UPDATE: Holy moly. Dr. Richard North over at the EU Referendum points to this, (screencap below) which makes Ric’s article (further below) look tame. Add this to what’s going on in the AMA, and it looks like a effort to co-opt the medical profession in the role of “trusted advocate”. They couldn’t get the TV weathercasters to go along, so they moved up the food chain. Expect climate change lectures with speeding tickets next. “Sir do you realize you were going 65 in a 60 zone? That hurts the planet with excessive emissions”. – Anthony
North says:
We are back to “foxtrot oscar” time. The medical profession is having a hard enough time convincing me that they can deal with the issues for which they are paid. The very last thing I am interesting in hearing from them is their ill-informed views on climate change. To use their positions to push them would be an abuse of trust. And it is quite disturbing that these people can’t even see that.
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Guest Post By Ric Werme
I give up. I almost was able to shake my head and move on, but no, this latest bit of congressional spin combined with general disdain for rational discourse and a vapid comment in Lancet got under my skin. All I can do is to try to pass it on. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn the page, metaphorically speaking, of course.
Has the world gone mad with stupid science, stupid testimony, and stupid editorials? I guess so. Consider this from The Hill:
Capps pointed to a 2009 article in The Lancet, a medical journal, that said climate change could be the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
“That makes climate change a bigger public health problem than AIDS, than malaria, than pandemic flu,” Capps said. “That’s why we need to take steps to address this cause behind this growing public health problem.”
I’m going to skip the rest of the article, read it if you wish, it will sound all too familiar. I merely want to call attention to this “spin device”.
Note that the reference to The Lancet included the word “could.” Right off the bat we’re into a lot of uncertainty. I assume they didn’t offer other possibilities. Personally, I think Alzheimers deserves consideration, but who knows, hangnails could be the biggest threat. Time will tell.
Capps took that reference, discarded the “could” and added a few possible candidates – OMG! I just Googled for |aids malaria pandemic flu| and Capps’ comment is referenced by seven other web pages already! I was looking for what might have been her source or if she thought of that list on her own. Try Epic Disasters, it’s pretty close.
Where was I? Oh – she changed the indefinite statement into something that is completely certain and included things that The Lancet may not have considered. Perhaps The Lancet left those off just to make its comment about climate change look more dire.
Why do people continue to use this sort of spin? It’s almost as though Capps has no better argument and resorts to something she hopes people won’t see through. Judging from the comments at The Hill, it didn’t work.
Oh well, if climate change is the worst thing to happen to us this century, we’ll do quite well.
There is something about all the ‘safe’ levels that really bother me. I moved to Oz from the UK because the UK is cold and pretty dreary, weather wise (I’ll keep my views on people to myself). I am now in Sydney, and it is much warmer.
People brought things to Oz from the UK to over the last couple of centuries. Things have grown. Most of these do pretty well. They did not all die off. Why will a couple of C kill everything and make everything else ill if a good 10C change does not, eh?
Yes, yes, I know that some things may not have adapted well, but can you show me data for anything that did not? Most trees are flourishing, although they do get odd ideas about what season they are in. Some flower in autumn, for example. They live. Our garden has flowers of one kind or another all year round. We even have oranges and lemons which ripen in the middle of winter (since it is a bit too cold for them here to ripen earlier). Things adapt!
Don’t get me started on the rabbits, foxes and cane toads, either!
Given what was said in the Senate today, the biggest threat this century appears to be stupidity; and they are certainly capable of, and apparently determined to; kill us with it.
Heck, they almost did me in today.
Mrs. Capps was elected to office after the incumbent, Walter Capps, died 9 months into his term of office. She is from Santa Barbara, the limousine liberal capital of the Western United States, after Beverly Hills. Her pashalik includes UCSB and several other bastions of liberal education. She is, I’m told, a nice person and was probably not elected for her political acumen, but for other reasons. She is not a useful idiot. No further comment.
Can we find another useful idiot to announce that the threat of Climate Change causes cognitive dissonance and insanity? It would at least be a true statement.
Where do they get these folks? They are “manufactured… Yes that’s right…
Take this fellow the director of The Canadian Association of Physicians for The Environment (CAPE) — Gideon Foreman:
http://www.themarknews.com/authors/117-gideon-forman
Mr. Forman holds a Master’s degree in philosophy from McGill University. He interned at The Nation – America’s oldest weekly journal – and studied creative writing at the Banff Centre for the Arts. From 1997-2004, he was Vice President of Strategic Communications Inc., a firm that provides political consulting and fundraising advice to the non-profit sector. In 1999, Strategic Communications was named to The Profit 100 as one of Canada’s fastest growing firms.
