From UMEA UNIVERSITY
Climate change could risk progress in health — or be a global health opportunity
The threat climate change poses to human health is possibly so great that it could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years. But getting to grips with climate change could also present major opportunities for global health. Details can be found in a major international research report published in the journal The Lancet.
‘Impact of climate change on global health could be enormous, not only through the direct health effects, but also because of reduced social stability if people are forced to move or flee,’ said Peter Byass, professor of global health at Umeå University in Sweden, who has been a senior adviser to the work of the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change.
‘Meanwhile, we know that mitigation and adaptation around climate change can have positive health effects, for example both by reducing emissions and improving dietary habits. Effective climate action may actually prove to be one of the greatest opportunities to also improve global health that we have ever had,’ says Byass.
The work behind the report, published this week by the journal The Lancet, involved a number of European and Chinese climate scientists, environmental scientists, natural scientists, social scientists, medical and health scholars, engineers, energy policy experts, and others.
The report shows that the direct health effects of climate change are linked to increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, especially heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms. Indirect impacts come from changes in infection patterns, effects of emissions, uncertainty regarding the availability of food, and hence malnutrition. Health effects can also be linked to people involuntarily forced to leave the affected areas or movements of people planned because of impending changes in living conditions. Increased incidence of conflict is also a factor that the report highlights as a threat to global health.
But global efforts to reduce emissions can achieve positive co-benefits for health. The report highlights a number of such points. These include reduced consumption of fossil fuels leading to lower incidence of respiratory diseases, as well as people walking and cycling more, which both reduce emissions and lower the incidence of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke. Even the consumption of red meat, the production of which is not very climate-friendly, is expected to decline and also bring health benefits as a result.
The report proposes a new independent global action plan ‘Countdown to 2030: Climate Change and Health Action,’ with the formation of an organisation to monitor and report every two years to the UN on how links between health status and climate change are affected. The organisation would also report on progress towards reduced emissions, measures to promote health and to reduce the vulnerability of populations, and to create sustainable health systems with low carbon emissions.
‘Overall, a strong international consensus is needed to create a global economy in which we minimise carbon dioxide emissions. This in turn presents an opportunity to improve human health. Measures recommended in this report are particularly important for populations in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable areas, which are also currently most affected by climate change,’ says Maria Nilsson, researcher at the Division of Epidemiology and Global Health at Umeå University, who is one of the report’s main editors.
‘The health community has responded to a wide range of serious health threats over time; examples would be efforts to reduce smoking and the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now more efforts are essential in response to another major threat to human health and the environment: climate change. Shifting to a sustainable society is economically possible and would also provide health benefits,’ says Maria Nilsson.
The Lancet Commission report will be an important resource for talks on climate change on global health during meetings connected with the UN Climate Change Conference, COP21, held in Paris from 30 November to 11 December, 2015.
###
Read the report in The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/climate-change
Additional press material from the journal: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f8sa29hs65cwdjq/AACQCq161bLaHjc4hvI_8uB-a?dl=0
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Meanwhile, we know that mitigation and adaptation around climate change can have positive health effects, for example both by reducing emissions and improving dietary habits.”
I saw what you did there.
Picked out the dumbest quote? I’m sure that who ever wrote the press release is actually responsible.
Oh Boy, But the flair. Dud or manipuation of the models?
Im stil waiting to see the effect on pressure……
Meanwhile…Back at the Bat Cave…
Warrenlb
These stats and sources may make you feel better as you freeze your anus waiting for the planet to warm you.
“Given that CO2 seems unlikely to endanger us by heating up the atmosphere significantly,
will this trend endanger life on earth? Is Carbon Dioxide poisonous?
Here are some facts which will ease these concerns.
