The Medieval Warm Period (800-1300) was a good time for humanity. The growing season lasted longer, which meant more food and a growing population, and heck, in the days before central heating it was more comfortable.

But forget all that. Global warming will make you sick say the AGW zealots.

Slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, according to studies released Wednesday and published in a special issue of The Lancet British medical journal.

Global and U.S. health officials unveiled the results as they pushed for health issues to take a more prominent role at upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. Also on Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced that he would go to Copenhagen at the start of international climate talks. U.S. health officials said the timing was not planned.

“Relying on fossil fuels leads to unhealthy lifestyles, increasing our chances for getting sick and in some cases takes years from our lives,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a telecast briefing from her home state of Kansas. “As greenhouse gas emissions go down, so do deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. This is not a small effect.”

Why then are people living longer?

Instead of looking at the health ills caused by future global warming, as past studies have done, this research looks at the immediate benefits of doing something about the problem, said Linda Birnbaum, director of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That agency helped fund the studies along with the Wellcome Trust and several other international public health groups.

The calculations of lives saved were based on computer models that looked at pollution-caused illnesses in certain cities. The figures are also based on the world making dramatic changes in daily life that may at first seem too hard and costly to do, researchers conceded.

Some possible benefits seemed highly speculative, the researchers conceded, based on people driving less and walking and cycling more. Other proposals studied were more concrete and achievable, such as eliminating cook stoves that burn dung, charcoal and other polluting fuels in the developing world.

And cutting carbon dioxide emissions also makes the air cleaner, reducing lung damage for millions of people, doctors said.

Oh, come on. I’ve been in Delhi and choked on the dung-smoke air and the two-cycle engines belching pollution.

To conflate that with C02 is absurd.

Mark Steyn sums it thusly:

On this Thanksgiving Day, let us give thanks that the two greatest all-purpose pretexts for government regulation of every single aspect of your life – “health care” and “the environment” – have now converged. Forget the global warming, global cooling, all the phoney-baloney tree-ring stuff – who can keep track of all that “settled science”? And fortunately we no longer need it, because we have a new rationale for the massive multitrillion-dollar Copenhagen shakendownen. Drumroll, please!

But slashing carbon dioxide emissions also could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, according to studies published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Government regulation of health care justifies government regulation of the environment: Ingenious!