These people think you're stupid: Did CO2 really cause West Nile case in Portugal?

Climate change blamed for Portugal’s “probable” first case of West Nile virus

Experts are warning that climate change could heighten the risk of surges of infectious diseases more common to warmer climates, such as the West Nile virus or Malaria, in Europe.

Diagnosing Al Gore: Truth in the Balance by Mary Ellen Tiffany Gilder (Nov. 2, 2007)

This litany of killers is impressive until you realize that out of the fifteen, only Lyme, malaria, dengue and West Nile virus are spread by insect vectors. A closer look at those four even further confounds the point. Lyme disease - far from being a tropical disease spreading northwards - originated in the temperate climate of Lyme, CT and spread South and West. Malaria is a disease confined to the tropics more for socioeconomic reasons than climatologic ones, and it was once prevalent in Siberia and Northern Europe. Its decline in these areas happened largely during warming periods of history. There has been a recent resurgence of malaria in some Eastern European countries that the WHO attributes to socioeconomic instability. Paul Reiter from the Pasteur Institute in Paris published a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases, refuting the section of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report on infectious diseases. (Reiter was actually drafted to be one of the authors of the IPCC report, but withdrew and actually threatened to sue the organization to have his name removed from the author list because he was so disgusted with the inaccuracy of the final product.) He focused on the misrepresentation of malaria and the lack of any evidence for climate-associated spread of dengue fever. Of these diseases, the one most commonly attributed to Global warming is West Nile Virus (WNV). Once again, the science doesn't hold up. The disease vector, Culex pipiens (also responsible for transmitting St. Louis encephalitis), is the most widely distributed mosquito in the world, common on every continent but Antarctica. Prevalent in temperate, not tropical, zones, it is readily found as far north as Nova Scotia. WNV's arrival in the US had nothing to do with changes in vector habitat conditions. (Emerg Infect Dis 6(4), 2000; and also Environmental Health Perspectives /Supplements Volume 109, Number S1, March 2001)