Global Warming Needs Your Money, Or It Will Kill Everyone

Climate change causes 315,000 deaths a year-report
Thu, 28 May 2009 22:22:42 UTC
CLIMATE-HUMAN/ (EMBARGOED)
(Embargoed for release at 1000 GMT May 29)

By Megan Rowling

LONDON, May 29 (Reuters) - Climate change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half a million by 2030, a report said on Friday.

The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), estimates that climate change seriously affects 325 million people every year, a number that will more than double in 20 years to 10 percent of the world's population (now about 6.7 billion).

Well sure. The Earth is actually getting cooler, global warming is becoming less of an issue, less of a priority, so they decided to come up with some new scary data about all the poor saps in Africa dying from starvation. Hey guess what dumb arses? People have been dying of starvation in Africa since, forever. Half of it is a freaking desert, the other half is run by corrupt governments.

Economic losses due to global warming amount to over $125 billion annually -- more than the flow of aid from rich to poor nations -- and are expected to rise to $340 billion each year by 2030, according to the report.

If your don't care about people dying, there is also your pocket book. $125 Billion you say? What about the $125 Gazillion spent on researching this hoax? Or the money spent on fighting it? Yes the Earth heats up, but it also cools, it's cyclical, it's natural, we have nothing to do with it. If global warming really will be the end of life as we know it, then it's God's will, and there is nothing we can do about it. If it isn't the end of the world, then why should we worry about it?

"Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide," Kofi Annan, former U.N. secretary-general and GHF president, said in a statement.

"The first hit and worst affected are the world's poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem."

Interpretation: "Consumerism is bad, capitalism is bad. Your SUV's and fast food are killing poor people. We all have to learn to live with much, much less."

The report says developing countries bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change, while the 50 poorest countries contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon emissions that are heating up the planet.

Annan urged governments due to meet at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December to agree on an effective, fair and binding global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the world's main mechanism for tackling global warming.

"Copenhagen needs to be the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated," he wrote in an introduction to the report. "The alternative is mass starvation, mass migration and mass sickness."

Ambitious is code for "mother f-word expensive."

The study warns that the true human impact of global warming is likely to be far more severe than it predicts, because it uses conservative U.N. scenarios. New scientific evidence points to greater and more rapid climate change.

Oh, you mean those same UN scenarios that many of the original scientists that worked on them, are now coming out, saying it is a bunch of crap? You mean that your predictions and estimates are based on scenarios, not hard scientific data? You mean that these are just predictions, even though we can't accurately predict if it will rain or not tomorrow? You mean that your predictions are advanced enough to take into account an infinite amount of confounding variables? And your predictions are able to differentiate between existing causes of starvation, weather related disasters and sickness?

The report calls for a particular focus on the 500 million people it identifies as extremely vulnerable because they live in poor countries most prone to droughts, floods, storms, sea-level rise and creeping deserts.

Africa is the region most at risk from climate change, home to 15 of the 20 most vulnerable countries, the report says. Other areas also facing the highest level of threat include South Asia and small island developing states.

As I said before: Interpretation: "Consumerism is bad, capitalism is bad. Your SUV's and fast food are killing poor people. We all have to learn to live with much, much less."

To avoid the worst outcomes, the report says efforts to adapt to the effects of climate change must be scaled up 100 times in developing countries. International funds pledged for this purpose amount to only $400 million, compared with an average estimated cost of $32 billion annually, it notes.

"Funding from rich countries to help the poor and vulnerable adapt to climate change is not even 1 percent of what is needed," said Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam in Britain and a GHF board member.

"This glaring injustice must be addressed at Copenhagen in December." (Reporting by Megan Rowling, editing by Tim Pearce)

Yep, in the end, global warming always comes back to this; money. Give us money to fight this. Money, money, money. It is a scam, and like all scams, you should keep a tight hold on your wallet, or you may lose it.