Exaggerating the impact of climate change on the spread of malaria

This deception also results in the misappropriation of resources not to mention the crime of environmentalist curbing the one known check on this scourge DDT. I've said it before, that when the full scope of this scientific abortion called AGW is fully revealed and the unnecessary pain and waste it has caused there will be hell to pay. Imagine if all the money spent on trying to prove a lie was actually spent on helping the poor of the world with real and proven solutions. The money spent on new computers and modelling to justify the lie probably could have cured malaria in Kenya.

FROM-UK Guardian

A recent press release from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) suggested that millions more people in Kenya are susceptible to malaria as a result of mosquitoes colonising higher ground as global temperatures rise. ('New evidence of a link between climate change and malaria', 30.12.09 – see below). The press release was extensively covered in UK newspapers and elsewhere.

Simple analysis shows that the claims of the press release are almost entirely without foundation. The battle against the severe threat from climate change is impeded, not helped, by government departments issuing alarmist and exaggerated alerts based on poor science.

All other things being equal, the spread of malaria is probably encouraged by higher global temperatures. The malaria parasite in the insect's body grows fastest at average daily temperatures of about 25 degrees and most parts of the world are well below this level. But temperature is only one factor in the spread of this terrible disease, possibly a small one. The presence of stagnant water in open sunlit fields after deforestation, increased population pressure, lack of availability of mosquito nets, or a reluctance to use them, may all contribute as much to the spread of malaria as increasing temperatures. Nevertheless, despite the plethora of more convincing explanations for varying levels of malarial illness, policy-makers and government departments continue to state, without any qualification, that malaria will become very much more prevalent in a warmer world.

The 2001 IPCC report also overstated the connection between climate change and malarial infections. Understandably, the top selling books by climate sceptics published in the last few years all feast on the weak scientific evidence for this assertion. These books usually quote the specialist in insect-borne diseases, Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who has strenuously and effectively attacked the idea that increasing temperatures will necessarily produce a rapid rise in the incidence of insect-borne diseases. Professor Reiter points out that malaria transmission is a complex matter and that rising temperatures are only weakly linked to an increasing incidence of malaria. (The illustration at the head of this article provides us with some sense of just how complex malaria is). Why, he and others have asked, if temperature is so important, did the disease disappear from countries like Britain just as the climate was warming at the end of the 'Little Ice Age' during the 18th and 19th centuries?

However the story that substantial increases in malaria will inevitably follow rising temperatures will not go away and DFID's recent press release is another example. The document claims that 'new research' in the highland areas around Mt Kenya has shown strong links between increasing temperatures and malaria incidence. When I asked for a copy of the scientific papers to back up this assertion, DFID said it was unable to provide this 'new research', stating instead that the press release was based on 'a cumulation of several studies over the past few years'.

Three papers were attached to this surprising response from DFID. The press release asserted that temperatures on the western side of Mt Kenya had risen two degrees Celsius in twenty years, prompting epidemics of malaria, but these research papers actually showed a much smaller increase. The specific claim that the Mt Kenya area has recently become vulnerable to malaria was backed up by interview data of a few years ago from a small number of families who declared a total of eight cases of malaria in the past five years compared to only three in the period of five to ten years ago. No medical analysis appears to have been carried out to determine whether the disease recorded was or was not malaria. Neither was any attempt apparently made to adjust for deficiencies in memory of events ten years ago.

What about the physical evidence of mosquitoes? The scientific papers sent to me by DFID write of finding a total of two mosquito larvae in pools on high ground near Mt Kenya. These larvae produced a total of 23 insects when incubated in a laboratory. The quality of this finding is never questioned. Most importantly, the background research papers do fully acknowledge that other events in the geographic areas under study, such as deforestation or increased pooling of stagnant water as a result of land use changes, could well have been the primary cause of any growth in the number of mosquitos and of malaria, not climate change. But these possibilities are unmentioned in the DFID press release.

A line-by-line analysis of the press release is provided below. It suggests that almost all the assertions in the DFID document are unsupported by any evidence or are downright wrong. Malaria may indeed be increasing in highland areas of Kenya but the evidence that the disease is driven by rapid climate change is completely unsupported. The research used by DFID and sent to me actually states that changes in land use may be the key factors in encouraging the growth of this extremely unpleasant disease.

The climate sceptics often claim that the political establishment routinely exaggerates the effects of increasing temperatures. These sceptics say that very poor scientific evidence is used to create alarmist headlines about the impact of global warming. The DFID press release is a clear candidate for criticism of this type. It has used inadequate scientific research as the basis for an unqualified conclusion about the impact of climate change on insect-borne diseases. In this case, the press release goes even further by misstating many of the elements of the research on which it is based. Such abuse of science does substantial disservice to the attempt to energise the global community to take action to mitigate climate change.

