LJWorld.com / EPA report details climate risks

Archive for Friday, July 18, 2008

July 18, 2008

Washington, D.C. — Climate change will pose “substantial” threats to human health in the coming decades, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday — issuing its warnings about heat waves, hurricanes and pathogens just days after the agency declined to regulate the pollutants blamed for warming.

In a new report, the EPA found “it is very likely” that more people will die during extremely hot periods in future years — and that the elderly, the poor, and those in inner cities will be most at risk.

Other possible dangers include more powerful hurricanes, shrinking supplies of fresh water in the West, and the increased spread of diseases contracted through food and water, the EPA said.

The strong warnings highlighted the contorted position that the EPA has staked out on climate change. Last week, the agency effectively decided not to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, at least not until after the Bush administration leaves office.

A former EPA official told a House panel this week that senior White House officials and several Cabinet members supported regulating the emissions before the White House changed course and barred the EPA from concluding that they endanger public welfare.

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18 July 2008 at 9:43 a.m.

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gr (Anonymous) says…

“Other possible dangers include more powerful hurricanes”

You mean more than last year?!
Maybe we'll have 6 this year.

“and barred the EPA from concluding that they endanger public welfare.”

Key word here: concluding

“and pathogens”

In other news, the EPA “concludes” pathogens need global warming to survive and is not a threat otherwise.

Pathogens need global warming.
There are pathogens on Peppers.
Therefore we “conclude”, there must be global warming.

We also conclude a few degrees increase will kill humans who have survived for 1000s of years. Never mind humans live in the tropics at prolonged temperatures and those temperatures aren't affected.
18 July 2008 at 9:58 a.m.

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snap_pop_no_crackle (Anonymous) says…

In other news:
“”Considerable presence” of skeptics

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”…
…The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”
In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.” ”

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?ne…