Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen – 6 November 2023
If you have ignored the previous revelations here at WUWT about climate propaganda news cabals operating in the MSM (newspapers, public radio, news agencies, magazines – worldwide) such as Columbia University’s Covering Climate Now [co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019] and Inside Climate News [“Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet.”], then I offer you yet one more to add to your “can’t we just pretend this isn’t really happening?” list.
The world’s major health journals, not all of them, but a majority of the major medical journals, have issued a joint statement. Let me re-word that: The Editors of the world’s leading medical journals have issued a joint statement as an Editorial in the BMJ (frequently referred to as the British Medical Journal). How many of them? “Over 200”. The joint statement starts with this:
“Time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency
Joint action is essential for planetary and human health
Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency.” [source — Read the the full BMJ Editorial here: https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2355 ]”
Don’t for a minute think that the 200 signatories represent the membership or ownership of their respective medical journals. That would be false – not [corrected by kh] even for the BMJ:
“BMJ is wholly owned by the British Medical Association (BMA), the professional association and trade union for doctors in the United Kingdom.” “The BMA grants editorial freedom to The BMJ’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr Kamran Abbasi. The views expressed in the journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the BMA.” [ source ]
The members of the British Medical Association were not polled to see if they would like to issue this statement in the BMJ on their behalf. (Brits: Ask your doctor, he/she will never even have heard of the statement.) I suspect that none of the journals obtained prior approval of the members of the organizations that their journal is supposed to represent to speak on their behalf. The statement is just from the editors….exactly who?
These are the actual authors of the statement:
1. Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief, The BMJ, London, UK
2. Parveen Ali, editor in chief, International Nursing Review
3. Virginia Barbour, editor in chief, Medical Journal of Australia
4. Thomas Benfield, editor in chief, Danish Medical Journal
5. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, editor in chief, JAMA
6. Stephen Hancocks, editor in chief, British Dental Journal
7. Richard Horton, editor in chief, The Lancet
8. Laurie Laybourn-Langton, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
9. Robert Mash, editor in chief, African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine
10. Peush Sahni, editor in chief, National Medical Journal of India
11. Wadeia Mohammad Sharief, editor in chief, Dubai Medical Journal
12. Paul Yonga, editor in chief, East African Medical Journal
13. Chris Zielinski, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK
However, authors and signatories are not the same. You can image how this works: The Editors-in-Chief of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet (an independent, international general medical journal) and the BMJ (sort of the journal of the British Medical Association) – nominally the three most powerful and prestigious medical journals in the world – send out an editorial statement to a mailing list of all the editors of medical and health journals around the world with a strongly worded suggestion that they climb aboard the bandwagon. Who would want to be left behind?
So two hundred (maybe-) editors sign up to go along to get along. [ See here for a full list of editors signing on for their journals. ]
As you know, the so-called Climate Crisis has produced a lot of funding for those climate scientists. And the climate science field stands to gain a lot of social and political power if nations (like the USA) officially declare a “Climate Emergency”. And then, maybe they can get a Global Health Emergency declared to allow them to ride in the climate emergency’s money-train’s caboose.
Medial researchers have already been reaping some of that research dough to study and write papers about how the climate crisis will create death and destruction under RCP8.5. See for instance this gem: Climate change crisis goes critical”.
And where does this idea come from? The cousin of the IPCC, the U.N.’s World Health Organization (see: here).
What does this mean for you? For us? It means that there will be a lot more non-science nonsense from the health and medicine crowd needing to be to debunked.
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Author’s Comment:
Let me assure you that this means that the field of medicine, or at least many of its professional journals, are now politically compromised on any topic that might even peripherally related to ambient temperature (now or in the future), the spread of mosquito or tick-vectored diseases (such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), Lyme disease, Anaplasmosis, Ehrlichiosis, Babesiosis, Powassan (POW) and Tularemia – in the USA and many more elsewhere), heat related symptoms, any and all diseases spread by flooding, floods themselves, landslides, dam failures and all the other disasters that can and have been blamed on climate change (falsely for the most part). These journals will seek out and approve for publication only studies that find present or future calamity, the majority using models that depend on the now-impossible RCP8.5 or its new clone-with-another-name. And, because the journals accept and publish some of these types of studies, more and more will be written. Few of them will have any value to science or health but will mirror the absurd talking points used in the editorial mentioned in the main essay.
