1st case? I guess Al Gore has never been to a psychiatrist…
From the Aussie-based heraldsun:
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.
“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events”…
“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”
The rest of the article goes on to cite (non-psychiatric) climate change delusions coming from various individuals in the Australian government.
But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.
Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands”…
Rudd hopes this pain will make you switch to expensive but less gassy alternatives, and — hey presto — the world’s temperature will then fall, just like it’s actually done since the day Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth.
But you’ll have spotted already the big flaw in Rudd’s mad plan — one that confirms he and Garnaut really do have delusions.
The truth is Australia on its own emits less than 1.5 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide. Any savings we make will make no real difference, given that China (now the biggest emitter) and India (the fourth) are booming so fast that they alone will pump out 42 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases by 2030.
Indeed, so fast are the world’s emissions growing — by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants — that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That’s how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter….
So almost everything depends on China and India copying us. But the chances of that? A big, round zero.
A year ago China released its own global warming strategy — its own Garnaut report — which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions.
Same deal with India. Goodness! Why haven’t they caught the green bug?!?
Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why.
Their conclusion? They couldn’t actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming: “No firm link between the documented (climate) changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established.”
In fact, they couldn’t find much change in the climate at all.
Yes, India’s surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts and floods, or rain: “The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . .”
