The Climate Change ThingMark Steyn remarked a few weeks ago that the Global Warming crowd had done away with GW and was now focusing on "climate change". And sure enough,
this headline in the Washington Post shows that:
Climate Change Drives Disease To New TerritoryNote as well, that the negative aspects of climate change are always highlighted, not the positive effects. We won't see a story entitled "Climate Change Reduces Heating Oil Bill for Seniors".
As for this:
Scientists have warned for more than a decade that climate change would broaden the range of many diseases. But the warnings were couched in the future, and qualified. The spread of disease is affected by many uncertainties, including unforeseen resistance to antibiotics, failures of public health systems, population movement and yearly climate swings. For that reason, some scientists have been cautious about the link between disease and global warming.
But Paul Epstein, a physician who worked in Africa and is now on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, said that, if anything, scientists weren't worried enough about the problem.
"Things we projected to occur in 2080 are happening in 2006. What we didn't get is how fast and how big it is, and the degree to which the biological systems would respond," Epstein said in an interview in Boston. "Our mistake was in underestimation."Now remember that about half the temperature rise that has been recorded occured during World War II, that the rest came before 1998, and that the planet has been cooling slightly since then. So why does this result in a spread of disease? In fact, it probably doesn't. Disease spreads normally; remember there were very few AIDS cases in North America before 1980.
