“In the comments, eagle-eyed Mark Bahner observes that the absolute numbers of deaths in the GHF report are exactly twice the number from the 2003 WHO report. Why? Mark hypothesizes that the GHF applied the Munich Re disaster “adjustment” to the health effects losses. If so, then wow. But when you are non-empirical, I guess you can do that sort of thing”

I kind of think that Mark Bahner is being as speculative as anyone here. The interesting meat in the Pielke post, is the difficulty of coming up with such figures, as climate change is generally an indirect, rather than a direct cause of mortality – not to mention that in a chaotic system such as the climate, it is meaningless to attempt to distinguish between weather events caused by climate change and those that would happen anyway. I would be very interested in hearing the WHO researchers reasons for their estimates of the proportion of different types of mortality where climate change is an indirect causal factor – Pielke seems to think that they discovered them on the back of a fag packet, but I’m withholding judgement.

Incidentally, Pielke’s sourcewatch page is interesting, especially the article discussion. He is listed as a political scientist, not a climate specialist, or as having any authority in matters of public health. He has crossed swords with the editor over his listing, and seems to have over-represented the amount of peer-reviewed articles he has published. His father is also listed as a noted climate change sceptic. So far, so ad hominem – I mention it only to point out that Pielke is not a disinterested authority who has simply discovered egregious practices in the GHF’s calculations.

Anyhoo – this stuff is classic GW denial – sniping at individual elements, in the hope of distracting attention away from a larger point. Let’s summarise the two significant points here. Firstly, climate change will kill people by increasing mortality in all the areas highlighted by the WHO (whose practices were then followed by the GHF and Save the Children – target of Pielke’s ire). Secondly that as average temperatures rise, its role as a causal factor will increase. However shoddy the GHF has been, these two points are hardly challenged by their practices. You could argue, as Pielke does, that if we cannot come up with certain figures, we shouldn’t be discussing figures at all, but I find arguments of that sort rather uncompelling. When you strip away much of the ornamentation, they tend to be fig-leafs for a desperate desire to put off change until some indeterminate point in the future when we’re all cooked, but at least we agree on why.

Waving the 607,000 deaths around as an excuse for inaction on climate change is nonsense, firstly because the deaths partially caused by climate change will rise in the future, but our window of effective action may be closed by the time it becomes the most significant factor. Secondly – did I miss the meeting where we decided we are only morally obliged to tackle the most severe preventable global health problems, one-by-one in strict sequence, in descending order of magnitude? I find the spectre of libertarians pretending to care about the ravages of global poverty as a means of dissembling about the need for action on climate change deeply repugnant.

And actually, I have rather more of an idea about the temperature reconstruction than you seem to. Granted, much of it is taken from RealClimate, who also oblige with a long series of 10 different Hockey Stick graphs without your precious Yamal tree ring data. They all bear a striking similarity to the original – the point being that if all your data is forming into patterns, and the patterns all seem to agree with each other….then probably the data is telling you something. You have multiple other proxies to choose from, and they all point to the Yamal divergence being an anomaly. To inflate that into the claim that the “proxies don’t accurately reflect late 20th C temperature” shows what the issue is here, and I’m afraid the problem is not in the science.

“As discovered by Mark Bahner, and reported on Roger Pielke Jr’s blog, the GHF took these [the WHOs] statistics and doubled them.”

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/11/dead-babies-conscripts-in-the-climate-war.html

There’s much more there including the 607,000 dying each year from inactivity.

As for your use of the temperature reconstruction, you cleary have no idea except for what you’re scraping from RealClimate. This curve is the subject of the “hide the decline” quote as you can see if you look to the right hand side of the curve where lines get truncated. If the proxies don’t accurately reflect late 20th C temperature, then why should they be trusted for the whole of the last 1000 years?

I stayed away from RealClimate for ages because I found it impenetrable for ages, which is a shame. You need to get to work with the search function, as most of the posts assume a lot of knowledge from the beginning, so you need to find the most introductory post on the subject you’re interested in. Perseverance pays off though – it’s an amazing resource.

I notice there’s a copyright notice at the bottom of this page, too. What’s all that about?

Oh the embarrassment. I rather peevishly shot myself in the foot there. It was a feature of the WordPress theme that I didn’t really notice. Gone now, and I am suitably chastened. I do feel that ‘all rights reserved’ isn’t really in the spirit of blogging though, do you not?

