More Climate Change Alarmism – Now It’s The Vibrio Public Health Scare!

Awhile back I wrote about the climate alarmists’ latest tactic to get people scared about climate change – i.e., make it look like it’s a serious threat to public health.

Hat-tip: DirkH

Der Spiegel has wasted little time and has immediately pounced on the new paper appearing in Nature Climate Change, by Austin et al, which boldly claims man-made global warming “is reshaping the distribution of infectious disease across global scales”.

The authors illustrate possible associations between environmental changes in the Baltic area and the recent emergence of Vibrio infections. They also forecast future scenarios of the risk of infections with predicted warming trends. The authors don’t beat around the bush, implying that the Baltic, because it warmed 0.063–0.078 °C yr from 1982 (a cold time) to 2010 (a warm time), sea surface temperatures there may rise 7°C per century!

How scientific is that? The stock market went up 200 points last week, and so does that mean it will rise 10,000 points over the next year? Of course not. The silly extrapolation the authors imply reveals their true intent: to fan public fear. This paper is hardly above tabloid trash as far as quality goes.

Moreover, the authors think that 29 years of data (half a PDO or AMO oscillation) are enough to make a quantum leap of faith and to conclude:

This is among the first empirical evidence that anthropogenic climate change is driving the emergence of Vibrio disease in temperate regions through its impact on resident bacterial communities, implying that this process is reshaping the distribution of infectious diseases across global scales.”

That is just plain stupid. Where’s the science? What would these scientists think if we told them that CO2 and global temperature haven’t correlated in 15 years?

Of course the somewhat obviously dimwitted journalist at Der Spiegel took it in, hook, line and sinker. Der Spiegel warns:

Already more and more people are being infected in warm summers by Vibrio vulnificus, a contagion for wounds, diarrhea and blood poisoning an international team of scientists reported in “Nature Climate Change”. Also the very closely related Cholera bacterium , Vibrio Cholerae, is on the march.

During the extremely warm summers of 1994, 2003 and 2006 at the Baltic Sea coast, there were numerous reports of infected wounds and cases of Cholera. Alone in 2006, 67 people became infected while bathing or doing water sports; some even died.”

The authors add that the number of Vibrio infections will increase significantly, if the warming continues. Note there’s no mention that there’s been no real outbreak since 2006.

The authors also warn that more than 30 million people live near the Baltic Sea coast and that they, and cities like Stockholm and St. Petersburg, are all threatened.

So readers, you are urged to cancel your Baltic holidays and to spend them somewhere else – like the good old Mediterranean, where water temperatures are about 10°C warmer.

 

4 responses to “More Climate Change Alarmism – Now It’s The Vibrio Public Health Scare!”

  1. John F. Hultquist

    They need to be careful not to fool themselves, and they will be the easiest ones to fool. (Clearly, that is not original with me. See Richard Feynman.)

    A. Could there be another reason? Quite so.
    B. Could there be a problem with this statement:
    “. . .empirical evidence that anthropogenic climate change . . .”

    Until they prove the anthropogenic part, they haven’t proved much of anything. All they really can say is they have some data but they don’t know what it means.

    Send more money!

  2. Pierre Gosselin: More Climate Change Alarmism – Now It’s The Vibrio Public Health Scare! | JunkScience.com

    […] No Tricks Zone Share this:PrintEmailMoreStumbleUponTwitterFacebookDiggRedditLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted in Climate Change, Public health miscellany and tagged climate hysteria, weather superstition. Bookmark the permalink. ← Pierre Gosselin: Summers Are Getting Cooler And Wetter, Germany’s Number 1 Daily Writes […]

  3. Pascvaks

    I know there’s a connection between temperature and bugs, everytime I have a temperature I have a bug. I think there’s also a connection between light and birthrates. I bet if I were a Green or a Warmer I could come up with some pretty wild connections –but I have a feeling that eventually people would start treating me like a certain, stupid chicken yelling “The Sky Is Falling!” –but if I can elect a few idiots who’ll mimic everything I say, people will have to believe me, now how to elect some idiots, that is the question? Hummmmmm….?

  4. Mindert Eiting

    The authors wrote: “Furthermore, warm temperatures are likely to be associated with increases in leisure activities such as bathing, further increasing risk.” They did not quantify it.

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