Wednesday, April 06, 2016


Climate change threatens hearts, lungs but also brains, says US study

I sometimes feel like I am the boy who declared that the emperor had no clothes.  Nearly every day I find myself pointing out that a claim is GLARINGLY wrong.

The huge and fancy report by many authors described below is another example.  It is just solid BS.  It ignored the basic truth that cold is a lot more fatal than warmth, which is why hospitals struggle more in winter.  So warming should REDUCE illness.

After that bad start they makes all sorts of links between global warming and other things that really ARE bad for you -- such as air polltion -- without providing any substantial evidence of such a link.  And the link asserted can be the opposite of the truth  -- such as the threat of more extreme weather events.  That the incidence of extreme weather events has in fact been declining for a century bothers them not a bit.

They are arrant liars and crooks.  Don't they have a conscience?  Old-fashioned of me to think they should, I guess


Climate change can be expected to boost the number of annual premature deaths from heat waves in coming decades and to increase mental health problems from extreme weather like hurricanes and floods, a US study suggests.

"I don't know that we've seen something like this before, where we have a force that has such a multitude of effects," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told reporters at the White House about the study.

"There's not one single source that we can target with climate change, there are multiple paths that we have to address."

Heat waves were estimated to cause 670 to 1,300 US deaths annually in recent years.

Premature US deaths from heat waves can be expected to rise more than 27,000 per year by 2100, from a 1990 baseline, one scenario in the study said. The rise outpaced projected decreases in deaths from extreme cold.

Extreme heat can cause more forest fires and increase pollen counts and the resulting poor air quality threatens people with asthma and other lung conditions.

The report said poor air quality will likely lead to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, hospital visits, and acute respiratory illness each year by 2030.

Climate change also threatens mental health, the study found. Post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and general anxiety can all result in places that suffer extreme weather linked to climate change, such as hurricanes and floods. More study needs to be done on assessing the risks to mental health, it said.

The peer-reviewed study by eight federal agencies can be found here

Cases of mosquito and tick-borne diseases can also be expected to increase, though the study, completed over three years, did not look at whether locally-transmitted Zika virus cases would be more likely to hit the United States.

President Barack Obama's administration has taken steps to cut carbon emissions by speeding a switch from coal and oil to cleaner energy sources.

In February, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the White House's climate ambitions by putting a hold Obama's plan to cut emissions from power plants. Administration officials say the plan is on safe legal footing.

John Holdren, Obama's senior science adviser, said steps the world agreed to in Paris last year to curb emissions through 2030 can help fight the risks to health.

"We will need a big encore after 2030 ... in order to avoid the bulk of the worst impacts described in this report," he said.

SOURCE  





Quantification of the Diminishing Earth’s Magnetic Dipole Intensity and Geomagnetic Activity as the Causal Source for Global Warming within the Oceans and Atmosphere

David A. E. Vares et al.

ABSTRACT

Quantitative analyses of actual measurements rather than modeling have shown that “global warming” has been heterogeneous over the surface of the planet and temporally non-linear. Residual regression analyses by Soares (2010) indicated increments of increased temperature precede increments of CO2 increase. The remarkably strong negative correlation (r = −0.99) between the earth’s magnetic dipole moment values and global CO2-temperature indicators over the last ~30 years is sufficient to be considered causal if contributing energies were within the same order of magnitude. Quantitative convergence between the energies lost by the diminishing averaged geo- magnetic field strength and energies gained within the ocean-atmosphere interface satisfy the measured values for increased global temperature and CO2 release from sea water. The pivotal variable is the optimal temporal unit employed to estimate the total energies available for physical-chemical reactions. The positive drift in averaged amplitude of geomagnetic activity over the last 100 years augmented this process. Contributions from annual CO2 from volcanism and shifts in averaged geomagnetic activity, lagged years before the measured global temperature-CO2 values, are moderating variables for smaller amplitude perturbations. These results indicated that the increase in CO2 and global temperatures are primarily caused by major geophysical factors, particularly the diminishing total geomagnetic field strength and increased geomagnetic activity, but not by human activities. Strategies for adapting to climate change because of these powerful variables may differ from those that assume exclusive anthropomorphic causes.

