Chicken Little Is Alive and Well

Have you ever read a news article that is supposed to be serious, but sounds more like something published by the Babylon Bee? It’s not meant to be satire, but it is so preposterous in its content and conclusions that it is impossible to accept it as legitimate journalism.

Grist, a liberal website, recently published an article titled, “Climate Change Has Killed 4-Million People Since 2000 – and That’s an Underestimate.” The article cited a study conducted by Australian epidemiologist Anthony McMichael that began with preconceived ideas and went looking for human cadavers under every possible rock. Among the “climate-related deaths,” McMichael included people who died from diarrheal disease, malnutrition, flooding, and even cardiovascular disease… claiming that the latter was a “proxy for heat-related illness.”

Good grief is right!

According to Mr. McMichael, people who died from clogged arteries did so because the temperature went up, not because they ate cheeseburgers and fries five times a week. Sounds like credible science to me… NOT! Likewise, blaming malnutrition and diarrhea on climate change is like blaming guns for killing people.

What do you mean that Progressives are already doing that, as if guns pull their own triggers? As for floods, it seems to me that they have been killing people since the days of Noah and the ark… and I doubt that global warming caused by carbon emissions was an issue back then.

The bottom line is that if you are an agenda-driven liberal, you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say, which is exactly what McMichael did when he claimed that 160,000 people died in a single year due to climate change. Not to be outdone, a global change biologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University named Colin Carlson extrapolated McMichael’s outlandish claims to their unnatural conclusion: that four million deaths can be directly linked to climate change since 2000.

“That’s more than the population of Los Angeles or Berlin,” Carlson added, just in case his fellow Progressives weren’t freaked out enough.

However, Zoya Teirstein, the Grist reporter, wasn’t about to let McMichael or Carlson steal her thunder. While labeling the 4,000,000 figure “a breathtakingly high number,” Teirstein then asserted without a shred of evidence that the alleged death toll was grossly underestimated.

According to Teirstein, everything from dengue fever and West Nile virus to wildfire smoke and suicide can be attributed to climate change. The same goes for deadly bacteria, fungal spores, and ticks… all of which she says are forced to migrate great distances because of climate change.

Migrating ticks and mosquitos? Aren’t we getting a bit hyperbolic here, Ms. Teirstein? The next thing you and your fellow climate change alarmists will want us to believe is that the sky is falling when, in fact, the only thing falling is your credibility as a supposed journalist… and McMichael and Carlson’s reputations as pseudo-scientists.