This is another gloom and doom estimate improperly regarded as fact without any mention of possible positive effects of climate change.

I have yet to see any reason why this cycle of warming will be any different from other recent cycles. By all accounts, the climate was much more hospitable during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period than the climate during the Little Ice Age.

Everything changes and when change happens, some things get better and some things get worse. Previous warm periods indicate that continued warming will most likely lead to more positive changes than negative. The best thing to do is to adapt to those changes.

It'll be interesting to see what they use as a baseline for their "model".

For malaria will it include the five million people who are killed and disabled every year due to the non ban ban on the use of DDT in Africa?

All the best,

Aaron

This is just more fear-mongering from the committed AGW alarmists. It's ironic that these eco-activists blame malaria deaths on global warming when it was their movement which banned DDT. Pittsburgh recently named a bridge in honor of Rachel Carson who led the fight which resulted in the world-wide ban on DDT. Her demonization of DDT resulted in millions of deaths so she has real blood on her hands. That bridge should painted red.

DDT was recently approved by the WHO and is again being used effectively to combat malaria. I fear that the same pseudo-science is being employed today by the AGWers and will result in the same tragic results if they succeed in convincing world governments to fall for their scare tactics.

Maybe we should tally up all the lives lost due to environmentalism run amok. I guarantee that the death toll will far exceed anything conjured up by people like Dr. Simon Lewis

But what's the percentage of Anthropogenic climate change deaths versus Natural climate change? If it's like global temperature, it's minimal.

Malaria is a bad choice. It could've been eradicated decades ago had DDT use not been curtailed.

Flooding is a bad choice. Changes in precipitation result from natural oceanic oscillations--AMO, PDO, ENSO.

How much of the malnutrition problem is associated with overpopulation? If not from it, is it again related to changes in precipitation? If so, refer to the preceding paragraph.

How many people are or would be killed due to global cooling? Ever notice how depressing winter is? This winter in particular has been absolutely brutal! How GREEN is life if its buried under white stuff? Not very. However...its green, lush and vibrant, ON THE EQUATOR! That should tell you something.

All of you alarmists better hope for a few degrees of warmth. If we head back into another ice age, the effects would then be TRULY catastrophic. You all have it backwards. Warming is the key to life. It creates and sustains it. Dont be afraid of a couple degrees of warmth. Embrace it, if it ever comes?

I am still waiting for someone to explain how all of this record COLD and SNOW is caused by a heat-trapping gas? Clearly its not. Its the SUN that drives our climate folks. It couldnt be more obvious. Wake up. We have no control over our climate. If we did, could we stop global cooling? Of course not. That should also tell you something.

If 150,000 people die each year from heat related illness I suspect 10 times that die from extreme cold. Just look at what's going on through out the world right now with cold weather related deaths. I'd like to see someone put a number on that. Plus the entire global warming thing is a hoax.

Mmmm... let's see... someone at the WMO can attribute certain deaths to AGW by what method? Malaria can occur in either a warming or a cooling situation -precipitation is key...Malnutrution can be caused by goverment induced famine (ie Ukraine 1935-1937, Ethiopia 1983-1986, Somalia 1991-current, ditto Sudan and Rawanda). The tropics haven't warmed at all, so it would be a stretch there...

Flooding can be caused by intense interaction between cooler high latitudes and warmer subtropics -the cooler the high latitudes the greater the flooding; There has been no crediable link between tropical storms and AGW....

Brett Said - "It also seems that these four could easily be caused by many other factors in addition to climate change."

But Brett, you fail to realize that AGW causes everything and supersedes any other possible cause. I'm suprised you didn't know this. lol

So if we were suffering from global cooling and tens of thousands were dying from storms and cold would that also count? Sounds like my friend, who in a fit of pickiness, complains when it is below 60 and above 80 degrees. Earthlings will continue to be affected by our home, which has changed before and will change again, regardless of what humans do or don't do. And human suffering?? Even if the globe could maintain perfect temperatures suffering would still exist, mostly from our own inexhaustable human weaknesses.

