Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Global warming effect on Mortality

I think work like this on Global warming gives it a bad name.
Now at first glance you probably say - what is the problem? It is in a good magazine so it must be well researched and I dont have any data to prove them wrong BUT al the same I am almost certain it is wrong.
Why?
Note there ae NO countries that have a drop in expected mortality (ie a negitive growth in mortality per million) they didnt even include a marker for the possibility.
Now think logicaly - if you live in a very cold country like finland and most people die at around 3 am (cold) in the winter months (cold) then if global warming raises the temperature by a few degrees there will be a huge drop in deaths over that period.

Clearly what this work has done is count all the begitive impacts but none of the positive ones. Now I dont argue that the net effect is more likely than not negitive (within a generation or two time frame) but it is ridiculous to say that it will be only negitive for all countries. Any change has positive and negitive effects and if oyu only count the negitive effects it is trivial that you get a map that shows only negitive effects.

In fact it is very arbitrary to seperate out effects into negitive and positive things anyway

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