It appears that a concentration of about 1,000ppmv would be beneficial to life on earth,
this being the concentration that Glass House growers prefer.
http://api.ning.com/files/XAPctmkiwvgEI5fT6iiGjWFvKNX*
cWuzeO4qmDVbgA_/Greenhouses.CarbonDioxideIn
Greenhouses.pdf
Our exhaled breath is about 4500ppmv
http://www.biotopics.co.uk/humans/inhaledexhaled.html
Up to 5000ppmv is acceptable for work places.
(American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists.).
Up to 3000ppmv is acceptable for residences
(Canadian exposure guideline for residential buildings)”
Medical oxygen has between 10,000 ppmv and 20,000 ppmv in it.
http://www.bocsds.com/uk/sds/medical/10_carbondioxide_oxygen.pdf
http://www.bocsds.com/uk/sds/medical/10_carbondioxide_oxygen.pdf
(Look at datasheets under “O”)
Currently our atmosphere has about 400 ppmv in it.
Furthermore, some scientists credit the extra CO2 in our atmosphere as the reason for our
current increased food production.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090209205202.htm
In other words, CO2 is plant food.
So important is CO2 that at approximately 180 ppmv all
life on earth would cease.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
Uh, no. CO2 is about 40,000ppm in exhaled breath, roger. You’re only off by about 2 orders of magnitude. Worthy of climate scientificality, I’d say.
Corr, 1 order of magnitude. Sorry.
The report should have taken into account the economic effects of AGW “mitigation” and the economic effect on people and families forced into poverty etc. and incorporated that into their report.
In my city for instance there are severe restrictions on burning wood etc. The choice is either electricity (unreliable when you need it most) and approved wood and wood products to be burnt in an approved appliance. Coal is banned outright.
This has adversely affected a section of the population who traditionally foraged for pine cones and debris from forestry waste. These people include individuals on pensions and other fixed incomes.
This is just a start
I think most people would go with the climate change if the economic results of mitigation were made clear to them.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com.
“I think most people would go with the climate change if the economic results of mitigation were made clear to them.”
Are you saying that most people accept or reject the Science based on what they perceive to be the economic impact of the solutions, rather than on the Science itself?
He’s saying that once you look closely at the purported benefits of reducing CO2 versus the concrete economic hardships, most people would rather stay warm this winter and figure out what to do about the increase in mosquitoes that may or may not happen in 40 years at that time.
@D.J.HAWKINS
So your answer is ‘yes, they do not base their opinion about whether or not Mans activities are Warming the planet on science, but rather on their perception of economic effect of the solutions’
Is that how you think about the question?
warren puond
please try harder to present your version of the science
your trolling is rather tedious
C’mon Harold –
you know that there is a consensus among “climate scientists” that our dietary habits are causing catastrophic climate change.
There has yet to be ONE shred of evidence that any of the listed diseases are impacted in any meaningful way by “walking or cycling,” let alone eating less red meat. And not for lack of trying. This PC yuppie garbage, endlessly repeated, is just as big a myth as AGW. Try cutting down on the world consumption of flour and SUGAR, then you might see some results.
Here’s one shred, annecdotal though it is, I’m quite sure it would be echoed by older folks. For many of us growing up in the 50s, shank’s ponies were the primary way of getting around. Almost everyone walked home from school in good weather, many of us rode bikes, and there was very little public school busing because most kids lived within walking distance of school. There was no obesity. None.
Steve the problem with that is the recent lawsuit against the parents of the Maryland ‘Free Range Children’ who were found innocent here. I remember walking all my school years.
I suppose that everyone needs to make a living even if it’s of the backs of us poor sap tax payers. I normally don’t like to be strident but these people are just leaches off the system and add nothing of value to our society. Poor asses would be on the streets if it wasn’t for the global warming mass psychosis.
They’ve joined the ranks of lawyers as pariahs. I’ve known a lot of lawyers and like them, but they will make work, like these people, if they need to.
Quite so, borrowing a quote from Bleak House (apologies to Charles Dickens):
‘The one great principle of Climate Change™ Science is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble’.
