Essay by Eric Worrall
Scientists should make an effort when they try to defend their positions, rather than simply trotting out tired alarmist talking points.
Trump says climate change doesn’t endanger public health – evidence shows it does, from extreme heat to mosquito-borne illnesses
Published: February 13, 2026 6.11am AEDT
Jonathan Levy Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University
Howard Frumkin Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington
Jonathan Patz Professor of Environmental Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Vijay Limaye Adjunct Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison…
As physicians, epidemiologists and environmental health scientists, we’ve seen growing evidence of the connections between climate change and harm to people’s health.
Extreme heat
…Heat deaths have been rising globally, up 23% from the 1990s to the 2010s, when the average year saw more than half a million heat-related deaths. Here in the U.S., the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome killed hundreds of people.
…
Extreme weather
Warmer air holds more moisture, so climate change brings increasing rainfall and storm intensity and worsening flooding, as many U.S. communities have experienced in recent years. Warmer ocean water also fuels more powerful hurricanes.
Climate change also worsens droughts, disrupting food supplies and causing respiratory illness from dust. Rising temperatures and aridity dry out forests and grasslands, making them a setup for wildfires.
Air pollutionWildfires, along with other climate effects, are worsening air quality around the country.
…Infectious diseases
Read more: https://theconversation.com/trump-says-climate-change-doesnt-endanger-public-health-evidence-shows-it-does-from-extreme-heat-to-mosquito-borne-illnesses-275619
Because they are cold-blooded organisms, insects are directly influenced by temperature. So with rising temperatures, mosquito biting rates rise as well. Warming also accelerates the development of disease agents that mosquitoes transmit.
…
Extreme heat
The argument global warming is worsening health outcomes by causing more heat deaths in Summer ignores that far more people die in winter. Even in hot countries like India, cold deaths outweigh heat deaths. If global warming reduces the severity of winter, any rise in heat deaths in Summer will be more than offset by a reduction in cold deaths in winter.
Extreme weather
It’s a pity they didn’t include a meteorologist in their group. The prediction global warming will increase hurricane intensity still isn’t supported by the evidence.
There have been studies pointing out the thermodynamic absurdity of unconstrained predictions of more severe weather, but sadly mostly ignored by alarmists. There is also significant disagreement between models as to what will happen, which suggests scientists don’t know what will happen.
Air pollution
Faster growth rates caused by CO2 fertilisation and more benign weather do have the potential to increase smoke hazards. But this could be counterbalanced by proper forestry management, a practice which has been severely lacking in recent decades.
Infectious Diseases
I can’t believe epidemiologists are still waving this tired claim.
Mosquitoes do not need warm weather to cause severe disease outbreaks, what they need is a failure to control mosquitoes. Diseases like Malaria used to be the scourge of Northern Europe and Russia. Anyone who has visited Northern countries in the Spring would be well aware that potentially disease carrying biting insects have no problem thriving in cold climates.
The reason we don’t associate Malaria with cold climates is our ancestors did not use the word “Malaria”. The old English word for Malaria was “Ague”. The famous playwright William Shakespeare, who himself may have died from Malaria in 1616, referenced “Ague” at least 16 times in his plays. It was a big deal back then – a known killer of the young and infirm, a terrible illness which arose when mild Spring weather warmed and melted the Malarial ponds where mosquitoes bred. All this happened during the Little Ice Age.
Historians are going to look back on the climate crisis and wonder how we ever believed that today’s mild warming was any kind of threat to our civilisation. Our descendants will think of such warnings the same way we think of the scientists who promoted The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894, the prediction that by 1944 the streets of the City of London would be buried under 9ft of horse manure.
In my opinion the 1894 horse manure prediction and today’s climate doomsday predictions share a common factor – scientists who didn’t make enough effort to question the flaws in their own reasoning.
Just as there is evidence today’s climate doomsday predictions are wrong, there was plenty of evidence by 1894 that horses would shortly be replaced by motor vehicles.
By the time of the horse manure prediction, the first automobile companies had already been selling vehicles for over a decade. Carl Benz, who founded Mercedes Benz, started producing and selling automobiles in 1885.
Yes, they should continue to publish peer-reviewed papers and not just donate money to the ‘Imbecile in Chief’ and his sickly clan.