In 2004, he became Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). Under his leadership, CAPE won a gold medal at the 2006 Canadian Environment Awards. In 2007, he was the co-winner of a Virtuoso Award from the International Association of Business Communicators (London, England). He is currently a Judge for the Green Toronto Awards. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Forum, and The Toronto Star, among other publications.
Now CAPE is involved in many good works — banning pesticides, weed killers, demonizing Coal Generation of Electrical Power…
Their objectives?
http://www.cape.ca/about.html
CAPE’s Objectives
1. To educate physicians on environmental issues, providing them with both accurate information and a framework for thinking about environmental problems
2. To prepare spokespersons to comment on the health implications of environmental issues in an accurate and rigorous manner
3. To serve as a “think tank” for considering the health implications of environmental issues
4. To provide a forum in which physicians can meet and discuss health issues associated with environmental problems together with non-physician colleagues who have the knowledge and insight they need
5. To advocate certain positions or courses of action.
Makes you all warm and fuzzy — doesn’t it? Of course they are the people who claim that the Coal Fired power plants of Ontario are killing thousands of people every year. Dr. Ross McKitrick looked at the claims and found they did not stand up to statistical analysis.
Indeed, he found that if you backcast using their methodology he found that the deaths caused by “coal fired air pollution” exceed the actual number of deaths in previous years.
Beware “Physicians” bearing climate studies. It may actually be someone with a bent for creative writing.
Thanks, Anthony. I’m a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology, dating back to the days when HIV was first observed in Haitian immigrants & a few other populations. Our group (Univ of Illinois) was the first to conclude that its transmission seemed to mirror Hepatitis B and that we were likely dealing with a bloodborne pathogen.
Hoo, boy….little did we know at the time!
This type of public health scare-mongering is preposterous. If they want to go after a real health hazard, then ban tobacco. Smoking will kill many more souls than climate change is ever likely to.
I thought I was unelectable, but I was very very wrong. Bless her heart. She looks happy in there.
From Randy Links on April 6, 2011 at 7:39 pm:
Nah, not Groucho Marx. He could get some votes in Illinois, since from there it’d just be those registered voters going for “one of their own,” except they’re all registered Democrats.
BTW, if you see those particular voters going to the polls, shooting them in the head is recommended.
Bedtime here, but she looks like a certifible, complete loon to me, ala Nancy P from the same geographic neighborhood. What is it about Californians that makes me want to??? L
So taking her statement as fact, then any spending not related to C/C or C/D or what ever its called today ! is a waste as any benefit is offset by the ‘we’re all gonna die’ problem so is she suggesting we cut off all funding to public health to fight her particular dragon ?
Is it another case of ‘band wagon climbing’?
The Lancet may be correct in this case though, cold weather produces more deaths than warm. Oh for a little global warming.
I think doctors should work on things they are paid to work on.
It would be too much to see them come out with a cure for heart disease or cancer.
How about just answering their phone when I call?
The Lancet article that Mrs Capps worked from is based on nonsense. Humans have always thrived when not battling cold climates.
As an example, the district where I grew up in New Zealand is oddly similar to the South-East of the UK where I currently reside, but has a slightly warmer climate with a much higher rainfall. The first English and European settlers cleared the standing native bush (forests) to create grassland farms and planted English trees to shelter their stock and to provide reminders of their home country. Both trees and settlers flourished in the warmer, wetter climate. During WWI, medical surveys of troops noted that the Colonial troops were taller, broader and with fewer health problems than their cold-country cousins. No doubt the diet the colonials enjoyed was a significant factor, but warmer climates suits humans admirably.
To gain an inkling of the effects of climactic cooling, read some of the histories of English villages that were recorded during the LIA. Cooling is scary.
A comet smashing into the earth COULD be bad for our health. What are we doing about it? There is a precedent you know……
The climate change to worry about is cold.
As one drives about the central UK, it’s pretty obvious that the warmth-needing plants, we’ve been planting in our gardens over the past decade or so, haven’t done too well over this last winter especially.
The eucalyptus we planted in our garden about 15 years ago, split its trunk bark and expired, several other shrubs (can’t say what type, labels have long gone!) have succumbed too. I’ve seen no end of dead palm-type trees in city gardens, many of my circle of friends have noted that they’ve had to replant this spring, as the effects of last winter have become apparent.