I guess they would allow this paper on facebook, since it’s obviously not “false, misleading, fraudulent or deceptive”, no siree.
Ah the Lancet, as I recall they were the same guys who claimed that the Coalition bombing campaign in Iraq killed more people than the combined bomber offensive against occupied Europe in WW2. So they certainly have the runs on the board when it comes to credibility.
Harry B,
Yes, it’s the same Lancet that began the vaccination/autism scare that is still going on, with their publishing of a fraudulent ‘peer reviewed’ paper.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
And yes, it’s the same LANCET that gave itself over completely to that other planck of ‘new’ New Leftism, anti-semitism.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11112930/Lancet-hijacked-in-anti-Israel-campaign.html
Idiots. Idiots. Idiots. This drivel is making me sick.
“The stupid – it burns!”
This is what rent-seeking looks like after 50 years of inbreeding.
I was just about to sign off for the night and go to bed, when this item popped up the BBC radio news. And now I am furious.
So far the biggest impact of the global climate change and renewables swindle has been the elevation of the prices of basic foodstuffs due to competition with the needlessly promoted bio-fuels sector.
This advancing the problems of poverty, food shortages and consequently revolution, civil strife and mass displacement.
The second biggest impact has been the explosive rise in the quantity of bullshit piped through the BBC at every hour of the day.
Can somebody please let me know when it will be safe for me to switch the radio on again.
I cannot take any more of this crap.
They keep saying “increasing extreme weather”. So, where are the bloody graphs?
I can provide a great number of graphs that show no trend and often have.
Why can the believers so far produce nothing whatsoever to counter these?
(Except that moronic nonsense showing how insurance costs are rising as more people insure more stuff at prices that are inflating. Well whoop-dee-doo. What a surprise!!!)
Is there nothing that anyone can do to stop all this.
It’s getting extremely silly and annoying.
Like you, sick of the BBC (Bolshevik Brainwashing Corporation) I stopped watching and stopped paying the annual licence fee. I cut the antenna wire to my TV and sent ’em a photo of it being severed by my tinsnips. This in order to prove that I don’t watch it and avoid being charged and fined for surreptitious watching of lefty propaganda.
I woke up to very much the same carp!! And wrote this as a response:
The health benefits of geological fuels and CO2
Then I read WUWT here. I’m not sure if the bigger surprise was this nutcase on the radio or the fact he now appears to be part of a bigger group.
” woke up to very much the same carp”
Sleeping with the fishies?
Obviously you’re not as indefatigable as your name might suggest!
In the US, there has been no health progress in the last 50 years, advances perhaps in understanding specific diseases, but statistically, deaths due to poorer health care – e.g. mothers dying in child birth, child mortality, etc. – have been increasing, and the US rank in health has been declining to the point where we are now the ’20s, where we were once one of the top ranked nations. That trend has had nothing to do with climate and everything to do with policy shifts.
And I expect the trend to ramp up in the not-too-distant future. (Finally, we’ll have Cuban-style health care!)
yes, medicine, but first. In Britain, we have levies placed on energy production which, for a right of centre government, shows socialist leanings, in that a capitalist market should not be moderated by the state unless there is illegality. The reason why Britain has expensive energy is directly linked to the state’s view of market economics. The strictures that are all too common from central state cause enterprise to slacken and for entrepreneurs to be hamstrung by scepticism. In that the British Government places a tithe on energy production therefore fails in two ways: one that it shows state interference in private dealings and two, that further impoverishes those that are at the cusp.
For a country that is redefining child poverty (which of course ignores an unsustainable influx of migrants) it is contradictory that the state should be mining fuel bills to satisfy some esoteric lifestyle conception. That the BBC can only sustain its argument by curtailing contrariness is a slanderous state of affairs and brings into doubt all else it may avow. If that corporation can do such a thing with climate (and quite openly) what can it attempt surreptitiously in other matters? Judging by the Conservative response to much of what the BBC portrays in ‘other matters’ one can hardly believe that the BBC has censored climate talk as a matter of complicity. It just seems as though we have a legacy policy which has ‘other’ politics written all over it.