Let's take these one at a time:

1. Malaria - the death toll was caused by stopping the sale/donation of DDT to the third world in the belief that the DDT might harm somebody, resulting in the subsequent death of millions and no doubt with more to come. Also, malaria isn't a tropical disease but was prevalent in Europe and Russia prior to general cleaning up of living standards.
2. Malnutrition - the "healthy" motivation of preventing genetically modified crops from reaching the people who need crops that can prosper in difficult climates is a large cause here. Using potential food that could feed them as fuel is another well-intentioned scheme gone to the law of unintended consequences.
3. Diarrhoea-type diseases - largely caused by the lack of clean water, which could have been provided if the five billion dollars or so was not squandered on self-serving studies.
4. Flooding - How do you get flooding if the world if drying and shrivelling up? Regarding Bangladesh - the poster child of rising sea levels - there has not been an increase in sea levels above historical averages that we can measure. Poverty prevents the Bangladeshi from building dikes like the Dutch, so here was another use for the money already blown on studies based on shifting sand (a.k.a. AGW).

This was yet another self-serving study to foment panic and get the author's name in the press.

Dr. Lewis' little blurb 'Climate Change in my view' is an interesting read.

http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?tip=1&id=4689

He is honest enough to admit that:

"It is currently impossible to make robust predictions concerning how future climatic changes will interact with social factors and non-climatic environmental problems" (I'm heartened by his inference that perhaps it may be possible in the near future)

Yet he seems surprised that:

"That is no new oil fields, no new coal mines. But such apparently drastic measures are not on the mainstream agenda."

Shortly after that we get to the crux of it:

"In my view this is because individuals, governments and companies all operate within a socio-economic system, capitalism"

I'll add that he's made a big deal of the statement:

"Climatic and other environmental changes are already dangerous, indeed deadly for many, but the victims are overwhelmingly poor."

Well I suppose it's really that simple isn't it. If we can eradicate economic growth we'll stop consuming fossil fuels. The climate will return to a happy equilibrium and we'll blissfully live out our days as subsistence farming peasants.

I'd be most interested in any WAG this guy has for how many deaths to blame on climate change.

Morbid scare tactics by an apocryphal, apocalyptic cult.

Why else would you want to quantify a body count over an unproven theory.

The folks that shut down the power plant would feel no remorse if some little old grandma died because o f their effort. She may have become their first patron saint.

Their actions could in fact be called eco-terrorism.

Send them to Gitmo

In the 1950s and 1960s in China, a combination of widespread drought and socialism caused as many as 50 million people to starve to death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Cold kills many more people than heat does. Automobile accidents kill one million people per year. Junk food kills millions of people a year. Saddam killed several million people (including the Iran/Iraq war.) Diabetes kills millions of people a year. Smallpox used to kill hundreds of millions of people. Malaria is much less common than it used to be, as is Leprosy, Polio and the Plague.

Socialists Stalin and Mao killed 80 million people between them.

I say, let's introduce worldwide socialism because of a few gighly questionable statistics put out by some publicity seeking professor. Lets recreate the good old days of mass starvation through the modern tools of biofuels, high energy prices and the time honored tradition of incompetent utopian centralized economics.

I think it's brilliant. Now the skeptics are forced to feel bad because by being pig-headed they have clearly killed several hundred thousand people. Just more propaganda.

regards, Elliot

LOL you really got to love articles like this. Shear absurdity. This goes from the sublime to the ridiculous which is the very definition of asinine.
From 2001-2004 Dr. Dr Simon L. Lewis held a position completely funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. “NERC spends about �40m each year on climate change research. Our scientists are world-leading authorities on this issue, and advise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recognised worldwide as the definitive source for climate change information.”
LOL this little group alone funnels 80 plus million US dollars into AGW each year.
NOW this scientist has been employed by the Royal Society since 2004 doing research focusing, “…on the impacts and interactions of multiple anthropogenic global change phenomena and tropical forests.”

And you folks wonder when the skeptics say “follow the money”?

If you extrapolate what this council gets and add it with all the other groups (i.e. Green Peace etc.) trying to convince us of AGW….. billions of pounds sterling is going down a rat hole instead being used on projects that will make a difference and save millions of lives. The trough is full for the taking…..as long as you have the right science. According to his CV he has never had a job outside of the AGW trough. Objectivity? Unbiased? Oh yeah! How do they sleep at night?
The sad part is all this money is not being spent on project trying to prevent malaria or adequately treating those who have the disease. That should be the real story. Unconscionable!
Why refute this nonsense point by point? Folks please read, learn, listen, read between the lines and think for yourself.
I have often said first do no harm! And to read this waste of finite resources it is so sad, so utterly wasteful, so wrong!

Wow. What to say about that.