I invite readers who are professionals in the field of medicine and health to help in the task of countering the exaggerations and falsehoods that have been appearing and will appear in your journals. If you can, publish in the journals themselves. But if you need help facilitating publishing here, you can write to me at my first name at i4.net.
Read more, read deeply, read widely.
And, thanks for reading.
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Just more green virtue signaling.
Prepare to be jabbed.
Add it to the list of shrill pronouncements by the AGW crowd.
Must be another major COP-out conference coming soon !
Creationism is alive and well. We have to conserve the yesterday. YESTERDAY FOREVER!
They are being blocked legislatively too much so this is a way to sneak climate regulation in thru the back door as a health regulation. Especially in the UK where they have national health system they can put stuff thru as a health issue without votes. .
The ‘success’ of COVID19 masks (don’t work but) and shutdowns (don’t work but) has emboldened them bigly. Morph AGW into ‘global health crisis’ and we get all to OBEY! our climate demands:
eat bugs not beef (even tho methane is NOT a real world GHG because water vapor)
freeze in the dark when the grid fails (because we have no grid scale storage)
give up private transportation (because there are not enough minerals to go EV)
send all your wealth to the second tier ‘disadvantaged’ nations (explicit IPCC).
Masks worked in Japan when almost everybody wore them.
In the US, with about 300 million people, and maybe half the population wore masks it had 1.2 million deaths.
In Japan, with about 125 million people, and most of the people wore masks, it had only about 75,000 deaths.
Luckily for us who want to compare, Japan and USA are nearly identical in geography, culture and longevity, right?
Japan has a culture of wearing masks, the US and Japan are both temperate climates, and longevity is long in both places.
The Japanese have historically worn masks when someone has a cold out in public. You can’t deny that stopping sneeze spatter over a sushi bar or in an elevator or bus is going to reduce spread of respiratory viruses. Your mother told you so, and so do many first year med school group lab studies…..
So, you are saying that 4,000 deaths per million in USA are from Covid.
And, 600 deaths per million in Japan are from Covid.
Therefore, 3,400 deaths per million are because less people wore masks.
(single parameter correlations are silly. But I think if I used gov’t payout, per death, as a single parameter comparison, I would have a better argument than you.)
Masks reduce the distance viral particles spread.
What do you mean by “worked”? No mask I have seen available to the public stops a cough or sneeze from spreading aspirated particles. Yes, they stop droplets like the ones in computer monitors, but COVID is airborne, not macro-droplet-borne. When you sneeze or cough behind a mask it spits our thousands of tiny droplets invisible to the eye. They travel a long way – certainly more than 6 feet.
I have not yet seen any declarative, science based study showing that coughing behind a face mask reduces airborne viral disease. The main effect is it makes people feel virtuous, and muffles their speech of course, so they have to speak louder, creating even more edge-escaping splatter and mucus-sourced microdroplets.
Why so few deaths in Japan? They isolated the vulnerable, treated people with decent ACE2 receptor-attaching decoys and gave people anti-inflams and ionophores. Uganda had FAR fewer deaths per 100,000. So did Tanzania which not only didn’t impose masks, didn’t shut anything and didn’t isolate the vulnerable.
Your thesis about masks in the USA is baseless. The USA if full of fat people who avoid the sun dues to skin cancer scares. They have an appalling level of serum 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D. There is a strong correlation between 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D level and COVID pathology. Videos at MedCram explained why in the spring of 2020.
Then there are “alternative views” like this one
https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/collections/choosing-wisely/140.html
which recommend we do not even test for it.