The sick endangerment finding has been rescinded. A brilliant move no other President would have had the guts to do. The fraud has ended. When will you come to understand this?
Unfortunately the “Endangerment Finding Fraud” might be more “Baked In” than any proposed Climate Tripping Point. It could take Vance48 to ensure it gets Baked Out.
Gyan, “it” can’t understand anything. “Bots” have no real existence. The fraud has indeed ended, along with a host of government bureaucracies like GISS. “It’s” existence is directly threatened by this. Upton Sinclair ‘s maxim on understanding applies here.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
He wasn’t an imbecile, just demented!
“to the ‘Imbecile in Chief’ and his sickly clan.”
Keep up. Biden is gone. !!
So you prefer a cold world. You hate people, don’t you.
TFN, when Joe Biden was president, he had legal authority — based on past precedent from World War II — to declare a climate emergency and to impose a carbon fuel rationing scheme on the American people.
But Slow Joe didn’t do that. He didn’t go nearly as far as past precedent and legal authority allowed him to go in unilaterally suppressing our carbon emissions.
Was he too slow to recognize that he held the power in his hands to save the world from catastrophic global warming if he had just been willing to make an example of Americans by reducing the entire nation to the status of a third-world country?
Biden and the Democrats realize that the American people would be up in arms if the Democrats were to do such a thing. At least 25 U.S. States would refuse to comply.
In addition, their “peer-reviewed” papers shouldn’t have an abstract that disagrees with the data in the paper. It’s a bad look.
I would say it was criminal to change the findings of the scientists, who said there was no evidence of a connection to human-derived CO2 and any weather event, and was changed by political activists in the summary for politicians to say just the opposite of what the IPCC report said.
Think of the enormous, detrimental consequences this lie has had on the world. Those who changed the meaning are criminals of the worst kind. They are worse than serial killers.
The sad thing is how many terminally clueless individual actually believe that if something has been “peer reviewed”, that it must be of high quality.
I guess some people just have a desperate need to feel superior to others.
Modern peer review for journals is more like…
1.. Are there any basic spelling errors.
2.. Does the message in the paper align with our ideology.
That is about as far as it gets.
Point 2 is spot on but there is a third point your overlooked:
3 How much money can this journal make the publishers by flogging it to state supported university libraries?
Is my paper included in your list of references.
Notice how many top scientific journals do not attach the names of the reviewers to each article but at best give a list elsewhere in the journal without saying which article each reviewed. Of course those writing the papers are usually prevented from knowing who reviewed their work and questioning flaws in the reviews. Readers are also not given the opportunity to ask hard questions of the paper and reviews.
I asked AI about the meaning of “peer” in the UK.
It replied, “In the UK, a “peer” is a member of the nobility or aristocracy—specifically a duke, marquess, earl, viscount, or baron—who holds a hereditary or life title.”
So, the science nobility, must approve all science. In the US, we must bow to American science nobility, mostly the Ivy League.
You appear to be uninformed or ill informed about the massive flaws in the peer review process. The conclusions in many of the papers can often not be proved because it is impossible to reproduce the experiments and get the same results. I have been shown some of the errors in top journals like Nature which they have not wanted to address.
Clintel issued a succinct and clear statement “There is No Climate Emergency” (286 words, six points) over three years ago and since then I have not seen a single concise refutation of these points of comparable length. If you know of one that has been hidden somewhere please reply with the link because I am open to consider any well reasoned statements on the need for climate alarmism.
You can’t refute, concisely or at length, something that is true, Michael.
That is precisely my point and why I have seen no refutations. If someone tries, we will be able to drive a double decker London bus through the holes in their argument.
Final nail –
Enough about Obama
Now lets talk about science
Yes, yes they should continue to publish peer-reviewed papers that contain a null hypothesis with valid evidence of being falsified or not. Until that occurs, peer-reviewed papers are merely proof of correlation and circular reasoning.
Sites like WUWT do a much better job of reviewing papers than do any of the so called prestigious journals.
That’s such a laughable statement OMG.
Maybe you should explain why you think that. Perhaps some specifics?
Yes, this is the most basic, reasonable request for AGW proponents to provide.
