by Prof. Paul Reiter

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Human ecology and human behavior are the two key factors that determine the transmission of human infectious diseases. When the cycle of transmission includes mosquitoes, ticks, rodents or other intermediaries, their ecology and behavior are also critical. When multiple species are involved, the levels of complexity are even greater. Lastly, the virulence of the pathogen, the susceptibility of its vectors and hosts, the immunity of those hosts and the collective immunity of the host populations all contribute to the force of transmission. The significance of climate factors can only be assessed in the perspective of this daunting complexity.

Enteric infections: In the developing world, scarcity of basic needs such as shelter, food, clothing, electricity, clean water, education, and healthcare is the dominant factor in disease transmission. In wealthier countries, new and challenging problems have arisen as a result of economic success. Straightforward strategies are available to prevent infections in all these scenarios, given suitable economic resources. In nearly all cases, climate is at most a minor, often irrelevant parameter.

Mosquito-borne diseases: Mosquitoes are found throughout the world in all climates. Meteorological variables are of limited value as a guide to the population densities, behavior and geographic range of vector species. The same is true for the pathogens they transmit. Future changes in climate may result in minor changes in prevalence and incidence of mosquito-borne diseases, but the critical factors will remain human ecology and human behavior.

Tick-borne diseases: As with mosquito-borne diseases, the prevalence and incidence of tick-borne infections is affected by an incredible range of parameters. In northern temperate regions, for example, Tick-borne Encephalitis is influenced by agricultural practices, land-cover, populations of small mammals and their predators, small mammal immunology, population and behavior of large mammals, hunting, wild-life conservation, industrial activity, income levels, leisure activities, depth of winter snow, the micro timing of springtime temperatures, and summer rainfall and humidity. Moreover, the interaction of these variables is distributed over a two to three-year period. In the context of this complexity, it is ludicrous to claim a direct cause and effect relation between climate and infection.

In conclusion, it cannot be over-stressed that the ecology and natural history of disease transmission, particularly transmission by arthropods, involves the interplay of a daunting multitude of interacting factors that defy simplistic analysis. The rapid increase in the incidence of many diseases worldwide is a major cause for concern, but the principal determinants are politics, economics, human ecology and human behavior. A creative and organized application of resources to reverse this increase is urgently required, irrespective of any changes of climate.

Paul Reiter is a British scientist whose entire career has been devoted to the biology, ecology and behaviour of mosquitoes, the transmission dynamics and epidemiology of the diseases they transmit, and methods for their control. He worked for 22 years as a researcher in the Division of Vector-borne Infectious Diseases of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, where he established a new unit of Insects and Infectious Disease.
He has led the entomological component of numerous field investigations of outbreaks of vector-borne disease on behalf of the US Government, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Pan American Health Organization. He is a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control, and has served as a consultant to governments worldwide.
He has been actively involved in the international debate on climate change for more than a decade. He served as a lead author for the US National Assessment of Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, and an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. He is a frequent commentator in the news media on this and other issues that concern vector-borne disease.

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by Indur M. Goklany

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Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events – such as the 2003 European heat wave and the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the USA – aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be.
Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s. The largest improvements came from declines in mortality due to droughts and floods, which apparently were responsible for 93 percent of all deaths caused by extreme events during the 20th Century. For windstorms, which, at 6 percent, contributed most of the remaining fatalities, mortality rates are also lower today but there are no clear trends for mortality. Cumulatively, the declines more than compensated for increases due to the 2003 heat wave.
With regard to the U.S., current mortality and mortality rates due to extreme temperatures, tornados, lightning, floods and hurricanes are also below their peak levels of a few decades ago. The declines in annual mortality for the last four categories range from 62 to 81 percent, while mortality rates declined 75 to 95 percent.
If extreme weather has indeed become more extreme for whatever reason, global and U.S. declines in mortality and mortality rates are perhaps due to increases in societies’ collective adaptive capacities. This enhanced adaptive capacity is associated with a variety of interrelated factors – greater wealth, increases in technological options, and greater access to and availability of human and social capital – although luck may have played a role. Because of these developments, nowadays extreme weather events contribute less than 0.06 percent to the global and U.S. mortality burdens in an average year, and seem to be declining in general. Equally important, mortality due to extreme weather events has declined despite an increase in all-cause mortality, suggesting that humanity is adapting better to extreme events than to other causes of mortality. In summary, there is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.