The Black population of the US has even less in their bloodstream than the non-Black population, and this translated into a higher death rate.
The Blacks had a high death rate from COVID-19 and then started wearing masks and their death rate dropped.
QRSandTUV, Seems to me, that i recall, a high rate of blacks were out burning down neighborhoods sans masks and sharing their COVID because black lives matter. My guess is that smoke inhalation was chalked up to COVID along with drive by shooting and drug overdoses but that would be another story for another day.
More junk science from a “more on”. You need to stop watching MS/CNN. Those folks make this shite up as they go along.
Obedience in USA may have been overstated. People planned to leave groceries untouched for hours and spray items with germ killer but people also showed up at the grocery store with “seasonal allergies” and ordered pizza delivery because, hey, mind your own business.
Its the old 2nd hand harm to others, bogus authority that they grab by making up fake claims with the aid of the propaganda ministry.
Michael Crichton, M.D. is sorely missed.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/26/anniversary-issue-the-crichton-caltech-michelin-lecture/
Just in time for COP28. Won’t help.
Debating ‘loss and damage’ funding is VERY difficult (Japanese idiom) when there is no ‘loss and damage’ to be found.
And debating a resulting ‘global health crisis’ when there demonstrably isn’t one would be equally futile. The old ‘malaria returns to NYC’ scare goes all the way back to JAMA in 1996. Turns out all four patients in that first AGW health scare contracted it in Africa and were diagnosed upon return to NYC. Wasn’t mosquitoes. Was airplanes.
Most likely they have a safe and effective solution ready.
I just thought that bore repeating.
My Dad was an Army MD in the Philippines in ’46. Started his private practice as a Pediatrician in 1951 and worked in it till he died 50 years later.
He was appalled at some of the he saw while he was alive. Like labor unions, the leadership leads the members around by the nose.
I used to try to read his “MD” magazine when I was a kid. But I never became an MD so I don’t qualify for what Kip is asking.
If you qualify, please do what Kip is requesting.
Some of the stuff my Dad was appalled at “snuck” by him in MD originations he was in.
Investigate. Don’t just be appalled when it’s too late.
Laurie Laybourn on the above list is not even close to being a Physician.
(I’m not one either, but am entitled to call myself Doctor when I choose, and have studied far more health-relevant science than he has).
From his own website:
“He has a MPhil in economics from Oxford University and a BSc in physics.”
https://laurielaybourn.com/about/
The guy is just an out-and-out activist wanting to change “society” by riding the global boiling bandwagon. It certainly invites the question of how and why this motley crew of ‘health professionals’ came to be associated with each other.
Also, it is not yet clear to me how the The British Dental Journal manages to relate teeth to climate change (Cue American jokes about British teeth.)
Well, with all the unreliable energy being touted as the answer to climate change inevitably many people sitting in the dentists chair will find their treatment interrupted on a regular basis. 🙂
I googled for a British teeth joke to paste here and was disappointed to find only pages “debunking” the myth. Oh well, assume this was an obligatory a British teeth joke and move on…. nothing to see here.
The ironing is off the scale –
Heal thyself doctor, before telling everyone else to
They pretend to worry about biodiversity loss…
… yet they keep building wind turbines and solar industrial estate, destroying millions of trees in the process, and now threatening sea life with offshore wind turbines.
They keep disallowing the use of coal etc to developing countries, leading to large areas of forest timber being denuded.
Fortunately, that haven’t had any luck reducing the CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentration that provide for ALL life on the planet.
bnice2000 ==> The “biodiversity crisis” is another invisible disaster — which is probably not happening as described, and has nothing whatever to so with health — it seems they just throw it in to make things sound like “everything” is going to the devil. Seldom does one read quite so many false “talking points in a single one page editorial. almost nothing they say is actually true.
“almost nothing they say is actually true.”
The Voices of our medical professional societies are spewing climate alarmist propaganda.
