Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Al Jazeera reporting on a Lancet claim that climate change exposes children to a lifetime of harm.
Climate change exposes children to lifelong health harm: Doctors
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Climate change is already harming people’s health by increasing the number of extreme weather events and exacerbating air pollution, according to an annual study published on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal.
The study warned that if nothing is done to mitigate climate change, its impacts could burden an entire generation with disease and illness throughout their lives.
“Children are particularly vulnerable to the health risks of a changing climate. Their bodies and immune systems are still developing, leaving them more susceptible to disease and environmental pollutants,” said Nick Watts, who co-led The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change study.
He warned that health damage in early childhood is “persistent and pervasive”, and carries lifelong consequences.
“Without immediate action from all countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, gains in wellbeing and life expectancy will be compromised, and climate change will come to define the health of an entire generation,” he told a London briefing.
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Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/climate-change-exposes-children-lifelong-health-harm-doctors-191114065305748.html
The Lancet report is available here.
My question, if a few degrees warming is so harmful to human health, why don’t people living in warmer climates already suffer these harms?
Diseases, parasites and pests surely can’t tell the difference between warmer temperatures caused by global warming, and warmer temperatures caused by living closer to the equator.
Water and food security is a matter of investing in infrastructure. If all else fails, water security can be achieved with large scale desalination plants, like desalination systems used in the Middle East. All desalination requires is cheap energy and a society wealthy enough to build and maintain the required infrastructure.
I live on the edge of the tropics in a much warmer climate than anywhere in the USA. Yes my chances of encountering one of Australia’s nasty insect pests is slightly elevated by living in a warm climate. But there is this remarkable product called insect repellent which massively reduces this risk to my health.
The only thing holding back the life expectancy of people in poor countries is poverty, lack of resources to fix the problems which impact their life expectancy. Cheap fossil fuel energy infrastructure fixes poverty, as China and many other countries have demonstrated.
Doctors should be ashamed of themselves for putting their names to such wild claims.
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If the Lancet wants to address real as opposed to fictional harms to children it should take Greenpeace and its ignorant supporters to task for the number of children in Asia and elsewhere who have lost their sight or died of malnutrition entirely unnecessarily because of its calculated and deeply dishonest opposition to golden rice and GM crops.
Then we might think better of the Lancet.
The doomsday clock of British science is in the final countdown.
“Children are particularly vulnerable to the health risks of a changing climate. ”
Do the brilliant light bulb authors of this junk piece know how much the temperature changes between January and July (and back to January again) here in the Upper Midwest—ever year! And they expect me to believe that 0.52C degrees (0.13 degrees C per decade from what I understand) of warming over the 40-year satellite temperature record is what we need to worry about regarding kids’ health!?
Have they seen how quickly we went from summer to winter here in the Upper Midwest this year? Do they have the evidence that extreme weather is getting worse and more frequent? The observational evidence I’ve seen says no.
Replacing poverty with the climate change scare narrative as a main contributor to illness, disease and short life spans reflects the fact that sound science has been abandon to some degree even in the medical profession. If The Lancet is doing this, they need to be called out for it.
I am wondering , CD , if there has been a significant change in Lancet editorial policy since Christiana Figueres joined them in Mid 2017;
-https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)31667-7/fulltext
“Christiana Figueres joins The Lancet Countdown—delivering on the promise of Paris”
Previously Lancet had published at least 2 papers , gathered from global statistics, which concluded that:
1. Moderate cold is far , far, more likely to increase mortality than moderate warmth (deviations from a comfortable mean).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
“Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”
2. Considering the effects of RCP 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5 on mortality : in many parts of the world the most extreme changes in temp(RCP8.5) do not cause heat-induced mortality to exceed that induced by cold.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30156-0/fulltext
“Projections of temperature-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios”
(both open access , the latter published nov 2017 , but presumably submitted and accepted several months before)
Now I appreciate that
1: there may be papers that contradict the Lancet conclusions , but here I am just considering possible changes to Lancet policy due to the influence of Figueres and Helen Clark
2: the papers mentioned do not specifically talk about child mortality , but again see comment above.
Mike,
I didn’t know Christina Figueres was on the editorial staff of The Lancet. The Lancet is (presumably) a medical journal. As far as I am concerned, anyone (and everyone) who sits on the editorial staff of a medical journal should have a medical background. Doctors with considerable medical experience would obviously be the best.
