By Keith B G Dear, senior fellow, Anthony J McMichael, professor

Three reasons to act: the health burden, inequity, and mitigation

On 12 May Michael Marmot and his team published their report, “The heath impacts of cold homes and fuel poverty,” commissioned by Friends of the Earth.1 The report highlights an obvious, well known, and largely ignored fact - that cold homes waste energy and harm their occupants - and identifies an opportunity for simultaneous gains on three fronts. By improving the thermal efficiency of British homes the government would reduce carbon dioxide ("greenhouse") emissions, avoid a major burden of ill health, and reduce health inequity, which - as the report shows - maps closely with social and economic disadvantage. The report delivers three messages. Firstly, improving the energy efficiency of the housing stock - to spread “affordable warmth” - would bring multiple health gains, directly and through improved home finances. Secondly, fuel poverty as a result of poor housing stock causes avoidable health inequality and is unjust. Thirdly, reduced fuel use would bring environmental gains, in the short term through reduced air pollution and in the longer term in helping to mitigate climate change.

The same is true of Australia, which is perhaps often envied by inhabitants of northern Europe as a land of sand, sunshine, and seasonal tropical monsoons that bring welcome warm rains (albeit sometimes to excess). The reality is that even in the subtropical city of Brisbane (population two million) deaths as a result of extremes of winter cold are roughly equal to those attributable to extremes of summer heat.2 This fact matches the finding in Europe that “higher rates [of excess winter deaths] are found in countries with less severe, milder winter climates."3 The explanation is that building standards have been raised in colder countries such as Finland and Sweden, but not in countries with a milder climate such as the United Kingdom. The report estimates that in the UK, about 5500 more deaths a year occur in the coldest quarter of houses than would occur if those houses were warm. Of note, this substantial burden of mortality was shown only by careful accumulation and analysis of national statistics. Might measures of housing quality be added to the international health statistics website, gapminder.org? The software at this site (created by Hans Rosling) allows graphical cross referencing of many national statistics over time, but housing quality is not currently represented among the variables available.4

Living in a cold house can affect health at any age, not just in old age, for a variety of reasons. Although the extra deaths in elderly people are caused mainly by cardiovascular and respiratory disease, far greater numbers have minor ailments that lead to a huge burden of disease, costs to the health system, and misery. Compared with those who live in a warmer house, respiratory problems are roughly doubled in children, arthritis and rheumatism increase, and mental health can be impaired at any age. As the report notes, adolescents who live in a cold house have a fivefold increased risk of multiple mental health problems.1

The report also presents evidence that living in a cold house has indirect effects, some of which persist throughout life. In many such households, educational attainment is affected, emotional resilience is impaired, and the financial burden of heating a poorly insulated house takes food off the table, risking malnutrition.1

The action proposed in the report connects well with the important concept of “health co-benefits,” wherein health benefits accrue directly within communities that undertake an intervention that is aimed primarily at mitigating climate change, such as insulating houses to reduce energy use.5 The “win-win” aspect of co-benefits is often overlooked. For example, in Australia a government funded programme of home insulation was undertaken in 2009 as an economic stimulus measure. It was, commendably, aimed at mitigating climate change and the public health benefits of the programme were not much stressed (on this occasion, however, the public health community should probably be glad of its low profile: four deaths and many house fires associated with faulty installations led to early cancellation of the programme).

The Marmot report takes the same approach in reverse - an environmental benefit (reduced greenhouse emissions) will accrue from an intervention aimed primarily at protecting health. In addition to this double benefit, the social equity argument provides yet a third motivation.

We should not assume that because the planet is warming dangerously, cold temperatures will become a thing of the past. Climate scientists anticipate that warming will be accompanied by increased variability.6 Furthermore, warming will not be globally uniform. In particular, northern Europe might become much colder later this century if the meridional overturning circulation is weakened by inflows of fresh water from a melting Greenland ice sheet (the geological record shows that such things have happened before).7

The world community is struggling to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is not merely continuing to rise when it should be starting to fall, but its rise is accelerating.8 The essence of the problem is our apparent unwillingness - as people, populations, and politicians - to put moral obligations above short term economic interests. So, when measures are identified that have negligible net cost and that will bring benefits on many fronts, including reducing health inequalities, they should be enthusiastically and promptly embraced and implemented.

Britain, like some of its former colonies, is saddled with obsolete housing stock many decades, if not centuries, old. These inadequate homes are a waste of energy, a health hazard, and (given today’s levels of national wealth) a shameful relic for their part in fostering persistent, avoidable, social inequity. For many reasons - economic, ethical, environmental, and epidemiological - governments should heed the call in this timely report.

