The Prospect of Mass Death from Global Warming Forces Us To Ask Important Questions About Who We Are
The 3500 deaths of heat that occurred in Pakistan and India in the summer of 2015 are a terrifying harbinger of what our world will be like by the end of the century if our civilization fails to take effective action to mitigate global warming.
Maps that show increasing temperatures have traditionally served to show what’s happening here, though scientists are more concerned about the so-called “wet-bulb” reading, i.e., the temperature at which a certain volume of air is cooled by the evaporation of the water it contains until it reaches 100% relative humidity. This is important because of the mechanics by which human beings cool themselves in hot surroundings, i.e., by the evaporation of sweat. When the air surrounding the person cannot hold more moisture, this process ceases to function, and, if the temperature is above 95 degrees F the person must either move to cooler surroundings or die. The map here presents the most probable scenario re: the rise in the wet-bulb temperatures.
OK, so what about these questions that we need to ask ourselves? Well, try this one on for size: How much do we care about the mass suffering and death in other parts of the world? It appears as though the answer is this: not too much.
Imagine that the president of the United States told the world, despite the protestations of the planet’s scientific community, that global warming is a hoax..and that he did his best to defang the EPA, rendering it powerless to do anything about this deadly situation. That’s easy enough to do; in fact, that’s exactly what we have here. But now imagine that, in the context of this rapidly anti-science behavior, that 3500 corn farmers had perished from the heat in Iowa that summer. That you actually can’t do, because such a scenario would be impossible in the U.S., largely because air-conditioning is ubiquitous in wealthy countries like ours.
The only difference between this fictitious scenario in Iowa and what’s happening in Asia right now is a geological and geopolitical accident. The dead lived 10,000 miles from Iowa, they had dark skin, a different language, practiced different customs and a religion we consider foreign (and sinister), ate strange foods, and lived mostly in poverty. We’re largely indifferent to the fact that the surviving members of these people’s families are baking like so many pieces of chicken in the ever-warming oven of the Asian summers.
Craig,
Do you ever wonder why so many otherwise well disposed environmentally conscious people are turned off by such an absurdly alarmist article as the one you just posted ?
Oh, they might not take to the streets in protest, or even answer their feelings to pollsters for fear of being berated, bullied and treated with derision by rabid alarmist advocates and their left wing acolytes, no, they just register their disapproval at the ballot box and as consumers !
Craig, you’re an intelligent well meaning sort of guy, but did you ever stop, take time to actually check out the veracity of your information.
I’ll bet you didn’t !
As long as any nonsense supports you sense of ‘outrage’, you’ll just buy into it, without any question and refuse to entertain the possibility of you being wrong.
The population of India and Pakistan is a little over 1.6 billion.
The population of UK is only 61 million, yet each year somewhere between 600 and 750 people die during heat waves.
The US EPA records the highest number of heat related deaths as 1.8 per million. About the same proportion as Pakistan and India !
So for from being sensational, the figure for Pakistan and India is astonishingly low ! At 10 times that number it would still be very small, when you consider the same source cites France as losing 10,000 annually !
So India and Pakistan are doing pretty well, despite a huge percentage of the population Most of these people live close to, or under the poverty line. India and Pakistan have more people dying in car accidents !
In fact the hysteria, is just that, sensationalized stories based on really dubious data and unsubstantiated urban myths.
No matter how emotive, and how thickly you apply the guilt factor, your figures just don’t add up!
,,,and you wonder why people are turning away in droves.
You sure are a busy little beaver. 🙂
If you Google “climate change uninhabitable earth” and read a few of the 293,000 articles on the subject, you’ll see that there is a great deal of validity to the idea that parts of our planet are in fact becoming uninhabitable.
Btw, people don’t seem to turning away in droves, or even in drips. The percentage curve of self-described environmentalists is fairly flat over the last 15 years. Of course, it was higher before the climate change disinformation campaigns started.
Craig,
Just because the same inaccurate information is repeated over and over, doesn’t make it more valid !
More importantly, I notice you can’t even substantiate your assertion, or bring yourself to acknowledge that the report is plainly absurd !
That’s kinds sad, it shows the sort of thinking that’s moved from scientific enquiry to “faith” based propaganda. You are beginning to accept all sorts of patently disingenuous information simply because you desperately want it to be true, and no longer test the validity.
Craig, it’s not “disinformation” to challenge any assertion, nor is it “hearsay” ! You used to think it was part of being intellectually honest.
People are still ‘environmentalists’, just not your sort of environmentalists ! The big change has come about because people who thought they were involved in scientific inquiry about the environment found to their dismay, they were being dragooned into a sort of political/ideological/religion.
Naturally, they lost interest, not in the environment, but in the sort of easily disproved nonsense advocated by “true believers”.
This sort of behaviour has made it so much harder for genuine, moderate environmentalists to raise genuine awareness and acceptance for practical projects. It’s also made investment and development more difficult.
Mass deaths?! Good greif , did you ever stop to think for just one moment what a tiny percentage 3500 is in 1.6 billion ? Did you even bother to look up the historical records to see that in 1846 in the Punjab alone over 6,000 perished as a result of heat ?(and that was a time when only a fraction of deaths were reported).
I employ some very bright young (and not so young) researchers and analysts. The first thing we teach, and continue to reinforce, is to challenge every assumption and all information. Take nothing as gospel or proven, until carefully evaluated and subjected to rigorous examination.
“Just because one donkey starts braying and all his fellow donkeys take up the chorus, doesn’t stop them being donkeys !” { Nero Wolfe }
We still make mistakes and errors. We don’t always get it right, but at least we know where we went wrong and why.
Craig,
One interesting fact about the great subcontinent.
After 300 years of colonial rule (Raj)Great Britain granted independence to India in 1948. At that time a survey was undertaken to find out hows ordinary people felt about the British leaving. Astonishingly, 28 percent of Indians and 26% of Pakistani’s were unaware the British had arrived !
A Indian government survey conducted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of independence in 1998, found that nearly 90% of Indians wished the British had never left !
I’m not sure what that tells more about, people or surveys:)