All our institutions are corrupted by this CAGW hoax.
There is no evidence of a CO2 crisis or an environmental crisis.
These people ought to know better.
Their ignorance just adds to the confusion.
I am unsurprised at the medical society’s virtue signalling since they also
drank the “woke” kool-aid as well. As an example, my medical journals are using the term “birthing person” in place of a pregnant woman. Its awful!
“… Lyme disease, Anaplasmosis…”
I had both at the same time. Pretty bad but not as bad as shingles.
My significant other got Shingles a few years back. Very bad, painful. But since it flared up then, she doesn’t need the vaccine. Immune system solved it forever.
Vaccination still recommended after a shingles infection – Harvard Health
Right- my doctor told me that. So I got it- you have to get it twice within 6 months. The shot is more painful than most. I highly recommend everyone get the shot. Shingles is extremely painful and can do serious damage to you. I had been warned to get the shot before I got shingles but I just didn’t get around to it. When I had shingles, I had some prescription pain medicine. I took the full dose- which did nothing to stop the pain. The pain was about as bad as as a very bad case of sciatica.
people get return bouts of shingles, its the gift that keeps in giving in the virus world, sorry. and i doubt the vax would do anything to fix that
Joseph Zorzin ==> My condolences — nasty diseases. Reasons for taking all the normal tick precautions in tick country.
We have ticks here, and we spend a lot of time in the woods and gardens, where the ticks are spread by the local burgeoning deer population, which has been allowed to increase beyond any sense.
I once bumped in to Nancy Pelosi.
She turned me into a newt.
But I got better . . .
We do not have a climate crisis.
We do not have a biodiversity crisis.
We do not have a health crisis
We have a crisis of consciense.
and spelling 🙁
yes… he meant CON-science.
might I add
crisis of intelligence
Crisis of consensus?
More cover for intellectually lazy writing and lame conclusions in journal paper submissions.
Oh No! A global health crisis!
We’re all gonna die!
/sarc
\|O|/
A list of 200 is nice. Now all we have to do is take their internal combustion vehicles from them, cut off all gas to their homes, meter their electricity so they only receive the proportion of electricity generated by wind and solar, meter their offices to equal the proportion generated by wind and solar, if the office is heated by gas close the vent, if they use public transport it can’t be fossil fuel operated. I’m sure there is a lot more they can give up to save us, we’ll get back to them as we remember them. Enjoy your new life you fakers.
There are so many lies packed into their screed it’s tedious to address them all. It’s a collection of utterly vacuous statements.
“Climate crisis” is a lie. There is no evidence that the ridiculously slow rate of climate change isn’t easily managed by simply adapting.
“Biodiversity loss” is a lie. Species adapt, go extinct, and evolve all the time. They ignore the fact that evolution happens constantly and everywhere. No one knows how many different species there are, how many are going extinct, and how many are evolving to populate new niches in the biosphere. Anyone who says they do is a liar.
“Human health is directly damaged by both the climate crisis . . . and the nature crisis.”
No, they are not. Human health is improved by a warming planet. A cold planet directly damages human health as numerous studies show and everyone knows from experiencing the cold of winter and the prevalence of respiratory viruses and cold-caused deaths.
There is zero evidence that deforestation and animal habitat loss is bad for human health. Sure, we’d probably be sad if there were no more elephants or tigers or other charismatic megafauna, but it wouldn’t have any impact on human health.
“Indigenous peoples’ approaches to land and sea management have a particularly important role in regeneration and continuing care.”
No, they don’t. Indigenous people denuded forests for firewood and building materials and fished and hunted until stocks depleted then moved on. The only thing that saved the forests and prey were the fact that indigenous people were very inefficient, had short lifespans, and a high mortality rate. It is modern agricultural methods and technology and wildlife management that has allowed societies to flourish and develop ways to use resources efficiently, and to conserve forests, prairies, and other wild places and live alongside other species without depleting them. Habitat loss, overgrazing, overfishing, overhunting are features of developing societies that are transitioning from the desperation of subsistence living to better living conditions but haven’t become prosperous enough to afford to manage their resources carefully. They will get there, just as prosperous societies have done. The U.S. has more trees and forests and protected wildlife and habitat now then they did a century ago, because they can afford to.
