Global Warming And Asthma? – small dead animals

About a week ago, news shot round the world that a spike in asthma rates has been attributed to global warming and rise in CO2 emissions:
New Jersey Star Ledger

The third-grader at the East Orange Charter School was diagnosed with the life-threatening condition when she was just a year old. Predictions of higher pollen counts and rising temperatures exacerbating asthma in America’s cities is a scary prospect for her.
…
A report recently released by researchers at Harvard University predicts that poor and minority children in America’s cities will experience worsening asthmatic conditions due to global warming and air pollution. As the climate warms up, allergens such as pollen and mold will flood the air, interacting with urban pollutants such as ozone and soot to fuel an already growing epidemic of asthma.

New Zealand Herald

“The combination of air pollutants, aero-allergens, heat waves and unhealthy air masses increasingly associated with a changing climate causes damage to the respiratory systems, particularly of growing children, and these impacts disproportionately affect poor and minority groups in the inner cities,” the report says.

Globe And Mail

America’s cities, blanketed with smog and climate- altering carbon dioxide, have become cradles of ill health and are fostering an epidemic of asthma, according to a report yesterday from a leading group of Harvard University researchers and the American Public Health Association.

Except that…. it’s not what the report says.
Cantstats surveyed the actual report;

The focus of the Harvard report is not the relationship between asthma rates (in children or adults) and increased levels of CO2 or global warming.
It had a larger purpose. “This report examines the direct impacts of CO2, as well as climate change, focusing on urban centers; examining synergies between air pollution and climate change and connections between climate change and emerging infectious diseases � in particular, West Nile virus, a disease carried by urban-dwelling mosquitoes that presents new problems for public health and mosquito control authorities.” (Epstein, pg. 4)

In fact, they revealed (exerpts):

No data is given on the purported link between rising asthma rates and climate change or increases in CO2. No numbers of asthmatic children from different cities are given. There is no attempt in the report to account for other reasons for the increase, such as better diagnostic techniques in younger children.

The report uses numbers without footnoting the source.

The amount of time explicitly devoted in the Harvard report to rising levels of asthma in children is miniscule and yet the media presented this aspect almost exclusively. The Harvard report is by no means devoted to exploring causes of asthma in children. It states only that the largest increase in asthma occurred in preschool-aged children (an increase between 1980 and 1994 of 160 percent). It is indeed worth asking whether the researchers ever intended to explain the causes of asthma in children, or whether they used this point to draw the media in. Television reportage was accompanied by photos of preschoolers in doctors’ offices using inhalers- certainly a more riveting audience hook than a general item on climate change.

Where the Harvard report frequently uses the words “may” “might” or “potential” to indicate the possible effects of climate change, the media did not.

The report is in fact a summary of other studies. The media reported it as if it were a set of new scientific findings, specifically on the relationship between asthma rates and climate.
They have more. And footnotes, too!

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