The New Menace: Global Warming Will Give You HIV
It looks like the Cult of Global Warming is racheting up the panic factor another notch. Jammie Wearing Fool brings us the story from Down Under where a new fear has been hurled at us. Global Warming is going to give us all HIV!
Ace is asking what new hell this is. Well, it’s the new hell of a group of people who have made almost no headway at all in public opinion in the last 19 years despite having the uncritical and fawning attention of the worldwide media for nearly the entire time.
The best bits of the article follow below the jump. Read on. There are a couple real laughers there.
A leading professor of health and human rights, Daniel Tarantola, has cautioned that global warming will indirectly make citizens of developing countries even more vulnerable to death and severe ill health from HIV/AIDS.
“It was clear soon after the emergence of the HIV epidemic that discrimination, gender inequality and lack of access to essential services have made some populations more vulnerable than others,” said Prof Tarantola, of the University of NSW.
Those problems had not gone away, he said, and today extra threats were lurking on the horizon “as the global economic situation deteriorates, food scarcity worsens and climate change begins to affect those who were already dependent on survival economies”.
“Climate change will trigger a chain of events which is likely to increase the stress on society and result in higher vulnerability to diseases including HIV,” said Prof Tarantola, due to address an HIV forum in Sydney tonight.
Prominent HIV scientist Professor David Cooper, director of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, agreed environmental change would have a negative impact on HIV sufferers.
“Climate change will lead to food scarcity and poorer nutrition, putting people with perilous immune systems at more risk of dying of HIV, as well as contracting and transmitting new and unusual infections,” Prof Cooper said.
Hmm…food scarcity you say? Like the food scarcity and poorer nutrition that’s happening right now thanks to unjustified and half-baked solutions to a perceived global warming problem? How many more people in Haiti from eating dirt cakes because they can’t get the basic staple food they need to live thanks to our misguided biofuels policies?
For scientists, these guys are not terribly on the ball. Let’s say the earth gets warmer. Here’s what that really means: more of the Earth will be like Brazil and less of it will be like Siberia. Do you think we’ll have trouble growing food if more of the planet is like the place with the most biodiversity? The thing that most climate change freaks refuse to get is that the real issue with warmer temperatures isn’t heat. It’s humidity. A place that’s wet isn’t going to be inhospitable to life if it gets warmer. Dry places will. But most of our land is pretty wet as it is. There are places that are not, and they’re not going to grow any more food than they do now. We’re not going to lose a lot if Africa or Siberia produces less food. But the places that do grow our food – Europe, China, Canada, America, the Tropics – aren’t going to suddenly stop if it gets warmer. In fact, they’ll likely be able to grow more food because the warm season will be longer, which means that they might be able to sneak in another crop once in a while.
More warmth in a moist environment, by the way, means more humidity, which means more rainfaill, which means more replenishment of the aquifers, which means fewer droughts. So the “we’re all going to die of lack of water” is a non-issue with me as well.
There’s one more good one in the article I wanted to share, from the same guy who gave the last quote.
“And this would effect Australia too, because these infections could potentially spread. Just look at the horror that SARS and avian flu have caused.”
Umm…wait. Does this guy really expect me to take him seriously? Outside of China, SARS and the avian flu were hardly “horrors”. The death toll from each of them never hit more than 100 in any other country. That doesn’t constitute a “horror” unless you’re Howard Hughes.
But look at what he’s really saying. We have to bend our entire will and purpose to combatting global warming because if we don’t, we could die of a “new and unusual” disease. He overlooks the fact that bending more of our will toward growing more and better food would solve that problem pretty quickly. So would pushing ourselves to researching the avenues from where a “new and unusual” disease might come. Those efforts would help people right now. Poor children wouldn’t die right now if we diverted the attention we’re paying to Chicken Littles like these to finding ways to making Third World nations self-sufficient.
Ah but those ways don’t put money in the pockets of “[a] leading professor of health and human rights” do they? They don’t drive funding to the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research. Global warming, though, is a real moneymaker.
And that, friends, is the real issue here: Cold hard cash going to the folks who summon the bogeyman the most often. It’s a shame that people have to die so these folks can make a few more bucks peddling their policy snake oil.
Other Posts of Interest:
Category: Oh the Climate, It is A-Changin'
J: "We’re not going to lose a lot if Africa or Siberia produces less food."
Tell that to the Africans.
We've been expecting this nonsense for a while. You're right that we'd have to worry less about global warming if we did more to tackle it effectively. We also wouldn't have to worry about the link between global warming and HIV if we spent our time and energy preventing HIV (which is, after all, an eminently preventable disease spread through needles and unprotected sex) instead of finding new, impossible-to-tackle reasons to explain our failure.
Ms. Pisani, thank you for your comment. I think you are exactly right. The easiest way to cure a disease is to cure a disease, right?
I've also heard a little bit of buzz about your book. I hope to add it to library soon and, if I can do it in a reasonable amount of time, blog a bit about it as well. Then again, I'm way behind on my reading!
sounds like more poop to scoop
[...] http://www.sundriesshack.com/?p=4435Prominent HIV scientist Professor David Cooper, director of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, agreed environmental change would have a negative impact on HIV sufferers. “Climate change will lead to food … [...]