Roger Pielke Jr. May 29, 2009 Excerpt: The new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum which makes the absurd claim that 315,000 deaths a year can be attributed to the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. […]
It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed. […]
The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie. These are strong words I know. […] Let me first start by noting that the same group that did the analysis for the UN, the Geo-Risks group in Munich Re, earlier this year published a peer-reviewed paper arguing that the signal of human-caused climate change could not presently be seen in the loss data on disasters.
For Pielke Jr.’s complete analysis see here:
More Reaction to 300,000 climate death claim:
‘Simplistic disaster storyline will prevail for some time’
‘Dishonesty’: ‘Just transfers deaths by storms to the ‘global warming’ category’
Update: Kofi Annan defends: 300,000 climate death claim ‘could never be as rigorous as a scientific study’ – Excerpt: ‘We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today’
NY Times: ‘There are significant questions about robustness of numbers at heart of ‘ claim of 300,000 climate deaths – Excerpt: ‘Nearly impossible to isolate contribution from human-induced climate change to mortality from disasters’
‘There are simply no words to describe the lunacy’
Not The First False Claim About 300,000 Deaths
300,000 death claim is ‘poster child for how to lie with statistics’
