DELINGPOLE: The Trump Effect — CDC Cancels Major Climate Change Conference

The cancelled summit was intended to teach public health officials more about climate change, an idea that is widely backed by climate scientists. Former President Barack Obama made it a key focus of his administration.

And this is exactly the problem which has beset so many public (and indeed private) institutions so long. From CDC to NASA to Departments from the Interior to Defense, government offshoots in the US —  infiltrated by green entryists from below and encouraged by irresponsible prioritizing from above — have engaged in climate change activism which has nothing whatsoever to do with their core remit.

The CDC is a particularly egregious example of this environmentalist mission creep. Founded in 1946, its job is to protect public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the US and internationally, with an annual budget in excess of $7 billion.

What does “climate change” have to do with this?

Nothing.

But that certainly hasn’t stopped the richly-funded climate alarmism industry trying to prove otherwise. (Why? Because if climate change can be demonstrated to be a public health issue than clearly it merits still further government spending….)

Last year, for example, the US Global Change Research Program produced a 300-page document called The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.

However, this told us rather less about the health impacts of climate change than it does about the power and tentacular reach of the global warming industry. The US Global Change Research Program sounds authoritative — and with its $2.5 billion annual budget certainly has the power to make its opinions known. But all it did in that report was synthesise the work of other US government agencies such as NASA and NOAA, and from global institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which are themselves in thrall to the dubious and corrupt science of the climate alarmism industry. It is just one gigantic echo chamber — whose purpose is to repeat and amplify the politically correct climate message.

The evidence that man-made climate change is damaging to human health is at best flimsy, at worst fabricated.

In 1996, for example, the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report claimed that “climate change” would result in an increase the range and intensity “vector-borne diseases” such as malaria, and that therefore it posed a great threat to human health.

As Christopher Booker recalls in his book The Great Global Warming Disaster, this was so far from the truth that one of the authors in the IPCC Working Group responsible for this claim resigned in disgust.

Professor Paul Reiter, of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, is the world’s leading authority on mosquito-borne diseases. Not one of the lead authors in his group, he was appalled to discover, had similar relevant expertise. One was mainly interested in the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets; two others were environmental activists, one of whom had written on mercury poisoning and land mines.

So Professor Reiter was somewhat perturbed when the “amateurish text” summarizing his group’s report claimed the opposite of what he knew to be true. It claimed, for example, that “mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18 degrees C”. But some species, Reiter pointed out, can survive temperatures of 25 degrees below zero.

Reiter said: “In summary the treatment of this issue by the IPCC was ill-informed, biased and scientifically unacceptable.”

Yet the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers still used this chapter to support its claim that “climate change is likely to have wide-ranging and mostly adverse impacts on human health with significant loss of life.”

This is the massive global scam that the Trump administration is now beginning to unravel.

There were be much squealing from the many interest groups with their snouts in the trough, such as Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

Maibach, who was due to speak at the CDC conference, told the Washington Post:

I don’t know why they canceled the meeting, but I do know the meeting was important and should have been held. Politics is politics, but protecting the health of our citizens is one of our government’s most important obligations to us… Climate change is bad for America, and bad for the world, in so many ways. One of these ways is that it is harming our health, already, and is likely to get much worse over the next few decades unless we take action. As the nation’s public health agency, we need CDC to be fully engaged in protecting our health from climate change.

But of course Maibach would say that. He’s one of the dodgy academics who were involved in what has been described as the “largest scientific scandal in history”, where a scientist at GMU was found to have raked in $63 million in federal grants by riding the climate change gravy train.