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Cite this as: BMJ 2011;342:d2807

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Competing interests: All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

Previous Section References
1 Marmot M, Geddes I, Bloomer E, Allen J, Goldblatt P. The health impacts of cold homes and fuel poverty. Friends of the Earth/Marmot Review Team, 2011.
2 Bi P, Parton K, Wang J, Donald K. Temperature and direct effects on population health in Brisbane, 1986-1995. J Environ Health2008;70:48-53.[Medline][Web of Science]
3 Healy JD. Excess winter mortality in Europe: a cross country analysis identifying key risk factors. J Epidemiol Community Health2003;57:784-9.[Abstract/FREE Full text] 4 Rosling HA. Visual technology unveils the beauty of statistics and swaps policy from dissemination to access. J Int Assoc Official Stat2007;24:103-4.
5 Haines A, McMichael AJ, Smith KR, Roberts I, Woodcock J, Markandya A, et al. Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers. Lancet2009;374:2104-14.[CrossRef][Medline][Web of Science]↵Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate change 2007: synthesis report. contribution of working groups I, II and III to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Core Writing Team, Pachauri RK, Reisinger A, eds. 2007.
6 Bindoff NL, Willebrand J, Artale V, Cazenave A, Gregory J, Gulev S, et al. Observations: oceanic climate change and sea level. In: Solomon S, Qin D, Manning M, Chen Z, Marquis M, Averyt KB, et al, eds. Climate change 2007: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
7 Husler AD, Sornette D. Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth. 2011; arXiv:1101.2832v3 [physics.ao-ph]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2832.

By Will Happer, Essay in First Things

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types - even children’s crusades - all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate atmospheric CO2 as a “pollutant.” According to my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, to pollute is “to make or render unclean, to defile, to desecrate, to profane.” By breathing are we rendering the air unclean, defiling or desecrating it? Efforts are underway to remedy the old-fashioned, restrictive definition of pollution. The current Wikipedia entry on air pollution, for example, now asserts that pollution includes: “carbon dioxide (CO2) - a colorless, odorless, non-toxic greenhouse gas associated with ocean acidification, emitted from sources such as combustion, cement production, and respiration.”

As far as green plants are concerned, CO2 is not a pollutant, but part of their daily bread - like water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other essential elements. Most green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand ppm, many times higher than now. Plants grow better and have better flowers and fruit at higher levels. Commercial greenhouse operators recognize this when they artificially increase the concentrations inside their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm.

Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII renounced the British throne, supposedly said, “A woman can’t be too rich or too thin.” But in reality, you can get too much or too little of a good thing. Whether we should be glad or worried about increasing levels of CO2 depends on quantitative numbers, not just qualitative considerations.

How close is the current atmosphere to the upper or lower limit for CO2? Did we have just the right concentration at the preindustrial level of 270 ppm? Reading breathless media reports about CO2 “pollution” and about minimizing our carbon footprints, one might think that the earth cannot have too little CO2, as Simpson thought one couldn’t be too thin - a view which was also overstated, as we have seen from the sad effects of anorexia in so many young women. Various geo-engineering schemes are being discussed for scrubbing CO2 from the air and cleansing the atmosphere of the “pollutant.” There is no lower limit for human beings, but there is for human life. We would be perfectly healthy in a world with little or no atmospheric CO2 - except that we would have nothing to eat and a few other minor inconveniences, because most plants stop growing if the levels drop much below 150 ppm. If we want to continue to be fed and clothed by the products of green plants, we can have too little CO2.

The minimum acceptable value for plants is not that much below the 270 ppm preindustrial value. It is possible that this is not enough, that we are better off with our current level, and would be better off with more still. There is evidence that California orange groves are about 30 percent more productive today than they were 150 years ago because of the increase of atmospheric CO2.

Although human beings and many other animals would do well with no CO2 at all in the air, there is an upper limit that we can tolerate. Inhaling air with a concentration of a few percent, similar to the concentration of the air we exhale, hinders the diffusional exchange of CO2 between the blood and gas in the lung. Both the United States Navy (for submariners) and nasa (for astronauts) have performed extensive studies of human tolerance to CO2. As a result of these studies, the Navy recommends an upper limit of about 8000 ppm for cruises of ninety days, and nasa recommends an upper limit of 5000 ppm for missions of one thousand days, both assuming a total pressure of one atmosphere. Higher levels are acceptable for missions of only a few days.

We conclude that atmospheric CO2 levels should be above 150 ppm to avoid harming green plants and below about 5000 ppm to avoid harming people. That is a very wide range, and our atmosphere is much closer to the lower end than to the upper end. The current rate of burning fossil fuels adds about 2 ppm per year to the atmosphere, so that getting from the current level to 1000 ppm would take about 300 years - and 1000 ppm is still less than what most plants would prefer, and much less than either the nasa or the Navy limit for human beings.

Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in CO2 levels and reducing the current level. As we have discussed, animals would not even notice a doubling of CO2 and plants would love it. The supposed reason for limiting it is to stop global warming - or, since the predicted warming has failed to be nearly as large as computer models forecast, to stop climate change. Climate change itself has been embarrassingly uneventful, so another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes or tornados. But this does not necessarily follow. The frequency of extreme events has either not changed or has decreased in the 150 years that CO2 levels have increased from 270 to 390 ppm.

Let me turn to some of the problems the non-pollutant CO2 is supposed to cause. More CO2 is supposed to cause flooded cities, parched agriculture, tropical diseases in Alaska, etc., and even an epidemic of kidney stones. It does indeed cause some warming of our planet, and we should thank Providence for that, because without the greenhouse warming of CO2 and its more potent partners, water vapor and clouds, the earth would be too cold to sustain its current abundance of life.

...

A major problem has been the co-opting of climate science by politics, ambition, greed, and what seems to be a hereditary human need for a righteous cause. What better cause than saving the planet? Especially if one can get ample, secure funding at the same time? Huge amounts of money are available from governments and wealthy foundations for climate institutes and for climate-related research.

Funding for climate studies is second only to funding for biological sciences. Large academic empires, prizes, elections to honorary societies, fellowships, and other perquisites go to those researchers whose results may help “save the planet.” Every day we read about some real or contrived environmental or ecological effect “proven” to arise from global warming. The total of such claimed effects now runs in the hundreds, all the alleged result of an unexceptional century-long warming of less than 1 degree Celsius. Government subsidies, loan guarantees, and captive customers go to green companies. Carbon-tax revenues flow to governments. As the great Russian poet Pushkin said in his novella Dubrovsky, “If there happens to be a trough, there will be pigs.” Any doubt about apocalyptic climate scenarios could remove many troughs.

What about those who doubt the scientific basis of these claims, or who simply don’t like what is being done to the scientific method they were taught to apply and uphold? Publications of contrary research results in mainstream journals are rare. The occasional heretical article is the result of an inevitable, protracted battle with those who support the dogma and who have their hands on the scales of peer review. As mentioned above, we know from the Climategate emails that the team conspired to prevent contrary publications from seeing the light of day and even discussed getting rid of an editor who seemed to be inclined to admit such contentious material.

Skeptics’ motives are publicly impugned; denigrating names are used routinely in media reports and the blogosphere; and we now see attempts to use the same tactics that Big Brother applied to the skeptical hero, Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984. In 2009 a conference of “ecopsychologists” was held at the University of West England to discuss the obvious psychological problems resident in those who do not adhere to the global warming dogma. The premise of these psychologists was that scientists and members of the general population who express objective doubt about the propagated view of global warming are suffering from a kind of mental illness. We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly.

The management of most scientific societies has enthusiastically signed on to the global warming bandwagon. This is not surprising, since governments, as well as many states and foundations, generously fund those who reinforce their desired outcomes under the cover of saving the planet. Certain private industries are also involved: those positioned to profit from enacted controls as well as financial institutions heavily invested in “green technologies” whose rationale disappears the moment global warming is widely understood to be a non-problem. There are known connections and movements of people involved in government policy, scientific societies, and private industry, all with the common thread of influencing the outcome of a set of programs and investments underpinned by the supposed threat of global warming.

My own trade union, the American Physical Society (APS), is a good example, but hardly the worst. An APS Council statement issued on November 18, 2007 states: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security, and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” This is pretty strong language for physicists, for whom skepticism about evidence was once considered a virtue, and nothing was incontrovertible.

In the fall of 2009 a petition, organized by Fellow of the American Physical Society, Roger Cohen, and containing the signatures of hundreds of distinguished APS members was presented to the APS management with a request that at least the truly embarrassing word “incontrovertible” be taken out of the statement. The APS management’s response was to threaten the petitioners, while grudgingly appointing a committee to consider the request. It was exactly what James Madison warned against. The committee included members whose careers depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result was that not one word was changed. Bad as the actions of the APS were, they were far better than those of most other scientific societies, which refused to even reconsider extreme statements on climate.

The situation is even more lamentable for the general public, which is fed a constant stream of propaganda by specialists in environmental issues from the mainstream media and well-funded alarmist blogs. Not unlike functionaries of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, with its motto “Ignorance is Strength,” many members of the environmental news media dutifully and uncritically promote the party line of the climate crusade.

