Warm or cold? Who's crazy now?

One of the strangest things about the success of the 'climate change' hoax is they way the perpetrators have so successfully got so many afraid of warmth. Whilst successful Americans have for generations fled their New Yorks and their Seattles for the Florida beaches, and Australian Melbournians and Sydneysiders have made the Queensland Gold Coast one of the fastest growing regions in the country, those same people have obediently lined up to condemn and to fear almost unmeasurably small warming trends in world climate. They would rather have their power bills and their food bills doubled, and to deny the benefits of extra food for the poor and for wildlife from enhanced atmospheric carbon nutrient.

Is it really that easy to stampede human beings into cutting their own throats?

Apparently so. The city-based environmentalists imagine, I suppose quite genuinely, that they are the knights in shining armour riding to save the planet.  I put this down to a complete lack of actual familiarity with the real processes of life that keep plants and animals alive - and of which we humans are not exempt. But here are a few things I noticed this week that should make sense even to people trapped in ignorance of the cycle of life.

From: Extinction (Real-World Observations - Animals: Birds) -- Summary

Climate alarmists generally characterize global warming as detrimental for most of the planet's animals, including birds, even suggesting that rising temperatures could drive many of them to extinction. However, when contemplating the special abilities of the winged creatures (like their ability to fly), one would think it would not be much of a problem for them to compensate for whatever degree of stress a temperature increase might impose upon them by merely moving to more hospitable living quarters, or to actually take advantage of whatever new opportunities global warming might present for them. ... Thomas and Lennon (1999) analyzed the distributions of British birds over a 20-year period of global warming, looking for climate-induced changes in their breeding ranges. In doing so, they found that the northern margins of southerly species' breeding ranges shifted northward by an average of 19 km from 1970 to 1990; while the southern margins of northerly species' breeding ranges shifted, in the mean, not at all, which finding was stated by them to be similar to results obtained for European butterflies, "for which the northern margins have expanded more than the southern margins have retracted." Consequently, both British birds and European butterflies have expanded their ranges in the face of global warming, which is clearly a positive response that makes extinction much less of a possibility than it was before the warming. ...

... [In Finland] southern species experienced a mean poleward advancement of their northern range boundaries of 18.8 km over the 12-year period. However, the southern range boundaries of the northern species remained essentially unaltered. Noting that similar results had been obtained for birds in the United Kingdom (Thomas and Lennon, 1999) and other species (primarily butterflies) elsewhere (Parmesan, 1996; Parmesan et al., 1999), Brommer thus concluded that "in general, for northern hemisphere species, southerly range margins of species are less responsive to climate change than the northerly margins," demonstrating once again that the ranges of birds (and possibly other animals) in a warming world will likely increase in size, as their northern range boundaries expand poleward and upward while their southern range boundaries remain largely unaltered, which should render them less subject to extinction than they are currently or than they have been in the past. ...

...great harm to earth's many bird species will likely be caused by man's destruction of natural ecosystems -- in order to use the land and water resources that have historically sustained those ecosystems for the growing of food crops (needed to sustain our growing numbers) and biofuels (wrongly believed to be effective in fighting rising temperatures) -- and this anthropogenic phenomenon will be most strongly expressed in "economically emerging tropical countries" that can least afford to bear the brunt of its catastrophic negative consequences.

In other words, warmth helps birds, but humans' stupid fear of warmth leads us to starve crops of CO2 (meaning we need more area for the same food production, and therefore extend the area of farmland into places previously used for wildlife), and to convert land needed for foodbowls into producers of biofuels, which do nothing (not even change the world temperature) except make city-based greens feel good. (Sorry if that's you, but this business is now too urgent to worry about your hurt feelings.)

Then again from co2science: Extreme Heat vs. Extreme Cold: Which is the Greatest Killer?

Hypocrisy in high places is nothing new; but the extent to which it pervades the Climategate Culture - which gave us the hockeystick history of 20th-century global warming - knows no bounds.

Hard on the heels of recent revelations of the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to the IPCC's contending that the current level of earth's warmth is the most extreme of the past millennium, we are being told by Associated Press "science" writer Seth Borenstein (25 November 2009) that "slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives." And in doing so, he quotes U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as saying that "relying on fossil fuels leads to unhealthy lifestyles, increasing our chances for getting sick and in some cases takes years from our lives."

Well, if you're talking about "cook stoves that burn dung, charcoal and other polluting fuels in the developing world," as Seth Borenstein reports others are doing in producing their prognoses for the future, you're probably right. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the proper usage of coal, gas and oil. In fact, any warming that might result from the burning of those fuels would likely lead to a significant lengthening of human life.

In an impressive study recently published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, for example, Deschenes and Moretti (2009) analyze the relationship between weather and mortality, based on "data that include the universe of deaths in the United States over the period 1972-1988," wherein they "match each death to weather conditions on the day of death and in the county of occurrence," which "high-frequency data and the fine geographical detail," as they write, allow them "to estimate with precision the effect of cold and hot temperature shocks on mortality, as well as the dynamics of such effects," most notably, the existence or non-existence of a "harvesting effect," whereby the temperature-induced deaths either are or are not subsequently followed by a drop in the normal death rate, which could either fully or partially compensate for the prior extreme temperature-induced deaths. ...

The two researchers say their results "point to widely different impacts of cold and hot temperatures on mortality." In the later case, they discovered that "hot temperature shocks are indeed associated with a large and immediate spike in mortality in the days of the heat wave," but that "almost all of this excess mortality is explained by near-term displacement," so that "in the weeks that follow a heat wave, we find a marked decline in mortality hazard, which completely offsets the increase during the days of the heat wave," such that "there is virtually no lasting impact of heat waves on mortality [italics added]."

In the case of cold temperature days, they also found "an immediate spike in mortality in the days of the cold wave," but they report that "there is no offsetting decline in the weeks that follow," so that "the cumulative effect of one day of extreme cold temperature during a thirty-day window is an increase in daily mortality by as much as 10% [italics added]." In addition, they say that "this impact of cold weather on mortality is significantly larger for females than for males," but that "for both genders, the effect is mostly attributable to increased mortality due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases." ...

...they estimate that "the average person who died because of cold temperature exposure lost in excess of ten years of potential life [italics added]," whereas the average person who died because of hot temperature exposure likely lost no more than a few days or weeks of life. Hence, it is clear that climate-alarmist concerns about temperature-related deaths are wildly misplaced, and that halting global warming - if it could ever be done - would lead to more thermal-related deaths, because continued warming, which is predicted to be greatest in earth's coldest regions, would lead to fewer such fatalities.

One thing that anyone 'new' to this debate needs to come to grips with (and fast, seeing as all our standards of living, and the very lives of the poorest of us, are about to be sacrificed on the altar of the climate religion) is simply that whatever happens (and in an entire planet with billions of people and even more plants and animals, that means lots of things happening all the time), there will always be some things happening that are unusual, 'unprecedented', startling, or even worrying. But the warming hoaxsters simply take whatever happens and blame it on 'climate change'. Some people died of heat stroke? Blame global warming. Some people died of cold? Blame it on 'climate change' - and hope you are too stupid or too careless to notice that this is merely their alternative term for warming. That's how the hoax works.

Cold is deadlier than warmth. A kilometer of ice over New York guarantees no life in New York (and that is what happens regular as clockwork each time the planet returns to the ice age). But tropical temperatures in New York (not going to happen, but even if it did) will apparently merely entice the emigres back from Florida.