Recently, an environmentalist special interest group engendered a political backlash in Massachusetts after running a particularly sleazy television advertisement that equated baby abuse with Sen. Scott Brown’s (R) admirable vote for excellent legislation that would have reined in the Environmental Protection Agency’s runaway regulatory regime for greenhouse gas emissions. I wrote about it here; suffice it to say, Sen. Brown turned lemons into lemonade by painting himself as a sympathetic father-figure under attack from unscrupulous sleazebags.

In the immediate wake of this blowback, I find it interesting that Politico’s Morning Energy Report (I recommend signing up here) reported today on how the greens feel that they have failed to achieve a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme because they have been too timid. According to the Politico writeup,

After spending a half-billion dollars on failed campaigns for a U.S. climate bill and an international climate treaty, green groups’ major bankrollers are wondering if they need to be more selective with their carrots and more menacing with their sticks.

“We’re not very good at supporting our friends and we’re not particularly good at punishing people who vote the wrong way,’ Kathleen Welch, a Washington-based philanthropy adviser, said. ‘Unless we’re really willing to play hardball, I don’t think we can win on big issues like this.’

…Now, the donors are exploring new strategies to make their dollars do more, including attacking greenhouse gases one economic sector at a time, targeting political moderates and concentrating their efforts in swing states.

This storyline makes a great deal of sense…in bizarro world. On planet earth, the greens have been playing “hardball” for some time now. Those distasteful ads I described above weren’t run solely in Massachusetts. No, they were also run in Missouri, to punish Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, for having the temerity to try to save the economy from the EPA.

This wasn’t the first time that environmentalist special interest groups have gone after Democrats for failing to toe the green line. As my colleague Marlo Lewis explained in this blog post, last year Move On leveled the ‘baby-harmer’ charge at Democratic Senators Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) and Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas).

All three of these Democratic Senators are mothers. How much more “hardball” can the environmentalist movement get, than attacking politically-like minded women politicians with the accusation that they are harming babies? The gutter gets no deeper.

My guess is that this “hardball” nonsense is a sleight of hand, crafted by a well-heeled public relations group, in order to draw attention away from the political blowback in Massachusetts. That is, it’s political propaganda.

The latest alarmist talking point is that “global warming will cause asthma in children.” To wit,  the Massachusetts League of Women Voters is running sleazy advertisements that essentially equate baby-abuse with Senator Scott Brown’s vote for excellent legislation that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The purported link between baby-abuse and global warming is increased asthma.

It’s not just lobbyists. At a recent House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on global warming policy, Democrats on the panel—in particular, Reps. Henry Waxman and Jay Inslee—made much hay about the supposed increase in asthma suffering in a warmer world.

The media, too, is parroting this talking point. Here’s Brad Johnson at the Wonk Room:

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), after a recent vote to protect coal polluters at the expense of children’s health, is now attacking the League of Women Voters. The 91-year-old good-government organization is running television spots that hold McCaskill and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) accountable for voting to block enforcement of Clean Air Act rules that limit greenhouse pollution, threatening the hundreds of thousands of children with asthma in their states.

Clearly, this claim that warmer temperatures will increase asthma is reverberating throughout the vast green echo chamber. But is it true? The claim is predicated on the hypothesis that global warming will cause longer growing seasons, which will result in the release of more pollen, an asthma trigger. OK…that makes some intuitive sense, and while there is peer review literature suggesting a link between asthma and pollen, there is also literature contesting such a link (“No association was found between visits for asthma attacks and airborne pollen levels,” Association of severe asthma attacks with weather, pollen, and air pollutants,” 0 V J Rossi, V L Kinnula, J Tienari, E Huhti, Thorax 1993; 48:244-248).

As I understand it, and as is intimated by the conflicting studies noted above, asthma is poorly understood. There does, however, appear to be agreement in the scientific community that asthma has many potential causes, including pollen, dust mites, cigarette smoke, and…cold weather. According to the peer reviewed literature, “A decrease in air temperature is an aggravating factor for asthmatic symptoms, regardless of the geo-climatic areas under study” (c.f., “Effects of Climate Change on Environmental Factors in Respiratory Allergic Diseases,” G. D’Amato and L. Cecchi, Clinical and Experimental Allergy, 38, 1264-1274). Cold weather triggers asthma directly, and also indirectly, by making people sick with cold and flu, which is another major asthma trigger (“Upper respiratory infections play a key role in exacerbation of asthma, contributing to the typical increase of hospitalizations and medical calls in cold months and during spring,” ibid).

Using a public health/medicine database search (EBESCO’s MEDLINE), I found peer reviewed research suggesting a link between global warming and asthma exacerbation due to increased pollen exposure caused by longer growing seasons, but I couldn’t find any study that also addressed the fact that global warming logically would mitigate asthma suffering caused by the cold. After all, if asthma hospitalizations peak during cold months, then doesn’t it stand to reason that global warming, which disproportionately affects winters, would decrease the number of these asthma attacks? If I’m wrong, and a study has considered the potential benefits of global warming for asthmatics, please send it my way: wyeatman@cei.org. Until I see otherwise, it seems to me that the green echo chamber’s alarmist asthma claims are based on only half the picture.

In any case, Americans shouldn’t be concerned. According to a recent peer reviewed article in the pre-eminent scholarly journal Science, global warming isn’t happening in the U.S.