I digress massively, sorry. On the subject of medicine, we have recently been treated to the prepared position of health authorities, that antibiotics are quickly losing their efficacious properties through over prescription. In Britain we are well used to the state painting lurid pictures as a propagandist exercise, seemingly as a budgetary exercise. The NHS (National Health Service) is a marvellous institution as long as money is not mentioned, then it becomes dark, starts to infiltrate into every home spreading stories of guilt (about one’s lifestyle) and pointing the finger at health monsters, fat people, the old, smokers and drinkers, who, through their turgid lifestyles and selfishness take away the life chances of others.
This is the sort of nonsense of a contrived health industry that is deeply inflicted and struggling to function in the patient’s interest rather than sustaining the bizarre compliances of an ideological conception. Reading the latest news items emitting from Glaxo alone, what is described is a pharmaceutical industry well prepared to take on the fears of the drugs failure that is principal machination of the latest state comprehension.
So, if poor people are being reduced by the cost of essential fuel in a cold climate and child poverty is on the rise, then this equates to a major health problem that is probably just as fundamental as the sparsity of decent food or the loss of function in some antibiotics, a plague of cold. Essentially although the argument is concerned with planet warming we are seeing here the possibility of deaths from cold, fuel poverty, trumping all else. Similarly, because of the NHS, medical diagnosis is being censured by fiat with the main aim of coercing a budget that ensures the survival of staffing and buildings but only does so by scurrilous policies and innuendo regarding treatment and lifestyle; the insidious concentration on propaganda methods to continually contrive a situation which detracts from the plausibility of a health system that is free (so what do you expect) but which can interfere in your freedoms to keep it so. In all of this climate takes a back seat. It’s a storm in an autoclave.
I do not believe much about the good intentions of Swedish institutions. They kept up with the Eugenics programs well into the 1970s.
Umeå University is very leftish and PC. Even back in the seventies when I was studying (at another university) it was well-known that “non-Marxists need not apply” in Umeå.
ok, so when they say ‘climate change’, they mean ‘refugees’ from middle east. True. When they come they wipe 50 years of development regarding vaccination.
The progressive’s who lusted for the 20 million or more illegals from South America who were not and still most are not vaccinated against these highly communicable diseases are just putting this out for an excuse for the crime later down the tax and spend road.
fobdangerclose – um, are you talking about the U.S.?
Might you be referring to Central American, not South America?
Since the South Americans cannot quite walk here, we don’t have vast hordes of them crossing the border illegall,y with no chance to check immunization status. However, with our proximity to Central America, they walk on over all the time.
Well maybe this latest solar flair will burn up the excess CO2 for the EPA.
“Overall, a strong international consensus is needed to create a global economy ”
The call to world wide socialism with people like the author at the top. I knew it was in there somewhere.
there already is a global economy. there has been for centuries.
And don’t they hate it!
+1 Thanks for making that point.
Yet another stealth effort to push the agenda:http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/64/4/379.full
I’ve managed to calm myself slightly by reading what Lomborg says on this issue.
A cooling salve, after the hot-fury induced by my encounter with this demented schlock:
“The best way to see this is to look at the world’s deaths from natural disasters over time. In the Oxford University database for death rates from floods, extreme temperatures, droughts and storms, the average in the first part of last century was more than 13 dead every year per 100,000 people. Since then the death rates have dropped 97% to a new low in the 2010s of 0.38 per 100,000 people…
In short, climate change is not worse than we thought. Some indicators are worse, but some are better.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bjorn-lomborg-the-alarming-thing-about-climate-alarmism-1422832462
Thanks for the quote. It so neatly sums up the ridiculousness of the lancet claim that I added it to my own blog article (link)
*sigh* and another one bites the dust. Lancet was once a high quality journal.
