IPCC co-founder claims WHO’s report which was used at the UN climate summit was fundamentally flawed and the estimated mortality rates were greatly exaggerated

  Dr. Indur Goklany is a co-founder of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as a former United States adviser on global warming.

  He has released a new report entitled Unhealthy Exaggeration: the WHO Report on Climate Change which, as you have probably already guessed by the title, refutes the World Health Organization’s report which was used at the latest United Nations climate summit.

  He claims the reports was FUNDAMENTALLY flawed and the mortality rates estimated by WHO were greatly exaggerated, here is the summary of the report.

In the run-up to the UN climate summit in September 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) released, with much fanfare, a study that purported to show that global warming will exacerbate undernutrition (hunger), malaria, dengue, excessive heat and coastal flooding and thereby cause 250,000 additional deaths annually between 2030 and 2050. This study, however, is fundamentally flawed.

Firstly, it uses climate model results that have been shown to run at least three times hotter than empirical reality (0.15◦C vs 0.04◦C per decade, respectively), despite using 27% lower greenhouse gas forcing.

Secondly, it ignores the fact that people and societies are not potted plants; that they will actually take steps to reduce, if not nullify, real or perceived threats to their life, limb and well-being. Thus, if the seas rise around them, heatwaves become more prevalent, or malaria, diarrhoeal disease and hunger spread, they will undertake adaptation measures to protect themselves and reduce, if not eliminate, the adverse consequences. This is not a novel concept. Societies have been doing just this for as long as such threats have been around, and over time and as technology has advanced they have gotten better at it. Moreover, as people have become wealthier, these technologies have become more affordable. Consequently, global mortality rates from malaria and extreme weather events, for instance, have been reduced at least five-fold in the past 60 years.

 Yet, the WHO study assumes, explicitly or implicitly, that in the future the most vulnerable populations – low income countries in Africa, Europe, southeast Asia and the western Pacific – will not similarly avail themselves of technology or take any commonsense steps to protect themselves. This is despite many suitable measures already existing – adapting to sea level rise for example
– while others are already at the prototype stage and are being further researched and developed: early-warning systems for heatwaves or the spread of malaria or steps to improve sanitation, hygiene or the safety of drinking water.

Finally, the WHO report assumes, erroneously, if the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report is to be believed, that carbon dioxide levels above 369 ppm –today we are at 400 ppm and may hit 650 ppm if the scenario used by the WHO is valid – will have no effect on crop yields. Therefore, even if one assumes that the relationships between climatic variables and mortality used by the WHO study are valid, the methodologies and assumptions used by WHO inevitably exaggerate future mortality increases attributable to global warming, perhaps several-fold.

  So the basic premise of the report was fundamentally flawed and the fear-mongering aspect of the report, the estimated increased mortality rate, was exaggerated several-fold. This of course calls into question the validity of the entire report as well as the premise behind the whole global warming movement.

  I guess we now know why Dr. Indur Goklany is a former adviser to the United States on global warming…