International Journal of Geosciences. Vol.07 No.01(2016), Article ID: 63199,13 pages 10.4236/ijg.2016.71007





After brief pause, China rushes to build more nuclear power plants

China briefly halted approval of new nuclear power plants as it reviewed safety standards in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, but is now deeply embracing the energy source.

The country is keen to tap cleaner power to fuel its power-hungry economy in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment

The nation gets about 2 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power and aimed to raise the level to 6 per cent by 2020. The country is operating 30 plants with a capacity of 26.9GW and another 24 are under construction. They will add another 28.8GW when they come online.

The nation’s latest five-year plan calls for a dramatic increase non-fossil fuel energy sources, in part by accelerating development of coastal nuclear power plants by 2020 to 58GW.

The head of the China Atomic Energy Authority, Xu Dazhe, was quoted recently by Xinhua as saying the country needed to speed up its nuclear power development while improving safety standards for the industry.

China General Nuclear Power and rival China National Nuclear plan to build four more reactors on mainland

President Xi Jinping detailed China’s nuclear security policies at an international conference in 2014. He said the nation would give top priority to the peaceful use of nuclear energy while managing nuclear materials and facilities by the highest standard. “China has maintained a good record of nuclear security in the past 50 years and more,” he said. Xi pledged to enhance the government’s regulatory capacity, increase investment in technology and talent while strengthening nuclear security capability.

SOURCE  





Europe’s Global Warming Czar Ensnared In ‘Panama Papers’ Scandal

More evidence that the global warming scare can be very lucrative

European Union climate and energy commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete has been ensnared in the controversy surrounding the newly-released “Panama Papers,” which detail how the global warming czar’s wife invested in a shady Panama-based law firm.

Cañete’s wife, Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont, reportedly was “empowered to approve transactions of Rinconada Investments Group SA, a Panama company registered in 2005 which was in existence while her husband Miguel Arias Cañete held public positions in Spain and the European Union,” according to The Spain Report.

“She was listed as authorized signatory together with members of her Spanish aristocratic Domecq family. Six siblings were also connected to Rinconada Investments Group,” TSP noted, citing reports by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Documents showing Solís-Beaumont’s involvement with RIG were part of 11.5 million leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm obtained by ICIJ. The so-called “Panama Papers” detail hundreds of shell companies used by politicians and executives to hide their wealth and possibly engage in shady deals.

The papers also expose “the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies,” according to ICIJ.

“The leak also provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world,” the news group reported.

The papers reveal that Cañete’s wife involved with one such financial institution that may have been used to hide the financial dealings of public officials — though ICIJ noted there are legitimate reasons to hold money in an offshore company.

Solís-Beaumont’s lawyer told ICIJ “she had declared all of her income and assets to Spanish tax authorities” and noted “Rinconada is not active and that [Solís-Beaumont] has no power or attorney and is not “an authorized signatory for the company.”

Cañete’s spokesman said “since his 1978 marriage to Domecq Beaumont that each spouses’ assets at the time of the marriage and after that ‘belong and are administered separately, according to Spain’s Civil Code.’” The spokesman also said “the company had no activity for several years before he took office as a member of the European Parliament.”

What’s more, though, is ICIJ reports Cañete wife and her family benefited from government bull breeding subsidies while her husband was in office.

“He urged expansion of EU agriculture subsidies to cover bull breeding,” ICIJ reports. “During his time in the ministry, his wife’s world-renowned Jandilla bull operations, managed by their two sons, Pablo and Juan Pedro, and co-owned by her siblings, received well over $1 million in farm subsidies. Her other farm, forestry and winery businesses also received EU subsidies.”

SOURCE  

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