summer heat deaths will outweigh fewer winter cold deaths from climate change.” Yes, computer models. In the span of two years and concomitant with Obama’s crusade to roll-out and justify hundreds of thousands of new regulations, the CDC went from actual data to simulated models to get the right ‘talking point.’ Because observational data shows something quite different.