However, the situation is slowly getting better. Skeptics are more numerous and better organized than before. In a few cases, leading former adherents have publicly and courageously spoken out against the dogma and its core of establishment promoters. The IPCC itself has come under severe criticism by the international scientific establishment for its series of bizarre errors and organizational failings. Under pressure from a dissident group of Fellows, the Royal Society moved to meaningfully moderate its former radically alarmist position on global warming. And perhaps most important of all, public skepticism has increased significantly, and with it has come a major drop in support of the climate crusade’s attempt to seize control of the “pollutant,” CO2.

I began with a quotation from the preface of the first edition of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and it is worth recalling now a quotation from the preface of the second edition: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

In our efforts to conserve the created world, we should not concentrate our efforts on CO2. We should instead focus on issues like damage to local landscapes and waterways by strip mining, inadequate cleanup, hazards to miners, and the release of real pollutants and poisons like mercury, other heavy metals, and organic carcinogens. Much of the potential harm from coal mining can be eliminated, for example, by requirements that land be restored to a condition that is at least as good as, and preferably better than, when the mining began.

Life is about making decisions, and decisions are about trade-offs. We can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently. Or we can be caught up in a crusade that seeks to suppress energy use, economic growth, and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.

William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

By James Taylor, Forbes

Three environmental activists and a duck walk into a bar and start talking global warming with a dozen people who have no formal education in climate science. Sound like the beginning of a bad joke? Actually, it’s not. It’s what the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would have us believe is an expert, objective, scientifically authoritative panel qualified to produce its latest report, America’s Climate Choices.

America’s Climate Choices asserts that humans are the primary cause of recent climate change that poses significant risks to human welfare and the environment. The report asserts we need to act now to fend off future harms.

Environmental activist groups and their media allies have had a field day claiming America’s Climate Choices is an unquestionably objective and expert report providing irrefutable proof that humans are causing a global warming crisis.

USA Today, for example, claimed the report was authored by “the nation’s pre-eminent scientific advisory group” and said the report “leave[s] the deniers in the same position as the ‘birthers’” who challenge President Obama’s reported birthplace.

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post referred to the report as “the scientific consensus of America’s premier scientific advisory group” and says “climate-change deniers, in other words, are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three.”

These are very strong assertions. Let’s see if the facts back them up.

Only 23 people served on the panel. This is hardly sufficient to form a “scientific consensus.”

Of the 23 panelists, only five have a Ph.D. in a field closely related to climate science. That’s less than 22%.

Five of the 23 panelists are or were staffers for environmental activist organizations. That means there are as many professional environmental activists on the panel as there are persons with climate-related science degrees.

Prior to publishing the report, 19 of the 23 made statements claiming global warming is a human induced problem and/or we need to take action to reduce carbon dioxide restrictions. That means 83% of the panel was clearly and obviously biased before being selected.

Two of the panelists are or were politicians.

One of the panelists was appointed by the Clinton administration as general counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency.

To claim that a report from such a small panel, comprised primarily of non-climate scientists and environmental activists, is objective and scientifically authoritative is a joke. The fact that 19 of the 23 panelists were clearly biased before even writing the report makes the report an even bigger joke. The only thing missing from such an “expert” and “objective” panel is the presence of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.”

When environmental activists lament the fact that public opinion has turned so forcefully against global warming alarmism, they need only look in the mirror to find the answer. You can’t trot out staffers from Environmental Defense Fund, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and other environmental activist groups and claim this is authoritative, objective science. And if you are going to issue a global warming report and claim it is from impeccably qualified scientific sources, at least a quarter of the report’s authors should be climate scientists.

Environmental activists and their media allies repeatedly point out that America’s Climate Choices is a National Academy of Sciences publication. Rather than provide credibility for the panel of activists and non-climate scientists, the involvement of NAS merely illustrates how far away from quality, objective science NAS has travelled when the topic is a political one as well as scientific one. The fact that NAS chose to publish the report in no way changes the fact that the report was written by a very small panel of environmental activists and non-climate scientists. All the Washington Post and USA Today editorials in the world cannot change the fact that the NAS panel is about as close to representing an objective, authoritative scientific consensus on climate science as Donald Trump is to representing an objective, authoritative scientific consensus on the accuracy of President Obama’s birth claims.

Indeed, when three environmental activists and a duck walk into a bar to discuss global warming with non-climate scientists, the duck is most objective, qualified source in the room. Too bad the duck was the only entity left off the NAS panel.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Marc Morano has compiled some links here.

Repulsive: National Research Council Chaired by Corrupted Warmist Ralph Cicerone: Turned Org. into political advocacy group: $6 million NAS study used to lobby for climate bill rcicerone@nas.edu

Flashback: MIT’s Lindzen Slams: ‘Ralph Cicerone of NAS/NRC is saying that regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If gov’t wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide’