DOCTORS FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS NEWSLETTER

At a recent hearing held by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senators were told that global warming is causing public health effects that must be ameliorated by drastic cuts in the use of hydrocarbon fuels.

The Bush Administration was accused of “gutting” testimony by Julie Geberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) produced a chart from the CDC website (www.cdc.gov) that lists a broad range of health effects that could result from significant temperature increase and sea-level rise. These include injuries and drownings from severe weather events; increases in vector-borne and water-borne diseases; asthma from drought-caused air pollution; and more depression, heart failure, heat stroke, and post-traumatic stress (Buffalo News 10/24/07).

The Union of Concerned Scientists complained that the Administration should have corrected the errors instead of “cutting the meat out of the testimony” (Nature 2007;450:8).

The Nobel Peace Prize committee–five leftist Norwegian politicians–went so far as to claim that global climate change may induce “large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for Earth's resources,” thereby increasing the danger of violent conflicts and war (Manchester Union Leader, cited in TWTW 10/20/07, www.sepp.org). Hence, Gore's prize.

Even Nature, however, despite its strong support for the catastrophic human-caused global warming hypothesis, reports that the UN may have overstated the case for climate change and resulting competition for resources as the root of the war in Darfur. The true culprit, according to Alex de Waal, is the National Islamic Front, which is bent on expanding its power through ethnic cleansing (Nature 2007;447:1038).

Shutting off 75% of the global energy supply, of course, can only exacerbate struggles over natural resources. And how would that affect the mosquitoes?

The IPCC could not find any scientists with long experience working with mosquito-borne diseases who agree with its alarmist pronouncements. Therefore, it selected environmental activists with no previous publications of peer-reviewed articles in a pertinent field to be lead authors of its health chapters. Contributing authors, according to Prof. Paul Reiter, included one professional entomologist, and one whose primary interests are motorcycle crash helmets and the health dangers of cellphones, who had also written one obscure article on dengue and El Niño (Financial Post 3/23/07). Reiter, who now heads the Insects and Infectious Disease Unit at the Pasteur Institute, was passed over.

Among the glaring errors in the IPCC report is the statement that tropical mosquitoes cannot survive at temperatures below 16 C; many do. And temperate species survive temperatures below -25 C.

“It's tires, not global warming” that accounts for the spread of mosquitoes, Reiter states (Korea Times 10/4/07). Millions of used tires are shipped around the world.

“The public will surely soon get fed up with constant hype about global warming. Sadly, when they realize that the alarmists were crying wolf, it is confidence in science and scientists that will suffer,” he writes.

Without science, how will we confront the genuine public health problems: like the five-fold increase in malaria in Mozambique, or the quadrupling of asthma in the U.S.? (Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School blames both on “climate-related factors,” NEJM 2005;353:1433-1426.) Or the worst outbreak in decades of dengue fever in Latin America–more than 630,000 cases in the first 9 months of 2007, with signs of a rise in the deadly hemorrhagic form (AP 9/30/07)?

20 YEARS OF THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL

The 1987 Montreal Protocol, which required the phasing out of some of mankind's most useful chemicals (CFCs), is cited as the model for an international treaty on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. Delegates to the 2007 meeting “determined to clamp down on ozone-harming refrigerants that have become prevalent in the developing world, and to do it in a way that could provide tangible side benefits for climate.” Delegates agreed to push forward by a decade a legally binding agreement to phase out HCFCs in developing nations. A “black mark” (bright spot?) was continuing an exemption for the agricultural fumigant methyl bromide at the insistence of U.S. delegates (Science 2007;317:1843).

“[E]xperts found that the Montreal Protocol had proved to be 5.5 times as effective as the Kyoto accord was intended to be [but hasn't been] in cutting emissions of global-warming gases” (Bradsher K, NY Times 3/15/07). HCFCs are thousands of time more potent than CO₂ as greenhouse gases, but are released in far smaller quantities.

China is now the leading manufacturer of air-conditioners that rely on HCFC-22. Its use in China and India is growing by 35% yearly. Most building air-conditioning systems in the U.S. also rely on it. No one has agreed on what should replace it.

An accelerated phaseout “could speed up by five years the healing of the ozone layer of the atmosphere,” Bradsher reports. But what evidence of “healing” has occurred to date? “The search for signs of recovery of the ozone layer” (article title, Nature 2006;441:39-45) is confounded by natural phenomena–such as the solar cycle. One must ask how those same phenomena might have been involved in the previous depletion.

The ozone thinning that occurred throughout the 1980s stopped in the early 1990s, too early to credit the Montreal Protocol, especially as stratospheric concentrations of the supposedly offending compounds were still increasing through 1998 (TWTW 9/29/07).

Satellite data from official websites shows no significant global trend in ozone since 1985; The decreasing trend prior to 1985 is limited to high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. The implication is that “stratospheric ozone concentration over most of the world is largely unrelated to ClO concentration and hence, CFC usage. The rapid phaseout of CFCs will be almost irrelevant to ozone concentration and was therefore scientifically unjustified.” What happened ca. 1985 over Antarctica remains unexplained. The imminent Arctic ozone hole predicted over Kennebunkport, ME, which triggered the accelerated CFC phase-out, never happened (S. Baliunas and W. Soon, personal communication 1999).

“The parallels with global warming are striking,” writes Ben Lieberman (TWTW op. cit). But Al Gore's claims of blind animals (despite lack of increase in ground-level UV-B) have simply been replaced by equally dubious assertions about the flooding of Florida.

“Perhaps decades from now, participants in the Kyoto Protocol, the global warming treaty modeled after the Montreal Protocol, will meet and congratulate themselves because none of their scary assertions came true,” Lieberman writes.

But how much damage will have been done to liberty and prosperity–and how many human lives will have been wasted–to Save a Planet that was never endangered?

SHELTER MEDICAL KIT

Richard Besserman, M.D., recommends adding liquid bandage and mupirocin (Bactroban), which is useful against methicillin-resistant Staphylococci (MRSA), to the recommendations for a shelter medical kit (www.ddponline.org/medkit.htm). The kit has not been updated for years–physicians, please review and send your comments! 

SAVE THE DATE!

DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, (520)325-2680, www.oism.org/ddp