Given the background of Figueres and Helen Clark and their political bent, I am at a loss to understand what they are doing there at The Lancet. An editorial policy change, perhaps induced by the two of them, would (in my mind) explain how a climate change scare hit piece like this found its way into an issue of the journal–despite what previous published studies might have said.
With their climate scare catechism, there is apparently no end to the degree to which people like Figueres are finding their way into every nook and cranny of life where they can spread the religion. I don’t know who sits on the staff of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) here in the U.S., but I sure hope their staff doesn’t include people like Figueres and Clark.
And a clueless mass media, serving as the mouthpiece of the climate scare, only makes matters worse.
The Lancet should review disease problems and mortality rates following the Medieval Optimum.
That ended sharply in the early 1300s on the way to the Little Ice Age.
Until ambitious statists got involved, warming periods were wonderful for most critters and plants.
The audacity of the Left is astounding.
Climate change alarmism is creating real damage by unnecessarily indoctrinating young children, making them fearful, hopeless, causing them to suffer needless anxiety and inculcating misanthropic attitudes, sometimes even toward their own parents. This is farging evil.
The Guardian newspaper (sic!) lists 5 ‘principles’ about their reporting on climate. One of them is to use the term ‘climate crisis’ throughout instead of ‘climate change’. They were already off the rails. Now they have completely fallen off the embankment too.
What about the effects on the mental health of children caused by being exposed to an unrelenting torrent of apocalyptic fantasies about the end of the world as we know it, that will all be caused by the use of fossil fuel?
Unlike loosely cobbled-together, putative future effects of climate change, this is real and it’s happening now, and it’s unprecedented.
Children are already taking steps to correct this danger in developed countries. They are staying indoors all day playing on their Ipads. They balance their health danger availability by becoming flabby, fat and overweight, and never playing sport. Success at last. The Lancet has not been a science magazine for decades.
Bloody Doctors ! 🙂
Consider, the medical crowd in the UK effectively had a Union at the time when shepherds in Dorset were being sent to a land down under for forming an ‘Illegal Combination’ So in the public eye they will carry more, much more, credibility than any number of supposed scientists. That of course carries a heavy degree of responsibility, and whilst I would not expect the medical community to stick their necks out to the extent of proclaiming one way or the other on the topic of CC, for The Lancet to be publishing on the subject does seem to suggest that their profession has been infiltrated by Quacks ?
A dangerous trend that needs attention.
The trouble is that the editors in chief of both the mainstream generalist medical journals here in the UK , the British Medical Journal (Fiona Godlee) and the Lancet (Richard Horton) are left wingers, and both are committed to the narrative of DAGW. Godlee paints her face blue and goes on climate marches. One of her assistants wrote an editorial entitled (I kid you not) “When balance is bias”. Horton is the more egregious and controversial of the two. He writes that it is part of the duty of a doctor, as defined by our General Medical Council, to take all possible nonviolent action against climate change (i.e. support XR). Professor Sir Mark Pepys, former Professor of Medicine in London and a Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote of Horton’s “long-standing and wholly inappropriate use of the Lancet as a vehicle for his own extreme political views”. And that goes for me, too., from my perspective as a retired surgeon.
Good insight 🙂
I hope you can pardon what amounts to my Trolling on the topic. Hopefully though, exposure of political bias in the medical literature, and the resultant public gaze, will result in the vast majority of the profession putting the Snickersnee about amongst the awful folk you mention.
“Children are particularly vulnerable to the health risks of a changing climate. [ ],” said Nick Watts, who co-led The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change study.
“Without immediate action from all countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, gains in wellbeing and life expectancy will be compromised, [ ] ,” he told a London briefing.
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At least “changing climate” poster childs can bring “gains in wellbeing” and ££ for “The Lancet”:
How much does it cost to publish in The Lancet?
The fee has initially been set at $3000 per article for all Elsevier journals except those published by Cell Press, which have a $5000 per article fee, and The Lancet, which will have a fee of £400 per page. The difference in fees for The Lancet and Cell Press reflects higher associated costs.
Do you have to pay to publish in a journal?
Answer: It’s not true that authors have to pay for journal publishing in most cases. Traditional subscription-based journals require the reader to pay for access to the journal; the author does not have to pay any charges for publishing in the journal.
… The journal submission stage can be challenging. Jan 27, 2016
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&ctxs=2&sxsrf=ACYBGNQuSdGARvNRYwsp_p57TVpa4aF-3Q:1574643563634&q=lancet+countdown+wiki&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjeioiylITmAhWn1aYKHcBJCL4Q1QIwCXoECAwQBg&biw=360&bih=518&dpr=3