Relieved to hear that your politicians are as intellectually challenged as ours are! It’s not just us then.
OT – I posted a complaint to BBC 1 regarding their early evening magazine programme, “The One Show” presenter Matt Baker after screening a piece about the reactor fire at Sellafield in 1956, adding the comment “& up to 260 cancer cases could be related to that incident”, or words to that effect, in which I pointed out the operative word was “could”, & that just as equall it “could not, etc. Not a sausage from them in acknowledgement. Perhaps I have used up my quota of complaints this year already………..one!
The same lunacy is happening in the UK corridors of the British Veterinary Association. Watch this space.
One wonders how all this plays out against the sweep of nations history.
One would have thought that Climategate was the Pickett’s Gettysbergy charge high water mark for global warmers and they’d be reduced to fringe and, one prays, just fade away. But the political Left is more akin to Mao’s Long March. What’s happened is climate has morphed into “pollution” and is joining the ranks of DDT. It seems nothing short of a full frontal dismemberment of the warmist claims into the dustbin of Piltdown Man’s bones will there ever be a reprieve from them.
Even in this posting you see the politicians resorting to “costs too much”. The GOP should simply accept the Dem’s amendment and counter with one that simply says, “Yes Virginia, we will vote to say that climate change is a fraud and we’re ending ALL climate fraud funding. Not because it costs too much, but because it is a fraud”. And make it a big issue in the 2012 elections as part of the No Energy No Time policy of the Dems.
What you’re witnessing is the regrouping of the Left using their normal tools. The GOP is allowing them their regrouping. This is exactly how you lose. With the Left, there is no such thing as a static defense.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says: April 6, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Pardon my ignorance of epidemiology Dr P.H., but would you explain how tobacco has killed more human (souls) than injury, inc direct human violence and industrial illnesses/accidents and other infectious diseases?
In regard to doctors, given the expectations of living from the abundant slice of a GDP how could anyone doubt that they expand their repertoire to accommodate the latest ‘findings in research? Freudian to say the least.
In many other countries, where number of sorcerers/per head population is more prevalent these peddlars make their living from ‘healing’ by directly dealing with the ‘illnesses’ they instil or allow construction of. Use of [alleviation of] fear, guilt, the denial of individual expression and/or negation of science are promulgated. Such use of cultural devices and real bodily practices framed in local lores (laws) are extremely powerful and extremely painful. And [communally] humiliating, as intended, generally to the women and youth. Sorcery, like rubbish science ensures maintenance of maximum control over swathes of the local human population and, naturally control of a local economy.
Dr P.H would understand this if he has worked with Hiatian people.
Apologies … [sp] Haitian
A few years ago the head of the AMA got on a gun control kick on the basis that guns in the home killed children. When I noted my doctor’s questionnaire asked how many guns I owned I asked him why he didn’t include swimming pools and automobiles. After all, they kill children too. He answered that the AMA had urged its members to give gun safety talks to patients who owned guns.
I am an antique gun collector and a retired Marine. I don’t need no stinking doctor to give me safety lectures.
I fired him.
Surely human health is a subject difficult enough to master. Let’s encourage the medical profession to stick to that.
Perhaps if your doctor gives you a lecture on global warming it is time to find another doctor.
It appears that leftists are shameless and unrestrained in their willingness to use any means to advance their agenda to destroy personal liberty. Climate change is not the first issue that leftists sought to use physicians for advancing.
A few years ago, a coalition of physicians that included the American Medical Association (AMA) and, not surprisingly, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP),
were urging their members to treat firearms in the home as a health issue that justified intrusion as well. Now that ObamaCare ™ is slowly herding people into a single payer system with standardized electronic medical records, should I now to worry that health care professionals will be required to quietly check boxes so as to alert monitors of unacceptable personal behavior? Or maybe that the patient refused to answer the ‘private lifestyle questions’? Paging George Orwell.
The real threat from ‘climate change’ is global cooling. That is the threat. Warmth is good, just ask the Romans who lived through their warm period.
the tele item also mentioned the Military? are supporting this..why?
the BMJ and Lancet have no cred..too much money taken for ads and favourable reports, exposed already.
in aus theres a collection of spacecadet doc also pushing this barrow, its full of shite as are most barrows:-) the sheepies will go along though and thats what they will rely on, peoples idiotic blind faith that their GP is “god” and he knows all and is never wrong or ill informed..even as they die from the wrong drug/side effects etc
Your first mistake is expecting rational thinking from an elected California Democrat.