Industrial Disease

The Gabby Logan Show on BBC Five Live this week shows how the insurance industry ducks its responsibilities and allows many people to die long before they pay out.

There are two direct repercussions to this - 1) the person dies a particularly uncomfortable and painful death without any financial support and 2) the pay out is automatically reduced after death even though relatives will have shouldered the cost of care. Both are terrible but the latter is a belter - once the unfortunate person dies then only if there are dependents alive will the pay out be the nearly the same as the award to the suffering person. If not, then it is reduced as non-dependents are supposedly in less need of the money - a nice way to save cash. Dependents are defined as spouses or children under 18.

This is not rocket science. The expense associated with making a claim is huge and it is a lengthy process. As a family, we experienced this when my father was diagnosed with mesothelioma after working all his life for the same company, BP. His only interruption in service for the company came from a stint in the Navy (seconded to the Merchant Navy) during WWII. Despite this, and his being able to pinpoint the most likely period of his employment with the company when he got most exposed, the company denied and denied it. Fortunately, we found the insurers quickly, engaged a good lawyer and claimed. My father, after so long a service with BP for whom he sacrificed a great deal working all over the world and away from the family in places like Alaska and Aden, was heartbroken that his employer turned their back on him, when all he needed was some contribution to things like a downstairs shower or wheelchair.

Even after we had found the insurer, the process outlived him. As he fell to the worst part of the illness, he asked us to pursue the case as he was so upset that his company would deny him. Eventually, an award was made. We had a meal in his honour and opened a bottle of his favourite wine, Barolo, after his service in Italy for BP where he suffered a life threatening car crash after too many hours on the job commissioning a troublesome refinery and where our mother suffered a stroke at an early age. We bought a piece of machinery for the hospital in Swansea where he was treated which would make life a little easier for fellow sufferers - and it says something that a small unit at that hospital needed such kit for such a rare disease - and a bench at the Nursing Home for the terminally ill that he spent his final hours in.

I will not go into the disease other than to say it is the most virulent of cancers which is caused by asbestos and affects the lining of the lung - it is inoperable and terminal in all cases, yielding a terrible death.

Insurance executives should read such articles and view programs on it and think about how they would like to die. If they should contract such a disease from the negligence of their employer, then the one thing they would want is some comfort and help during their suffering.

That is the one thing insurance companies in these cases do not give. I have no sympathy or respect for that industry in total. Faceless executives betting and profiting on misfortune and making it onerously hard to get access to what is rightfully claimed. You need a cold heart to be successful in it - and most are.

So Is Climate Change a Hoax?

The Copenhagen Summit was a costly affair and it is now over - no real deal has been ratified and the outcome was inconclusive. But was the whole shebang really necessary? Is Climate Change not a man-made phenomenon?

I have tackled this subject before and what strikes me is its immense complexity and its simplicity. The complexity revolves around the evidence to prove that Climate Change is actually occurring and, if so, how it is linked to human intervention. The simplicity is to argue that in all this earth's several billion year history there has been no other species like man to inhabit it who can cause nuclear explosions, pump noxious gases into the air, chemicals into rivers and oceans and consume vast tracts of natural resources and convert them into materials and energy. Man's existence has only been concentrated into a very small part of recent history - as Carl Sagan famously put in his series 'Cosmos', if the history of the earth were expressed as a 365 day calendar then man first turned up after midday on 31 December; we are that new to the earth. Even more so, it has only been in the last couple of hundred years that man has started to become industrial and that has accelerated at an enormous rate as we consume ever greater amounts of natural resources.

It really is fairly obvious that our occupation on earth must have had some effect - it isn't that cerebral.

But there is a frightening issue underpinning the panic surrounding Climate Change. It is more likely that we will exhaust our bank of natural resources before we change the world's climate enough to kill off future generations - and that may well curtail their life expectancy anyway. Hubris around the subject is stoked up by people like Christopher Booker who fancies himself as a bit of a scientist - he claims the whole issue of Climate Change is bullshit.

He may know a thing or too about that. Famously, he declared, without any fundamental qualification or simple research, that white asbestos was identical in chemical make up as talcum powder and therefore as dangerous. True, white asbestos is the least virulent of the three types of asbestos, but it can still cause such terrible diseases as mesothelioma. As my father died of that disease due to working in an asbestos-laden environment, I find Booker's assertion as disgraceful. Anyone who has access to the internet, let alone a chemistry book, will tell you that talc and white asbestos are by no means identical, although the base formula may look similar to the untrained eye. Booker has also claimed in the past that breathing in the smoke of others does not cause cancer and that there is no proof that BSE causes vCJD in humans. You would think that he is the world's leading scientist rather than a Telegraph journalist and founder of Private Eye.

But there is the rub. Everyone who wants to bash the Climate Change argument just says that the issue is hokum because the evidence is forged - claiming that in fact the earth's temperature is actually going down, the Antarctic is getting colder and that CO2 levels are not the issue as they have no correlation to temperature levels. The new Freakonomics book argues that water vapour is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2 despite evidence that Venus has no such vapour but plenty of CO2 which actually keeps its temperature cooler than it should be because of its insulating capability.

I must admit that I sit somewhat on the fence as to the evidence - it is not conclusive other than the fact that we are enduring particularly high CO2 levels now and the seasons are definitely changing; you can see that clearly in when migrating birds re-appear or when flowers blossom.

Is this down to man? It may not be, but I tell you what, we are the smoking gun.