So where do the numbers come from? I agree with your suggestion that STC applied child-mortality-as-%-of-total-mortality ratios* to GHM’s numbers, but who did this? As far as I can tell, the numbers don’t come from any other recent Save the Children reports. Did some press officer decide to spice things up a bit with a bit of creative maths? (Or perhaps it was Midge Ure, who was wheeled out as an expert on erratic rainfall and dead babies in the first Telegraph press release article.)

*80% for this year, 85% for 2030. More offerings from the Institute of Made-up Numbers?

Maybe we need to give the Africans something else to burn, so that they stop cutting down trees for firewood…

Re deaths due to climate change, whenever I read about this, a question springs to mind. If, according to AGW proponents, climate change is causing hundreds of thousands of deaths now (with CO2 at 385 ppm), is there a time in the past that could be pointed to as an ideal time, from the point of view of climate change deaths? When would have been an optimum time? Somewhere in the 1600s, perhaps? Or the 1700s?

I’m thinking of a year such as 1770, when CO2 was (presumably) at a “safe” level of 285 ppm or thereabouts. This was during the great Bengal Famine, when approximately 15 million people were said to have died in India. Poverty would have been a factor, also probable mismanagement and indifference on the part of the British East India Company; however, the main cause was crop failure, caused by a severe drought in 1769.

I have no doubt that if we had something similar to the Bengal Famine of 1770 occurring now, AGW proponents would be blaming man-made climate change. I think the main reason why they get away with ascribing so many deaths to climate change, is that people, generally speaking, are not as conversant with history as they ought to be, and tend not to realise just how bad things often were before recent times.

Please see this very important news from the University of Bristol…

http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6649.html

I was recently given a copy of Christian Aid news (Issue 45 Autumn 2009) which is witness to their shift in focus to climate. Word count (out of 30 pages):

“Climate Change” 42 mentions (excluding climate crisis, climate chaos, climate justice, runaway climate, changing climate, climate science, climate summit, climate friendly and at least 3 global warmings)

“God” 1 mention

“Jesus” 0 mentions

PS My counts haven’t been peer-reviewed – I have excluded the letters pages where at least one writer mentions Jesus.

The fact that CAid spent “£18 million on fundraising in 2008/09″ and “Sixteen per cent of our expenditure this year went on education, advocacy and campaigning” out of a total income of £86.5 million is also quite staggering. (from their website).

Finally, as you’ve noted in comments before – when what is left is spent using “sustainable development” to save these people’s lives there is an inevitable compromise for those threatened today against some notional future generation. This is hypocrisy.

I mean how many lives are actually being saved by these actions?: “We support women’s councils in Afghanistan, human rights monitoring in the Gaza Strip and sustainable agriculture in Bangladesh.” The mind boggles.

We’re still confined to debate and blogging, it seems, but we too would like to hear about how to widen the argument in the mainstream.

Congratulations on the analysis. I’d love to see some discussion here on how to get the information out to a wider audience. Every political speech on climate change can be blown apart with selected statistics from C-R.