It seems very hypocritical to bang on about “THE science” when you won’t even embrace the most basic principle of the scientific method.
AGW was never about science. It was and is about the communist political system it both requires and sustains.
non sequitur.
Only leftist imbeciles call CO2 a pollutant while the planet calls it great for making plants grow better.
Don’t sugar coat it like that. The us how you really FEEL.
Professors remind me of an old COVID joke: A coroner dictates a death certificate: Write: Cause of death, COVID19.
-But, Doctor, he has three deep stab wounds.
-Add: With complications.
Lots of good cause-effect COVID jokes like that. My fav is as follows:
One night a woman asked her husband, “Honey do you think I have gained weight in all this COVID?”
The man replied, “Honey, you were never really skinny.”
The next day the coroner reported the death of the man to the CDC: Cause of death COVID.
It used to be you could respect scientists. But now so many “scientists” especially in the climate realm do not believe in observations and evidence but instead in computer models and projections, even when they are shown to have little to no predictive power, even when they differ from reality. Sadly “follow the money” has become the catchphrase that describes more and more once-honored professions like scientists, doctors, and lawyers. Wait, scratch “lawyers” from that list, I think they have always been taught “follow the money” in law school…
The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 has indeed come to fruition; it’s just an intellectual crisis rather than an epidemic of apples of the road! Sadly, our alarmist critics seem to have liberal amounts stuffed inside their tiny little heads, along with an ample dose of bovine excrement to boot!
dose of male bovine excrement
4 authors – I thought it only took 1
Didn`t Einstein also say something along that line when challenged in writing by 100 scientists,
over a hundred years ago
Yes. He was asked how many papers it would take to refute the theory of general relativity. His reply was, “If I were wrong, it would only take one.”
The reason they keep trotting out the same, tired, climate crap which has all been debunked a bazillion times is because that’s all they have. Sheesh, give them a break.
Yeah, they don’t have anything else.
The same old debunked claims over and over and over again.
“Warming from CO2 is a log function “
That is not warming, that is “theoretical radiative absorption”.
(and some measurements have shown that it actually levels off around 280-300ppm, see chart below)
That tiny theoretical “forcing” is MASSIVELY overwhelmed by energy transfer by bulk air movement… so is totally meaningless and immeasurable in the atmosphere.
Please do not fall into the trap of using AGW mantra and terminology.
Came across this article yesterday, for a layman I found it very informative.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/greenhouse-gas-theory-scientific-myth/
I got to
“CO2 does not rise in the atmosphere. It weighs the same as propane with a specific gravity of 1.52. It seeks low points as does rainwater.”
So…the author has less understanding of statistical thermodynamics and physical phenomena than a third year engineering student. Not good…didn’t bother continuing…
Thanks for the alert. I will recalibrate based on your comment.
Re: Point 2.
I understand you are describing a log process but you seem to have accounted for it twice. When you say “per doubling’ that is the log part. The degrees-C-per number stays constant and is called “climate sensitivity”. You seem to have piched a number around ‘1’ and reduced it.
Someone will sue and it will go to court. Good, finally a “debate”. Models and consensus won’t work well as evidence.
It there a court whose judgemnt could not be guessed before the trial begins? eg Did the Mann Stein jury need to hear evidence, or was their conclusion foregone?
NYC and Wash. D.C. juries are pretty much guaranteed to decide based on whatever the party wants.
Yes, exactly.
There are conservative places I can assume would the opposite verdict from the same trial.
Venue and Jury selection are everything in that type of court case – whether the EF has been abolished or the science is true or the litigants are offensive would matter not much.
If a trial involving climate happens in NYC or DC…
(Books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” illustrate the problem using a different plot device. Sometimes Americans forget that the word “prejudice” has meaning outside the social consequences of what happened in USA before the civil war).
Unfortunately it will likely go before a sympathetic liberal judge who supports draconian environmentalism
All of the threatened disasters are logical outcomes of very bad state regulations, and are quite simply and easily traceable to environmental movements.
(All except for any increases or decreases in hurricanes.)
I don’t know the horse manure prediction may just have been 132 years early, now the manure is cramming the media across the United States and UK from leftist talking heads and politicians not just about the climate but virtually everything they utter.
Extreme Heat: deaths have been rising globally, up 23% from the 1990s to the 2010s.
