A Case Study of Climate Corruption: tracking the trash to source

Here is a compact case study of how junk information on climate is produced by a vested interest to suit its own ends and taken up by others for theirs.  How easy would it be for this to get into a school textbook?  Is it just a matter of time?

Willis Eschenbach spotted this claim in a book review in the South China Post:

“Guzman ... cites an estimate that the annual global death toll already sparked by climate change is 300,000.”

 Note the alarmism in the book’s cover.  A sure sign of trash to come when the book is about climate.

The reviewer is not totally bowled over, managing this in an otherwise gushing review:

“One possible peeve is that he lashes climate deniers for lacking expertise when he himself is a Berkeley, California, legal scholar. An unkind critic might say that is rich, even hypocritical.”

 Eschenbach describes how he decided to try to track down the source of this claim of 300,000 deaths each year due to ‘climate change’.    

He finds that Guzman refers the claim to Kofi Annan, and follows that through to find that Annan has his own foundation in place, a foundation that produced a report in which the statistic was used:

“Finally, on page 9, we find the following explanation of where they get the three hundred thousand deaths number:

'This estimate is derived by attributing a 40 percent proportion of the increase in the number of weather-related disasters from 1980 to current to climate change.'

Now wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute right there. They are saying that the three hundred thousand is only forty percent of the increase in people killed annually by the weather since 1980?”

As Eschenbach immediately notes, “That’s hogwash”, and he goes on to explain why.

Further into the report, he discovers an organisation notorious for climate alarmism, Munich Re:

“So just what is Kofi Annan’s pet foundation using as their authority for the 40% claim and the other numbers? Further reading brings us to this one (emphasis mine):

'The 40 percent proportion is based on an analysis of data provided by Munich Re on the past trend of weather-related disasters, as compared to geophysical (i.e. non climate change related) disasters over time.⁵ It compares well to a 2009 scientific estimate of the attribution of climate change to droughts.¹¹ It is assumed that the 40 percent increase due to climate change based on frequency of disasters can be applied as an approximation for the number of people seriously affected and deaths.'

Munich Re??? They got their numbers from Munich Re? They’re trusting a dang insurance company? That’s what we find way down at the bottom of the edifice of bogus claims? An insurance company that makes more money if people are very, very afraid.”

Eschenbach is rightly shocked.  He goes on to summarise:

"• Munich Re pulled some hugely improbable climate death numbers out of their corporate fundamental orifice, numbers that are clearly designed to help them sell insurance. They have no relationship to reality.

• These bogus numbers were then swallowed hook, line and sinker, and regurgitated in a report issued by Kofi Annan’s pet foundation.

• The report was then quoted by Kofi Annan.

• Kofi Annan was then quoted by Guzman

• Guzman was then quoted by the South China Morning Post.

And there we have the impeccable pedigree and provenance of the claim of 300,000 dead from climate change every year … garbage top to bottom.”

Well done Willis Eschenbach.  He has exposed a piece of irresponsible nonsense that may yet appear in school textbooks in years to come.  Teachers may like to emulate Eschenbach by tracking back from the most scary claims about climate in their current textbooks.  Or give these as project tasks to their more able pupils.  They might learn something about climate corruption that could help protect them from further propaganda.

Meantime, we can all be on the look-out for that 300k surfacing again.

Note added 5 March 2013.  Ben Pile was on to this sort of nonsense, and how pernicious it can be, way back in 2009:  http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/06/the-age-of-the-age-of-stupid.html