“Science” is becoming less reliable than religion. Dream up anything you want and because it occurred to you, with a mechanism, this is proof that you are right.
Carbon dioxide is GOOD for the human body because it makes you breathe better.
I meet so few folks who know this.
Along with this maybe
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2015/06/your-moral-and-294.html
and the link
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/09/plants-encouraged-as-co2-levels-reach-400-ppm/#comment-1930888
We used to understand this – then science when backwards for several decades,
Proof:
Circa the 1960’s, comedian Shelley Berman said:
“No matter how mean, or cruel, or sinful you have been, every time you breathe out, you make a little flower happy.”
🙂
Let’s just say: “climate change legislation could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years”
Naah! Obamacare is already doing that!
That report is badly used bull food.
It’s interesting that the Lancet have taken so willingly to this swindle.
It’s actually an extension of the longest running swindle in the history of the human race.
First you must convince a healthy person that they have a serious disorder.
Then you propose to them that only you can aid them in their recovery from this imaginary ailment.
Then in the course of treating them you will be given the opportunity to create some real problematic illness.
Now the person really is feeling quite unwell for good reason and will be likely to become even more dependent on your suggested “treatments”.
Meanwhile, you can empty their bank account whilst making them progressively more and more ill.
Finally, when they run out of money you can declare that their condition is sadly untreatable.
By that point it probably will be.
Climate alarmism is a vast version of this same scam.
In the case of climate alarmism, the victim of the fraud is the entire population of planet earth.
Ahh, the Lancet. Wasn’t that the journal that published a study in 1998 that claimed the mercury-based preservative in the MMR vaccine caused autism? I believe it was. And wasn’t this groundbreaking and scary study based on a comprehensive and representitive sample of 12 children? Why I believe it was again. And 10 of the original 13 authors retracted the paper in 2004, but not before various fringe activist groups used the study to whip up anti vaccine fever in parents, resulting in who knows how much damage. And finally the Lancet itself issued a retraction in 2010 — 12 years after the original flawed study was published and 6 years after all but three of the original authors admitted there was no evidence for the link in the first place.
The study was worse than flawed: it contained material misrepresentations of the way the study children were screened and recruited. But it passed whatever form of peer review was in place at the time, and Lancet made no serious investigation until over a decade later, despite extensive criticism of the study by other researchers.
You can read about the long road to retraction here.
Also, when the hoi polloi wake up and realize that fanatical warmists are overstating the catastrophe of climate change, they will loose even further faith in science, using this as an excuse to avoid vaccinating their children.
So yes, climate change rhetoric will affect the health of people, but not in the way the warmists claim.
A considerable puzzle to me is why so many people have lost the ability to appreciate the difference between the words lose and loose. The error is now so commonplace in correspondence that it cannot be attributed to a mere typographic error. My guess is that the cause lies in the educational profession’s disdain for the teaching of spelling.
Much of the gains in health and longevity are from vaccinations and antibiotics. What the extreme greens want is a killer virus. They hate people, especially poor people. It’s a moral imperative that we oppose their misanthropic pseudo scientific assertions.
Oops. Too much booze and oodles of o’s gives oomph to phonetical spelling.
[snip – multiple policy violations -mod]
Sorry, but that comment should have been snipped. Some pretty bad ad hominem that doesn’t add to the discussion and makes WUWT look bad.
Yes, snip that rant. No room for such intemperate stuff on the superb WUWT.
Concur.
This individual is probably bitter due being ejected from an alien abduction spaceship for having defective logic circuits. It should not be snipped, but identified for what it is: ROT
I agree – please snip that rant. It’s way over the top.
What a horrible comment. Apparently the posting policy of “No vulgarities of any kind”, no personal attacks and no name-calling is only selectively enforced by the moderators here.
This is one of the worst uneducated comments I have seen on WUWT. I have up to now never recommended a ban on any one individual. I do so on this one. What an asshat.
