I was going to comment on this remarkably stupid story yesterday, but became distracted by real life. In the meantime, Bishop Hill got in before me and cites a rebuttal. The story struck me immediately with the reaction; “WTF!?!” rapidly followed by “where’s the evidence for such a remarkable claim?”
Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today.
A report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, says that the effects of climate change are growing in such a way that it will have a serious impact on 600 million people, almost ten per cent of the world’s population, within 20 years. Almost all of these will be in developing countries.
“Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” Mr Annan said.
“As this report shows, the first hit and worst affected are the world’s poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem.”
The report claims that 90 per cent of the deaths are related to gradual environmental degradation caused by a warming climate, which exacerbates existing threats — mainly malnutrition, diarrhoea and malaria. The rest are said to be the result of weather disasters.
Never mind that natural disasters and disease predate AGW by several millenia, let’s run a completely made up story and dress it up as a report. With Kofi Annan’s name in the frame, I can’t say I am over surprised by the alarmist tone backed up by fuck-all evidence.
What is disturbing, as BH points out, is that news agencies trot this stuff out without bothering to challenge the reliability of the claims being made. As Bishop Hill says:
The report is clearly a travesty. Who is going to mourn the newspapers that publish it?
Quite so. And I won’t.