By Jo Nova
Just another spot of climate porn for the industry
Like a bad B-grade movie, nearly every science news story also doubles as an advert for a cult and a carbon tax. Last August three people (three!) died from infections of Vibrio vunificus in New York.
The horror-show microbes are advancing up the East Coast of the US “thanks to climate change”. And they’re racing at the breakneck speed of 30 miles a year. Quick, put up some solar panels!
Some 3,464,228 people died of other causes last year in the USA, but nevermind about that. Let’s remodel the economy anyway.
Warming waters entice ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ further north
Olivia Geiger, ScienceLine
Who needs satellites to measure temperatures, we can measure climate change with flesh eating bugs:
A “microbial barometer of climate change”
From 1988 to 2018, infections on the East Coast have increased from 10 to 80 cases a year, according to Archer’s research. The bacteria’s range has moved nearly 30 miles north per year and will continue to do so, even if the climate warms relatively slowly. By 2040, Vibrio vulnificus is likely to be at home in the Long Island Sound.
While very few people contract vulnificus infections, one in five who do are likely to die.
The real crime in this reporting is not the clickbait hyperbole, but the wallpaper intrusion of another disguised advert for a religion and a tax. Implicit in the headline is the “news” that coal causes flesh eating infections, that all climate change is bad, and that nothing remotely, even a tiny bit useful, could come from warming or fossil fuels. Our lives become filled with trivia and irrelevant misinformation, like litter. The big picture goes unspoken.
A far bigger killer is poverty and cold but they rarely get marked on the death certificate. Lower indoor temperatures kill six to twenty times times as many people as heat does. And when the heat comes, air conditioners save around 20,000 lives a year in the US, — if only people can afford to turn them on.
Obviously every medical association is advocating for cheap coal, oil and gas in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Yes, no, well… not even close.
Science journalists are the foot soldiers of voodoo.