Repeat after me, you greenie morons … cold kills, cold kills, cold kills … greenies kill. You granny killers should be up for manslaughter.
– The indefatigable Richard North spells out just how much worse cold weather is than hot weather.
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Samizdata quote of the dayMarch 13th, 2010 |
 20 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Oh, this is getting silly. Extreme heat can be as dangerous as extreme cold, and old/sick people and small children are equally vulnerable. The key in both cases is being well prepared and equipped – which means technology, which means burning fuel, whatever fuel may be available.
And, (needless to add?) sound economy, so that the vulnerable can actually afford the equipment and the fuel.
Indefatigable !
That’s the word I’ve been looking for. When does he sleep?
Purely anecdotal, (in other words as scientific as your average IPCC assesment report), but when my father shuffled off this mortal coil in January, ten or so years ago, we had to wait two weeks to get a slot in the local crematorium. A couple of years later, when Mum joined him, she went in June and we could have had the funeral the next day if we’d wanted.
Extreme temperatures kill, but here in the UK the worst extremes come from cold weather, and ample cheap available energy saves lives. When the feed in tariffs start next month and the incentives for building base load generators diminish even more while the price of energy increases, then this government and the next put themselves in line for mass murder charges.
(Oh, and add the bloody EU to the list of killers.)
Yes Kevin, but GW, if it exists, is supposedly a global problem, not restricted to the UK. North’s remark is pointless.
Scratch ‘problem’, insert ‘phenomenon’…
Studies suggest cold kills more globally, too. (It depends if you include the effects of droughts, though.)
But it’s not straightforward, because they also indicate that mortality has a U-shaped relationship with temperature, where the minimum varies with latitude. That is, society adapts to a certain temperature range, and extremes outside that range can kill. So you can’t simply look at the point at which people start dying now and say ‘if the temperature changes by so much, this many more people will die’, because of course people will adapt. Old people live in Greece and Spain, and in Norway and Canada. If it was as simple as warm/cold kills, all the people in one or the other place would be dead.
It’s a more interesting question to ask what the costs of those adaptations would be. Does it cost more keeping warm, or keeping cool? How will the balance change?
“this government and the next put themselves in line for mass murder charges.”
There has been evidence around for years that greenies (and the politicians who pander to them) have blood on their hands.
By some estimates, thousands of children die every day because of the excessive anti-DDT pogrom. Little black African children dead from preventable malaria. The unnecessary purge of chlorofluorocarbons (nominally to save the ozone layer) has reputedly resulted in premature deaths for asthma sufferers. (CFCs were the most efficient carriers for inhalants).
But who cares? The environmentalists’ intentions were good. And the environmentalists have never been held to account for the consequences of their actions. Probably never will be.
Now, expressing doubt about the ever-so settled science of Anthropogenic Global Warming — when David Cameron is crowned, that will probably become go-to-jail hate speech.
Alice – you say that the removal of CFCs was ‘nominally’ to save the ozone layer. If it was nominally for that, what do you think it was actually for?
@PaulH: I suspect that the real issue is not what Alice may think the purpose of the removal of CFCs was was, but more about about the cause and effect of banning of DDT and CFCs in general.
Take DDT as an example: have a look at what Wikipedia says about malaria at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria :
This is an extract:
After it had been discovered during the second half of World War II that DDT enabled real control of malaria and typhus amongst civilians and troops, DDT was used extensively and had almost eradicated malaria in some parts of the world. When it ceased to be used, the malaria came back, so millions of people – mostly children – had to die each year again.
Now try telling those children as they lie dying, and their families, that this massive scale of death is because of no scientifically substantive reason for banning DDT.
That may be only half the story of the use of DDT. The other half would be in its use as a highly effective crop pesticide.
Now you might understand why the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 – i.e., “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”
All this may not stop us from continuing to try to justify our POVs.
We in the western civilisations are fortunate in that we will not have to watch our children die of malaria by the millions. You can be sure that if they did start to die of it, then we would rapidly deploy DDT or invent some even more effective malarial control. We are already using crop herbicides, crop pesticides and animal pesticides by the mega-tons, and genetically modified seed which is resistant to these chemicals, which is one reason why we can produce more than enough food for our needs.
The majority of people affected by malaria are those living in poverty. Malaria effectively aggravates the state of poverty – which is the world’s biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe. It is listed almost at the end of the WHO International Classification of Diseases. It is given the code Z59.5 – extreme poverty. DDT is one of the few things that has made any major dent in the statistics for global poverty and its associated human misery, and yet it has been pushed aside because it was made politically (not scientifically) incorrect by the book “The Silent Spring” (1962).
Just as a rough estimate, let’s suppose that since (say) 1970, DDT ceased to be used to control malaria, and that (say) at least 1.5million children died from malaria each year since then as a result. That’s 40 years and 60 million dead children to date.
We could perhaps argue about precise numbers, but this estimate helps us to get the general idea of the scale of the thing.
So, this estimated 60 million children were sentenced to die from what could have been an otherwise avoidable disease – malaria. The only reason those children were sentenced to die was because they suffered from another disease – Z59.5 (extreme poverty). Because they were children and had Z59.5, they had no franchise – no voice – in the arbitrary decision made by wealthy western nations to withhold the only known defense that could have saved them – DDT. We committed those 60 million children to death, and we currently commit somewhere between 1.5 and 3.0 million more children to death each year by the same means.
That 60 million is a staggering number of children to kill by default, made all the more worse a crime because it continues and may have been because DDT became politically unacceptable due to a fascist green whim regarding DDT and because someone wanted to write a best-selling book based on insubstantial scientific evidence.