Anyway, to substantive matters. I would be very glad for you to post an edited version on your site. I stand by my point that making the leap from bitching about the unpredictability of weather to harbouring doubts about climate science is daft. I’ve had a look through the longer DK article, and there’s still nothing of substance (though I’m a sucker for flow-charts too). The crux of his argument is here:

The Harry Read Me file shows just how badly knackered the HadCRUT temperature series really is. HADCRUT is one of a tiny number of recognised (“peer reviewed” even?) global temperature sources. All of them feed off each other and the people implicated in the emails are linked to some of the others. RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt, for example, is a protege of the team, is extensively mentioned in the audit trail of shame and works for NASA’s GISS – one of the other of this tiny number of recognised (“peer reviewed” even?) global temperature sources.

In other words, because all of the scientists have professional links and their work is informed by each other, they must be in league together in a great global conspiracy to distort global temperature records. This is Dan Brown fiction, not scientific critique. Incidentally, as RealClimate points out here, the data in the ‘Harry Read Me’ file is not the HadCRUT data, so actually the PG’s whole argument is shot. None of the people engaged in talking up ‘climategate’ are remotely interested in actually finding out the scientific context, or attempting to engage with the data, they just want to muddy the waters enough to prevent action.

The main thrust of my argument is that to stimulate ‘debate’ about the science at this juncture places you somewhere on a continuum between irresponsibility, and extreme malevolence. That isn’t an attack on anyone’s freedom of speech, or to shut up people who have uncomfortable truths to articulate, honestly. For over a decade proper political action onthis issue has, particularly in the US, been prevented by a vocal and well funded lobby whose only purpose has been to portray the science as less fixed than it actually is. They make no attempt to really engage with the science holistically, only to snipe at little bits of it by distortion, outright lies and highlighting the few remaining areas where there are uncertainties.

Obviously it is bad democracy to blindly trust the scientific authorities to know what’s best for us, but if people want to debate the issue, I think they really need to put in the hard graft necessary to understand and critique the science in a meaningful manner. Unfortunately, for a complex issue such as this, the debate will necessarily be over the heads of most people, unless we’re going to have a very radical mass education programme right now.

The stakes are high, and the scientific opinion has come down squarely on one side – those of us who have better things to do with our lives than taking a crash course in climate science ought to trust them. Climategate was a well-timed and malicious leak with the most damming items highlighted in an attempt to undermine that trust. There are a few shocking things in there, but not enough to undermine an entire scientific discipline, and if you cleave to that opinion, you are being played. Simple as that.

Sure the policies so far announced will not make enough of a difference, but we need to do more, not less. In any case, surely the fact that the oil is going to run out means that we need to de-carbonise our economy anyway? For me doing it now and possibly saving the environment into the bargain is a no-brainer.

It seems to me that what you want is a global revolution

It’s a bit more complicated than that, and littered with caveats about non-violence and consent, but for our purposes, I’d settle for meaningful (inter) governmental action. I harbour serious doubts about the ability of liberal capitalism to deliver a fully sustainable zero-carbon economy, because of the necessary element of continued material growth – but I feel this is an issue for a different post. We don’t have the luxury of holding out for the perfect political system, what we need is for the existing political authorities to take action to cut carbon emissions now. While that process is beginning, we can continue to debate what our society should look like in 2050, given what the science tells us about the emissions cuts we need to make.

There is a huge issue of justice here, in that the industrialised world has primary responsibility for cumulative historical emissions, and that people living marginal lives in the developing world will mainly suffer the consequences, at least in the beginning. To decide that we should do nothing because our political system is not up to the job, or because cuts are politically unpalatable is morally indefensible. Anyhooo – I’m straying from my subject. Would you like me to edit the version of this for you, or are you happy to take it? It’s creative commons now, so you can

Your substantive points are well made. I’m not seeking to promote any particular view; I ran the PG post – which was a summary of his views, which are set out in greater detail and with supporting documentation at the linked DK article, because I knew it would encourage debate. And it did, so I put it down as a great success. There’s a gap between “this is what the science is saying” and “this is what we have to do” that is the province of politics, not science, and since it’s not at all clear that the policies so far announced would make a huge difference, there’s a case for saying that it would be money not well spent. It seems to me that what you want is a global revolution. At Copenhagen, China and India made it quite clear that they weren’t going to go along with the agenda laid down by European politicians (which you probably think is far too little anyway) – in which case what the science says is less important than the question of what is to be done, given that.

I would be happy to run an edited version (ie with the opening crap taken out) of this piece, which deserves far more readers than it’s likely to get here.