Dr. Indur M. Goklany has worked on environmental and energy policy issues for over three decades in federal and state governments, and the private sector. He has written over one hundred monographs, book chapters and papers on topics ranging from climate change, human well-being, economic development, technological change, and biotechnology to sustainable development.
He has worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages 20 percent of the U.S. land area, and associated mineral, energy and water resources, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2007 Julian Simon Prize. He was a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, and the Julian Simon Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. He has represented the U.S. at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in the negotiations leading to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. His degrees, all in electrical engineering, are from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and Michigan State University..
He is the author of Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution, and The Precautionary Principle, and The Improving the State of the World, all published by the Cato Institute. Opinions and views expressed by Dr. Goklany are his alone, and not necessarily of any institution with which he is associated.

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By Wolfgang Kasper

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Mitigation costs in terms of lost long-term global economic growth are much more difficult to assess than the household costs inflicted by specific legislative proposals. Politicians and bureaucrats around the Western world are now imposing piecemeal regulations ‘to save the planet’, often without much analysis of their effectiveness and the costs. (page 81)
Energy users are being burdened with costly regulations and compliance costs; taxes are being diverted into subsidies for some politically preferred solutions; and new ‘climate regulations’ block otherwise promising avenues for wealth creation. These costs of climate mitigation will without doubt on balance be massively negative. (page 81)

Economists have coined a term to describe the activities of those who seek regulations, taxes, subsidies and other government programmes that result in personal benefits to them at a cost to society: ‘rent seeking’. As Kasper notes:
“Pervasive rent seeking is counterproductive in economic terms, as well as profoundly unjust. To the extent that arguments about global warming are detected as just a new excuse for rent seeking, they will be treated with disdain and contempt – regardless of their scientific merit.” (page 87)
“To most natural scientists, concepts such as public choice and rent seeking are of course unfamiliar. They therefore fail to understand that social scientists and the public are cynical about the climate advocacy of recent years, which they view as a case of massive rent seeking. This is the main reason why economists are recalcitrant to uncritically accept the assertions of the climate activists.” (page 87)

Wolfgang Kasper is an emeritus Professor of Economics of the University of New South Wales. He worked first in Germany and Malaysia, and from 1973 in Australia, as well as in the USA and most of East Asia. Apart from his academic teaching, he has a long record of research and consulting for international businesses and governments. His main interest has been industrial ( re)location and institutional economics, i.e. the role of customs, laws and regulations in shaping economic life. He was an early voice for economic reform in Australia and New Zealand, and has written widely on the role of secure private property rights, small government and economic freedom in promoting prosperity. In 1988, Kasper was elected to the Mont Pelerin Society, an international academy dedicated to the promotion of freedom. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful pointers and astute criticism from one anonymous reviewer; all errors of fact and judgement of course remain his alone.

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By Douglas Southgate and Brent Sohngen, Ohio State University