If the Wikipedia and other balanced articles are anything to go by, then we should not forget that it is apparently acknowledged that not only was the case against DDT far from being categorically scientifically proven at the time the book was published, but also a substantive part of that case still remains to be proved. We have apparently become and continue to be mass murderers through our own passivity and ignorance and now including from our belief in the relatively new religion of greenie.
It is our beliefs that are become fatal to so many others, coupled with our avoidance – even hatred – of anything which might test or contradict that belief. This is a religion where the belief is more important than and comes at the cost of the deaths of millions of innocent children.
If we:
(a) have withheld DDT from these innocents, thereby ensuring their deaths in the millions each year;
(b) have done this because we *believed” we were right to do so and that somehow this would save even more lives in our societies (“for the greater good”);
(c) withheld DDT without offering any reasonable or effective substitute (QED);
(d) did this without knowing for certain whether we were right (QED);
– then arguably we could well deserve the charge of mass complicity in mass murder on a scale that beggars belief and that would make Hitler seem like a rank amateur.
Just a thought.
Slartibartfarst – you make an interesting case, and while thare are several counter-arguments I’m not convinced enough by them (or by the pro-DDT arguments) to want to take a side. None of what you said, however, explains what the real reason for banning CFCs was.
@PaulH: Well if you are after an explanation of “what the real reason for banning CFCs” was, I am unable to see how you would advance towards that by asking what Alice may think the purpose of the removal of CFCs was (i.e., of what relevance is her POV?).
I would suggest some hard research on your part could be in order if you are still after the real reason for banning CFCs.
By the way, I was not trying to make a “case” per se for anything in particular, as you suggest. What I was attempting to do was draw together the subject in the quote:
– with the issues that it raises, particularly in respect of cause and effect of banning things for apparently no good scientific reason.
You see, if greenie is indeed a religion where the belief is more important than and comes at the cost of the deaths of millions of innocent children – as I suggest might be the case – then there has to be something seriously wrong (anti-life) about that. The mind boggles.
PaulH,
I have no idea if it is true, but there is a popular theory that the real reason for the CFC ban was that DuPont’s patents on a best-selling CFC refrigerant (CFC-12) was about to expire, but they had a patent on a more expensive non-CFC substitute (HFC134a), and in any case, had many years research lead on competitors should a ban occur. Alternatively, I’ve also heard that there are plenty of other refrigerants/propellants and DuPont has no monopoly, and that DuPont initially fought the ban until they had the alternative sorted out.
It’s a bit like the rumours that the ban on incandescent lightbulbs is because European manufacturers like Osram can’t compete with China on incandescents, so forcing a shift to fluorescents maintains their advantage.
But this sort of conspiracy theorising is fraught with difficulties. Evidence is rarely more than circumstantial, and it distracts from the main issue which is that the theory that CFCs destroy ozone is as yet unconfirmed, the environmental impact exaggerated, and the global human and economic cost of mitigation very large.
I think it’s more probable that the real reason was that the CFC theory, combined with the recent observation of the South polar vortex ozone hole fitted (affirming the consequent) with the general anti-technology movement’s hatred of artificial chemicals. The anti-progress, anti-consumption, anti-industry, litany-of-doom, naturalistic-fallacy, man-is-destroying-the-planet, back-to-nature Environment movement picked up on it, and the politicians had not yet twigged to the tactic. If the scientists being reported in the media said CFCs were a problem, and the public supported action, then we’d better do something about it. The chemical companies like DuPont simply found a way to adapt and take advantage.
Lots of useful chemicals get banned for no good reason. The CFC thing was only unusual in its scale, both of the putative threat and the economic consequences. Just one in a very long line of scares.
I ought perhaps to clarify – I don’t know what Alice was referring to. It might or might not be the DuPont theory, or the anti-progress enviro-loony theory, or something else entirely.
But the main point is that whoever is responsible, such measures cause massive harm on the basis of scare tactics backed by insufficient evidence. When will we learn?
I salute his indefatigability.
Yes, if only he abstained from talking nonsense. But nobody is perfect, I’m sure his heart is in the right place.
“Alice – you say that the removal of CFCs was ‘nominally’ to save the ozone layer. If it was nominally for that, what do you think it was actually for?”
PaulH — There is little I can add to Slartibartfarst’s excellent exposition.
By ‘nominally’, I was alluding to recent work which suggests the whole “CFCs cause the (invisible) ozone hole” meme has a scientific basis which is almost as solid as the “CO2 is causing (non-observed) Anthropogenic Global Warming” meme.
Personally, I doubt there are nefarious capitalist conspiracies behind the movements to outlaw DDT, CFCs, and CO2 (the latter even though every Greenie above room temperature is a veritable 24/7 CO2 producer).
The movements to ban specific substances – with no attempt to weigh costs & benefits, or even to assess whether there really is a problem – is more likely to be driven by some people’s need to have a cause to give meaning to their lives. The following those movements attract probably has a lot of similarity to page-boy hairstyles replacing bee-hive hairdos — simply herd instinct among the empty headed followers of fashion.
Kevin B
Anecdotally, I wastold in France that when old people died in the Alps in winter, the ground was too hard to bury them so the bodies would be put on the roofs and freeze in the snowcover. When spring came along, Granny would slide down and they could bury her.
O/T but on the subject of CFCs and “the science is settled”. CFCs and their uses were discovered by a chemist called Thomas Midgley, who also discoved tetra ethyl lead as an anti-knock agent for petrol. In his day he was hailed as a saviour of Mankind. Now however…
Alice:
I’m finding that this is the theme of leftists in general: sell the benefit with no consideration of the opportunity cost. Of more frequently, obfuscating the opportunity cost.
“opportunity cost” ? Isn’t that Capitalism talk ? We can’t have any of *that* around here, now can we ?