(With many thanks to Professor Paul Reiter for his comments during the preparation of this article. Errors are my responsibility. If you are interested in reading more about the causes of malarial infections, please consult one of Professor Reiter's papers)


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The inconvenient truth about malaria

H/T Andrew Bolt

FROM-Spectator UK

Al Gore has made bold claims that climate change is aiding the spread of insect-borne diseases. The science does not support him, says Paul Reiter

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood.

In his book — the version for adults, not the one for schoolchildren — he even included a colour photograph of a corpse, a young man, floating face downward, drowned by Hurricane Katrina. I wonder whether the dead boy’s family were consulted.

I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology. My speciality is the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases. As the film began, I knew Mr Gore would get to mosquitoes: they’re a favourite with climate-change activists. When he got to them, it was all I feared.

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.


These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.More...

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: ‘Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy’. Clearly, Mr Gore didn’t read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore’s credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don’t write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious IPCC assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria — ‘the ague’ — was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth.


The activists also claim that malaria is already increasing in sub-Saharan Africa because of climate change, and that the people who are attacked by our climatic transgressions are those least able to defend themselves.

Science has a different angle. In the first place, malaria in most of sub-Saharan Africa is ‘stable’: everyone gets bitten by infective mosquitoes every year, sometimes as many as 300 times. So it is absurd to claim that climate change will increase the rate of infection; you cannot add water to a glass that’s already full.

On the other hand, in regions where malaria is newly arrived, or has emerged after a period of remission, a plethora of interacting factors are at play, including forest clearance, irrigation, the mobility of people, urbanisation, resistance to insecticides and antimalarial drugs, the Aids epidemic, population increase, the degradation of public health infrastructures, and war and civil strife. Most of all: poverty. Poverty and malaria go hand in hand. There is no evidence or need to implicate temperature.

When the Bush government nominated me as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I knew I hadn’t a snowball’s chance of being accepted. The IPCC, supposedly formed of thousands of the world’s top scientists, is an ‘Intergovernmental’ panel. Governments nominate the authors, governments make their selections from those nominations, and governments must approve of all reports, line by line, before they are published. Moreover, the IPCC is a UN organisation, so its ‘top scientists’ are drawn from the 192 member countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Each chapter must include two authors from developing countries and at least one from an emerging economy. Clearly, the people of the Maldives are not going to nominate a scientist like me, but if they did, I doubt the project would get very far: the IPCC Working Group II, based in Exeter, somehow happened to lose my nomination from their database.

At the end of his movie, Al Gore ridicules global warming ‘sceptics’ as a tiny and dwindling band of flat-earthers, people who believe the moon landings were staged, and accuses us of being richly rewarded by the oil industry. According to him, ‘the science is in’. End of discussion.

In truth, the science is never in. We’re not pollsters or policy-makers. We proceed by question, observation, hypothesis, and testing by experiment. We are still re-testing Einstein’s theory of relativity! So I’m happy to be a sceptic. That is how science works.

Ecologists acting badly

from New Scientist

Will climate change spread disease?

MUD-SLINGING has broken out among ecologists over a study suggesting that climate change might not spread tropical diseases far and wide after all. When the paper triggered an uproar, editors at the journal Ecology decided to publish not one but six responses alongside the original research. The collection appears in the April issue.

Many disease researchers have warned that rising global temperatures could lead to more disease, for example by allowing tropical diseases to expand their ranges into what are now temperate regions. This is a particular fear for insect-borne diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness.

But the reality is more complex, argues Kevin Lafferty, a disease ecologist at the US Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center in Santa Barbara, California. He argues that a warming climate could favour some diseases in certain regions while inhibiting them in others.

Lafferty does not deny that climate change might allow malarial mosquitoes to spread to new areas. However, he believes that hotter and drier conditions may also eliminate mosquitoes from areas where they currently thrive, such as the Sahel region in Africa. If this were the case, he says, there would be little if any net increase in the risk of disease.

In addition, many temperate regions such as southern Europe or the southern US have good sanitation and insect control programmes which, Lafferty says, would prevent diseases from becoming prevalent even if climatic conditions were suitable. ....

The Real Killer

I love this article from Science Daily. One scientist says that disease in the coming apocalypse will not be as bad as predicted. So another scientist has to take him to task for minimizing the danger, as if people are going to up and relocate based on what either of these folks predict.

But what is important to understand and which is right there in the story, for people who aren't yet off the deep end, is all the studies are based on computer models which are themselves based on computer models. Using a hypothesis to create a hypothesis in order to scare people in order to get funding for further hypothesis to further scare people and on and on it goes.

It is like the constant media blare of all the things we eat and do that are harmful for us or will cause cancer etc. Yet despite this year after year, decade after decade American life expectancy continues to go ever upwards. Poverty kills, this obsession with detruction of wealth and the driver of wealth-energy, is the evil and the killer, not CO2.



Ecologists Question Effects Of Climate Change On Infectious Diseases

Recent research has predicted that climate change may expand the scope of human infectious diseases. A new review, however, argues that climate change may have a negligible effect on pathogens or even reduce their ranges. The paper has sparked debate in the ecological community....