A computer model predicts 150,000 deaths back in 2002 and it is being used as propoganda with no way to verify if any ever happened.

These people are clearly desperate.
what else can be said.

Off Topic... Sorry, but interesting.

Global warmists try to stifle debate.

Here is another example of the AGW industry Deperately trying to censor the debate.
Is it obvious to anyone else that they are loosing steam?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120390556121489679.html?mod=opinion_journal_political_diary

Excerpt:
Already, environmental groups have sent out their opinion to their media friends that the conference is simply a platform for corporate apologists and can safely be ignored. One group alleges the conference will have "no real scientists" present despite an impressive array of speakers such as Patrick Michaels, a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Critics point out that ExxonMobil gave nearly $800,000 to Heartland between 1998 and 2005 and that the group's board of directors include several people with ties to energy companies. The authors of the blog Real Climate don't engage the issues raised by the conference but instead attack it as stuffed with shills. When Heartland experts tried to respond to those charges, they were blacklisted from the comments section of the Real Climate Web site

"What do you think?"

I think the climate has been killing living things on the face of this planet since day one.

I think Dr. Lewis needs to get a life. Maybe get outside, get a little sunshine and fresh air.

ITS UNFORTUNATE THAT THERE ARE SO MANY GROUPS OUT THERE
WHO THRIVE ON THE FEARS OF OTHER PEOPLE. I'M SURE IF I WANTED TO I COULD COME UP WITH A WAY TO CONVINCE PEOPLE
THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MY LOSING LOTTERY TICKET.

I wonder how many people have died because of this winter's cold. Global warming has ended.

The average global temperature decreased more from January 2007 through January 2008 than the entire increase from 1901 to 2001.

The average global temperature anomaly from
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat in 1901 was -.0974 and in 2001 was .4934 for a total temperature increase of .5908 centigrade degrees.

The average global temperature anomaly from
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/perspectives.html
for January 2007 was .85

and the average global temperature anomaly from
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/perspectives.html
for January 2008 was .18 for a total temperature drop of .67 centigrade degrees in 13 months.

If the world were getting colder from some human-related cause, I'm sure the good doctor would be offering a no doubt "highly conservative" estimate of the hundreds of thousands of deaths due to global cooling. Recall the death toll resulting from the little ice age. Which leads to one inescapable conclusion: climate-wise, we were living in Leibniz's best of all possible worlds! What are the odds!

I think this number is a complete, wild arse guess with absolutely no shred of direct evidence in support.

This is merely a means by which to attempt to "quantify" and legitimize global warming as a threat. It is an extreme example of the alarmist approach taken by those who want to support this form of extreme environmentalism.

To think that there were not 150,000 worldwide deaths due to natural events in the past is plain silly. To think that better forecasts and warnings, in conjunction with modern society's ability to assist those who need it, hasn't reduced this number is also silly.

ARRRGHHHH! This kinda article is annoying.

AMERICA which has ten percent of the population,and uses twenty five percent of the worlds energy. AMERICA'S pollution, is an Inevitable part of our over- industrialized country.Carbon monoxide,sulfar dioxide and CFC,s are the largest tribute to America's legacy in the world. Even young Chinese, are starting to rebel, against a totalitarian state that allows such gross abuse of the air. Americans are wimps and afraid to act on their beliefs.
KIPP

The AGW consensus like argumentum populum.What many people think,does not make it right. And to those of you who have proved to yourselves that the globe is cooling I must suggest the same logic applies to you. A few projections have been misstated and you think the world is colder. Have you seen pictures of the arctic thirty years ago and today. It is melting. And that's more than all the snow in New Hampshire.
KIPP

America has provided it's population with the greatest standard of living in human history. America has provided the rest of the world with the drugs to cure illness, technology to grow more food and raise their standard of living. America has Provided you with an oil derivative touch pad that you can type words into an electronic coal fire generated pathway to enable you spout ignorant rantings against the greatest country the world has ever seen. America has provided you with the freedom to live you life as you choose and to aspire to do anything
I could go on and on but it will fall on deaf ears.

Brett threw out some bread crumbs, and our deniers are scampering around it like roaches. Too funny.

Rich, temperatures in New Hampshire have averaged above normal this winter. It's been a few degrees above average in February, and it was above average in January, too. I grew up in the north and remember people actually looking forward to snowstorms because snowstorms often brought warmer temperatures which pro