The inconvenient truth about malaria

Paul Reiter

02 December 2009

Al Gore has made bold claims that climate change is aiding the spread of insect-borne diseases. The science does not support him, says Paul Reiter

The activists also claim that malaria is already increasing in sub-Saharan Africa because of climate change, and that the people who are attacked by our climatic transgressions are those least able to defend themselves.

Science has a different angle. In the first place, malaria in most of sub-Saharan Africa is ‘stable’: everyone gets bitten by infective mosquitoes every year, sometimes as many as 300 times. So it is absurd to claim that climate change will increase the rate of infection; you cannot add water to a glass that’s already full.

On the other hand, in regions where malaria is newly arrived, or has emerged after a period of remission, a plethora of interacting factors are at play, including forest clearance, irrigation, the mobility of people, urbanisation, resistance to insecticides and antimalarial drugs, the Aids epidemic, population increase, the degradation of public health infrastructures, and war and civil strife. Most of all: poverty. Poverty and malaria go hand in hand. There is no evidence or need to implicate temperature.

When the Bush government nominated me as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I knew I hadn’t a snowball’s chance of being accepted. The IPCC, supposedly formed of thousands of the world’s top scientists, is an ‘Intergovernmental’ panel. Governments nominate the authors, governments make their selections from those nominations, and governments must approve of all reports, line by line, before they are published. Moreover, the IPCC is a UN organisation, so its ‘top scientists’ are drawn from the 192 member countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Each chapter must include two authors from developing countries and at least one from an emerging economy. Clearly, the people of the Maldives are not going to nominate a scientist like me, but if they did, I doubt the project would get very far: the IPCC Working Group II, based in Exeter, somehow happened to lose my nomination from their database.

At the end of his movie, Al Gore ridicules global warming ‘sceptics’ as a tiny and dwindling band of flat-earthers, people who believe the moon landings were staged, and accuses us of being richly rewarded by the oil industry. According to him, ‘the science is in’. End of discussion.

In truth, the science is never in. We’re not pollsters or policy-makers. We proceed by question, observation, hypothesis, and testing by experiment. We are still re-testing Einstein’s theory of relativity! So I’m happy to be a sceptic. That is how science works.

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Richard King

December 16th, 2009 6:21am Report this comment

Many, who like myself, have looked at the work of Michael Chrichton will be familiar with his speech about journalism. In it he challenges us to read a newspaper article on a topic we know well, and assures us we may well discover the reporter has it all wrong, and is quite likely to confuse the cause and the effect. He goes on to say that then we will likely, illogically, proceed to turn the page and believe everything else in the newspaper.
Paul Reiter has given us a similar opportunatey, a window into one of the IPCC 'articles'. Now how are we to feel about the rest of their 'publication'.

LoboSolo

December 16th, 2009 3:38pm Report this comment

The "inconvenient truth" is that it is the ban of DDT that has allowed the surge in malaria cases. The myths surrounding DDT are as strong as the myths surrounding AGW.

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