Executive Summary

During the 20th Century, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses (GHGs) rose appreciably. There is some evidence that this caused limited warming of the planet, with worldwide temperatures about 0.6°C higher in 2000 than in 1900. Since GHG concentrations will increase this century, some additional warming of the planet seems likely.
Specific climatic impacts that will result as atmospheric concentrations of GHGs continue to change are difficult to predict. But given specific assumptions about the future course of global warming,1 economic consequences can be examined. Two sectors in which these consequences have been scrutinized are agriculture and commercial forestry.
In general, the costs of environmental change hinge on how people choose to adapt. In the agricultural and forestry sectors, successful accommodation of global warming will not require central planning by governments. To the contrary, adaptation is best accomplished by relying on the sort of decision-making that happens routinely in competitive and unregulated markets – decision-making that is decentralized and individualistic, yet coordinated because everyone faces the same prices for scarce resources.
Thanks largely to the adaptations that producers and consumers will make in the marketplace, global prices of farm products will not be greatly affected if average temperatures rise by 1.0°C to 4.0°C during the 21st Century, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is currently forecasting. With prices staying about the same, the main economic consequence of global warming in the farm economy will be to raise or lower the values of agricultural land. Since the 1990s, economists have investigated this consequence in the United States. Some of this research suggests that the aggregate impact of global warming on land values will be negative. However, the expected magnitude is not all that great.
In the face of higher temperatures as well as less precipitation in some settings because of global warming, efficient adjustment is impeded when governments meddle with market forces. This is true of agricultural protectionism. It is also true of distortions in the pricing of water. In particular, farmers in dry regions have little reason to adopt conservation measures if governments subsidize their use of water.
On the whole, higher temperatures will promote tree growth, certainly in places which continue to receive adequate precipitation. Risks of fire will increase as well, although probably not enough to affect timber supplies. Moreover, expected trends in the forestry sector contradict a widely-held belief about the impacts of global warming, which is that developing regions close to the equator will suffer more than affluent settings in temperate latitudes. To be specific, higher temperatures are apt to accelerate a geographic shift that is already underway. As ever larger portions of the global timber supply are obtained from sub-tropical plantations, where trees are grown and harvested in cycles lasting just 10 to 20 years, the share of timber harvested from temperate and boreal forests will decrease.
In the forestry sector no less than in agriculture, efficient adaptation to global warming requires that protectionism be avoided. With or without global warming, the sector’s development depends on strong property rights, in developing countries as well as in affluent nations.

Douglas Southgate specializes in the study of environmental problems in developing countries and has been a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University (USA) since 1980. Southgate has written numerous chapters and journal articles on public policies contributing to tropical deforestation, the economics of watershed management and related topics. Southgate is also the author of four books, including The World Food Economy (Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Southgate has consulted in 15 African, Caribbean, and Latin American nations.

Brent Sohngen is an environmental and resource economist, and has been a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University (USA) since 1996. Sohngen has written numerous articles and book chapters on the economics of climate change, forestry markets, and tradable pollution permits. In addition Sohngen has participated as an author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sohngen is currently developing models to assess the implications of climate change on global demands for agricultural and forestry.

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The Civil Society Report on Climate Change comprises:
• Summary and Policy Recommendations
By the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change
• “Human Ecology and Human Behavior: Climate change and health in perspective”
By Paul Reiter
• “Death and Death Rates due to Extreme Weather Events: Global & U.S. Trends, 1900-2006″
By Indur M. Goklany
• “Weathering Global Warming in Agriculture and Forestry: It can be done with free markets”
By Douglas Southgate and Brent Sohngen
• “The Political Economy of Global Warming, Rent Seeking and Freedom”
By Wolfgang Kasper

Main conclusions:
•    Cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the coming two decades is not a cost-effective way to address climate change.
•    Deaths from climate related natural disasters have fallen dramatically since the 1920s, as a result of economic growth and technological development. With continued economic growth, the death rate is likely to continue to fall regardless of climate change. (The number of reported natural disasters has increased continuously since 1900 for various reasons, including population growth and improvements in communication; climate change is most likely not one of them.)
•    There is no evidence that climate change has caused an increase in disease. If the main causes of diseases such as diarrhoea and malaria are properly addressed, climate change will not increase their incidence.
•    Agricultural production has outpaced population growth in the past 50 years. With continued technological improvements, this trend will continue to 2100, even if the global mean temperature rises by 3°C.
•    Water scarcity is a problem in many countries, but with better management and modern technologies, more water can made be available to all.
•    Millions of people in poor countries currently die unnecessarily due to a lack of wealth and technology. These problems have generally been exacerbated – not alleviated – by foreign aid, which has supported unaccountable governments that have oppressed their citizens, denying them the ability to improve their lot.
•    Global restrictions on greenhouse gases would undermine the capacity of people in poor countries to address the problems they face today as well as in the future by retarding economic growth and general economic development.
•    Instead of pushing emissions restrictions and failed ‘aid’ policies, governments should focus on reducing barriers to economic growth and adaptation – e.g. removing trade barriers and decentralising management of water and land.
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*The Civil Society Report on Climate Change (ISBN 1-905041-15-2, 100 pp.) published by the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change (www.csccc.info).   Download PDF

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