Climate Change Isn't Our Top Public Health Threat

Climate Change Isn't Our Top Public Health Threat

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 12/4/13

Hysteria: The Environmental Protection Agency chief says global warming is the most urgent threat to public health. Given that the whole climate change frightfest has fallen apart, how do people keep saying such things?

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says she has dedicated her life to protecting the environment. It's too bad she is not more dedicated to reality. If she were, her comments Monday before the left-wing Center for American Progress would have been different.

But McCarthy knew who she was speaking to and told the group what it wanted to hear when she said, "I really see no greater issue and no more urgent threat to public health than climate change."

Obviously this government functionary has missed the news that the world might be entering a post-antibiotic era in which organisms resistant to the drugs that remarkably increased health and longevity in the 20th century will pose grave dangers.

Already, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 2 million people become infected each year in the U.S. "with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections."

In addition, the CDC's "Threat Report 2013" says that "many more people die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection."

And how many Americans die each year due to man-made global warming? The answer is none, of course.

When confronted with this fact, the alarmists will seamlessly shift to global warming's future threat. The danger, they say, is out there — somewhere. Just trust them. It is. Even though the climate disasters they've predicted and so tightly embraced have not occurred.

Consequently, we are left to wonder: If the real threat is to come, how many will die due to man-made global warming in coming years?

No one can say for sure, but we'll venture a guess: zero.

Meanwhile, it appears that future yearly deaths from antibiotic-resistant infection will start at the 23,000 figure cited by the CDC and grow from there.

The radical environmentalists, who are aligned with most Democrats and the mainstream media, have no sense of proportion. Climate change is an idea hatched and sustained by fevered minds. It has killed no one, but somehow it is still the top public health issue, says McCarthy, and requires "global action."

While fixated on a fraud, the alarmists haven't been able to see the real public health threats around them, from the post-antibiotic era to terrorism to the re-emergence of diseases — measles, mumps, tuberculosis — we had almost eradicated to the possible widespread and uncontainable outbreaks of bird flu, SARS and the West Nile virus.

Neither have they observed changes in the natural world that they claim to care so much about.

Consider the raw Arctic cold that's hit America's western half. Temperatures, reports the Associated Press, are "20 to 40 degrees below normal levels."

That's not global warming, the phrase used before it was converted to climate change so that the alarmists could blame all weather changes on human greenhouse gas emissions while also ignoring the fact that the predicted warming was not happening. But it does bring the entire global warming idea into question.

Also consider, because McCarthy and the global warming propagandists won't, that Arctic ice, which was supposed to be gone by now during the summers, covered 29% more water in August 2013 than it did in August 2012.

And then there's that troublesome fact that global temperatures have been flat for at least 16 years.

The global warming alarmists should be on the run, embarrassed by their exaggerations, ashamed that they believed so much in something so unbelievable, humiliated that the world hasn't ended as they said it would. Yet they're still shamelessly in the public eye, making crackpot pronouncements that are patently false.

Even worse, they're making and implementing public policy. That's the real threat to all of us.