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Andrew Bolt gets a perfect score on global warming

By Tim Lambert - posted Thursday, 18 January 2007


In fact, America has this year had fewer hurricanes than usual. And most hurricane experts agree with Dr Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Centre, who says, "there has been no change in the number and intensity of (the strongest) hurricanes around the world in the last 15 years".

This one is wrong. Most hurricane experts don't agree with Landsea on this point. Gavin Schmidt summarises:

Basically, although everyone acknowledges that there are data problems early in the record, it seems clear that there has been a global rise of the most intense hurricanes over the last 30 years and the most obvious explanation is that this is related to the contemporaneous increases in tropical SST in each basin.

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Two chances left.

9: Gore claims warming is causing new diseases and allowing malarial mosquitoes to move to higher altitudes.

In fact, says Professor Paul Reiter, head of the Pasteur Institute's unit of insects and infectious diseases: "Gore is completely wrong here." Reiter says "the new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago" and "none of the 30 so-called new diseases Gore references are attributable to global warming".

This one is misleading. Other experts disagree with Reiter. For example, Paul Epstein, an expert in tropical health at the Harvard Medical School writes:

Insects and insect-borne infections are being reported at high elevations in South and Central America, Asia, and east and central Africa. Since 1980 Ae. aegypti mosquitoes, once limited by temperature thresholds to low altitudes, have been found above one mile in the highlands of northern India and at 1.3 miles in the Colombian Andes.

And:

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Could global warming be contributing to the resurgence of malaria in the East African Highlands?

A widely-cited study published a few years ago said no, but new research by an international team that includes University of Michigan theoretical ecologist Mercedes Pascual finds that, while other factors such as drug and pesticide resistance, changing land use patterns and human migration also may play roles, climate change cannot be ruled out.

"Our results do not mean that temperature is the only or the main factor driving the increase in malaria, but that it is one of many factors that should be considered," Pascual said.

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First published in Deltoid - ScienceBlog on September 15, 2006. It is republished as part of "Best Blogs of 2006" a feature in collaboration with Club Troppo, and edited by Ken Parish, Nicholas Gruen et al.



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About the Author

Tim Lambert is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales. He blogs at Deltoid ScienceBlogs.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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