I suspect it could be used as an example of what we followers at WUWT, will not tolerate & accept, but I for one was rather surprised to say the least that this was not edited, or fully snipped! Apart from that the only “uneducated” comments I have ever read here were from warmists! AtB.
I concur, and it has been snipped. This one was skillfully crafted, using dashes and partial spellings to get around word filters, it didn’t get flagged and was allowed by the system without it being brought to the attention of a moderator first.
Thank you Andrew
Thanks Anthony.. [corrected; too late at night to typo straight!]
Take your meds and write, write, write. Read Franz Kafka for insight into where your gift may lead you if you develop it.
Eugene WR Gallun
What the hell are you talking about Mr. Massolint? There are some people in this world who still have a little decorum, and sanity. You are clearly not one of them.
My guess is you are an “investigative” journalist trying to demonstrate that the readers of this blog are bigoted idiots.
If I am right then I hope you will publish your scoop that you were wrong.
On the other hand, you might just be a surly teenager.
In which case, don’t worry about it. We all did stupid things when young.
Agreed – unpleasant and unhinged.
Disappointing ad hom.
NB Europe did not grow corn till long after corn was brought to Spain inn the 1490s.
Proably that comment wasn’t snipped because of its profound lack of coherent reasoning.
“heron diseased minds”
Is that how one becomes ‘bird-brained’?
lol irrelevant I read the other day we only have 100 years to live because of Cagw.
I’m sort of curious. How would one pronounce Peter Byass, or more specifically, the last name? Is it pronounced; by – ass? Or is it pronounced; bias?
Now, I know the foregoing is a silly comment on my part. But, my understanding is that life expectancy was around 45 years in 1900. What is it today? About 70-80 years? Why is that? The Industrial Revolution, maybe? So, I know, let’s get rid of the Industrial Revolution and return to a pre-Industrial Revolution era when life expectancies were shorter, and that way we’ll somehow increase … life … expec … tancies. And we’ll all be happy. And we’ll all be merry. And loving. And content. And satisfied. And secure. And neighborly. And peaceful. And, oh so healthy. And these people at the UN know just how to do that. They do. They really do. They super, really, really do.
How do you pronounce Byass again?
I had a similar problem with William con- … at which point I honestly could never remember the rest of his surname.
Remember when doctors used to think that humans should eat well and keep warm?
Well, apparently they still do.
Personally, I quite like being warm.
It is currently 9 degrees C in the UK in mid June.
Can somebody please turn up the thermostat.
Glastonbury festival is in a week and we need some heat.
Can’t somebody build some extra coal burning power stations or something – and fast.
Otherwise the paramedics are going to be stretchering away the hypothermia victims – which does often happen. And nobody wants to be medicalised for the combined effects of hypothermia and psychotropic drugs. Ain’t nobody got time for that!!!
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/winterhealth/Pages/KeepWarmKeepWell.aspx
Climate alarmism is a well-oiled money machine.
you forgot a word: “well-oil funded … money machine” (all large oil companies are up to their snouts in the trough of wind subsidies)
“Drivel”, “Demented schlock”, all absolutely appropriate. Here we are, reacting to what is so obviously nonsense. Lancet, shame, shame, shame! Like the American car industry, once you lose your credibility, you will never get it back. My son has a saying for it: If you put on the clown face, it’s really hard to get it off. Personally, I have had enough of the clown act.
What idiotic nonsense. Everyone today lead much longer and prosperous lives than people did a century ago. Even the poorest live better lives with higher calorie intake.
And Goklany, Lomborg and Oxford Union studies show that death rates from extreme events have fallen by 97% over the last 100 years. ALL because of the increased use of fossil fuels.
The absurdity is obvious, but I wonder about the general population and how they respond to the continuing nonsense. I do know that liberal, educated, registered Democrats will believe every word, and yet know very little on the subject. So, dust them off; I think the rest of the population is getting turned off by the incessant hysterical negative exclamations by the doomsday cult..