This is the expected outcome of the long march through the institutions.
How many did you fall for?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-RCOfdWYAAszf1?format=jpg&name=medium
And the WHO global pandemic treaty will then allow them to dictate all our lives when the WHO uses this as a means of usurping all power from the world’s democracies. – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/27/who-pandemic-treaty-would-be-a-threat-to-our-freedom/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_psc_ppc_dsa_news&gclid=CjwKCAiA3aeqBhBzEiwAxFiOBv7cXHdJnhqDFVaH90l5U3sqS3DIS7dRs_ZwfH1m9IYKljLJANsciRoCB2MQAvD_BwE
and this ties it into the recent WEF ideology to have all nations sign into the global control of “health” using pandemic OR health risk to enable EU control over sovreign nations, in regards to borders travel and personal behaviour control..just like covid lockdowns they loved so much.
this is a down n dirty attempt to make it appear as if its real and that doctors are concerned.
medicos should stick to patient care. and editors shouldnt be allowed to misrepresent as they are
This reminds me of a “crisis” we had locally. Back when Michele Obama was promoting her eat local campaign, someone in the grade schools got the bright idea to have the kids eat Yucca. Pretty soon some grade schoolers got a tummy ache — maybe some other symptoms. I don’t know if anyone called Mr. Yuck the local poison center about Yucca. Soon lots of kids had symptoms of all sorts.
They started showing up at the ER. People at the hospital were feeling a bit panicky because they didn’t really know what kids had been eating, or how many kids would soon be at the ER, or if the symptoms were real. Eventually they concluded it was mostly a case of contagious hysteria.
I think a lot of this crisis is similar except to replace the ER with the PR.
Careful observation and accurate record keeping are or should be important to both medical doctors and meteorologists. I lived for over a decade in a very hot semi desert area. Many summer days were in the nineties °F with days quite often over 100°F. I cannot remember – despite not having air conditioners – anyone dying because of the heat. We had a constant and plentiful supply of water and both fruit and vegetables flourished. I would like to see the documentation of the observations and records that these health journals used to substantiate their claims of a global climate health emergency. I suspect it is based on what is in fact hearsay and that the journals likely all using a single source.
Michael in Dublin ==> Their stance is mostly based on projections and predictions from climate models using RCP8.5 — which is generally now considered impossible. And serious misunderstandings about vector-borne diseases spreading as temperatures warm (if they do).
What is a biodiversity crisis? Evolution will stop and everything gradually dies out rather than adapt? What is it about the narcisso-socialist habit of mind that people, societies, economies, and even nature are treated as static? People on coasts will drown because they cannot adapt to a ten-inch per century rise. Birth rates are fixed unless the enlightened intervene. Technology is frozen (except for magic green tech).
OldHoya ==> The biodiversity crisis is based on the false 6th Great Extinction myth. Millions of extinctions per year — even though nobody can find those extinctions in the real world.
It is true that if a city in India doubles in geographical size, then some flora and fauna will be expelled from that area. Same for expanded cropping in Brazil.
But loss of biodiversity is another claimed but unseen fake-disaster.
As a longtime member of the medical/scientific community, I would advise the public to accept this statement as an admission that medical academics has completely lost its way and is no longer an authority on what is best for human society and the biosphere. That may be an entirely unnecessary bit of advice after the public health debacle that was and still is CoVID.
Andy ==> Do, please, chip in with some writing on propaganda in the journals of health and medicine. The latest I have seen is that health insurance should cover indigenous health providers — such as paying Navajo medicine men to perform healings because … well, indigenous.
Climate crisis and nature crisis.
What do these two things have in common?
You can’t find any real world evidence for either.