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You’ve got to hand it to your professional warmist, the sort who never misses a chance to make the dire best of any and all surprising developments. Take people dropping dead, for instance, a trend said to be rising with the thermometer and sure to get worse as the climate cataclysm draws nigh. You might even have heard a warmist or two point out that the Victorian heatwave of 2009 killed more people than the Black Saturday bushfires which followed. They seemed rather smug about it.
Today, a bit more smuggery from Environment Victoria, but this time the message is that it is the cold, not heat, which kills more people. The pace of change within a settled science can be quite astounding at times, likewise the flexible theology of its preachers. Professional activist Nick Roberts, aided by an incompetent Age sub-editor, doesn’t miss a beat. With the application of artful spin, he manages to turn a confirmation of what sceptics have long maintained is one advantage of a warmer planet — fewer people dying — and present it as an argument for pumping more money into climate hysteria and its promoters’ careers and pet causes.
Bear in mind that Environment Victoria, the organisation for which Roberts works, is as mad green as you can get, and also that it has previously made much of heatwave death tolls. Quoting a recent international study co-relating temperature and mortality, Roberts today explains that “more people die from the cold in Australia than in Sweden“, implying that people are being frozen rigid in unheated homes left and right. From there, pausing only briefly to note that home-heating costs are expensive but not explaining why green impositions have made them so, he urges government funds and programs to save Australians from the deadly peril of drafts under doors. To pound the point, the secondary headline reads, “A study has shown that the poor quality of our housing is behind many preventable deaths from the cold in Australia”.
Except it says nothing of the sort. Here is the report, as published in The Lancet, and observe this advice: “Heat stroke on hot days and hypothermia on cold days only account for small proportions of excess deaths.” Nowhere are heat-leaking houses mentioned, not even in passing.
So why does the cold carry off more of us than the heat? The study’s authors aren’t hazarding a firm opinion, but they do note that while and hot and cold weather each play havoc with heart functions and breathing in their different ways, it is only cold which “…induces bronchoconstriction and suppresses mucociliary defences and other immunological reactions, resulting in local inflammation and increased risk of respiratory infections.” In other words, people come down with flu and pneumonia in winter and sometimes die. A minute’s googling, which the Age sub-editor should have done, would have revealed that Roberts’ thrust and argument are bogus. On a decent newspaper the story would have been impaled on the spike.
In the Age, which is no longer a decent or credible newspaper, such tosh is presented without qualm or question, the irony of Roberts’ unaltered goal going entirely unnoticed. Those mass insulation crusades he seeks aren’t intended to lower death rates. As he notes, they are meant to reduce carbon emissions — those same carbon emissions his version of science insists are making the world warmer and, if the research he cites is to be taken at face value, safer and more hospitable.
If only climate science were as rigorous as its advocates are slick it might actually make some useful contributions to the sum of human knowledge.
Roberts’ turned-about take on the science can be read in full via the link below.