Well, the global population has increased around 30%……
ooops!
30% population increase – That was my question, but didnt take the time to look up the data.
Point being is that it is very easy to impress the audience with the big number 23% , especially when you omit data that provides more complete context. Yet, factoring in the population growth, there is actually a per capita decrease in heat related deaths.
Yeah, but most of the population growth is obviously younger aged people who are less susceptible to heat death…since they can more easily go to air-conditioned shopping malls instead of toughing it out in the seniors care center that has lockboxes on the thermostat.
Stats need to take into account extenuating circumstances. /s
Older people are living longer now as well … Octogenarians Account for over 170M people, Even Centinarians are increasing as well to over 720,000 globally
I suspect that the bulk of that population growth was in those areas that were already hot.
good point – a factor I overlooked and probably known by those that raised the 23% death increase knowing both the 30% population increase and the greater population growth in the hotter areas of the planet – africa and indian subcontinent.
The warmest pertiod during Holocen occurred 8000 years ago. The following ones became successively cooler. This is basic paleoclimatologic knowledge!
Trump says climate change doesn’t endanger public health…
Nah he’s onto Chinese windmill blades spreading nano-plastics in the atmosphere-
Scientists find ‘plastic clouds’ hanging over major Chinese cities
Unintended consequences.
There is a lot of that connected to windmills and solar.
I guess this new kind of air pollution will come under the purview of the EPA.
Trump says he doesn’t want to see even one more windmill built on his watch.
Trump says climate change doesn’t endanger public health – evidence shows it does, from extreme heat to mosquito-borne illnesses
This is a classic, and it works by leaving out a critical term, by not being specific about whether they are talking global or American.. You have to watch the pea under the thimble. The argument passes from the argument that Global Warming caused by Global Emissions is a global threat to global health in some locations — to the argument that therefore lowering US emissions will lower a US threat to Americans. Without being specific about what the threat is, or who to, or what effect the regulation will have on it.
So higher temps increase malaria. Therefore lets lower US emissions. Why? To reduce the incidence of malaria in Florida? How exactly is lowering US emissions going to do that?
Lowering US emissions will not lower a US threat to Americans. Partly because lowering US emissions will have a negligible effect on global emissions, and therefore none on global temperatures. And partly because if the air over the US is 200 or 300 ppm CO2 will make no difference to the heath and well being of Americans. Unlike lead emissions from leaded fuel, which would and did.
This is yet another case of Do Things Because Climate which will have no effect on the climate and have no benefits for Americans. Or indeed anyone.
The EPA is a body which is solely concerned with the health of Americans, and with the regulation of threats to health in the American environment.
For the Endangerment Finding to be correct, America’s emissions of 5 billion tons of CO2 a year (out of around 39 billion tons globally) would have to pose a specific threat of some sort to Americans And any EPA regulations would have to lower that threat.
What is the US threat? US emissions cannot raise global or American temperatures by more than a miniscule amount. And breathing a bit higher concentration of CO2 is totally harmless. What good do the regulations do for anyone?
How exactly does the EPA regulation make any difference to either US or global weather or climate? Answer, it doesn’t.
The UK is ahead of the US on this matter. The argument they made for ruining the country with Net Zero used to be climate. But lately you hear nothing about climate, and great claims instead about energy security and lower energy prices. Both of which are delusional. But the climate justification has now faded from view. It will fade from view in the US too.
The point is that the climate does change but the change is mostly NOT due to man’s activities and it cannot be changed by him
I am sorry for all the posting here but these climate frauds make me really angry.
My final comment:
These physicians, epidemiologists and environmental health scientists live in the academic halls far removed from the real world. Notice how often it is engineers in the real world, who are not concerned about fancy models but building what really stands and works, who are most critical of climate alarmism and alarmists. I bet not one of these health alarmists has a grasp of even a single one of the various sciences used to understand weather and climate and certainly not statistics.
Michael in Dublin writes – “These physicians, epidemiologists and environmental health scientists live in the academic halls far removed from the real world. “
Agreed – Same with covid. Amateurs had a much better handle on the covid risks than the experts. One example was a conversation I had in 2024 with an infectious disease expert at a major Southern CA university/hospital was his statement that without the mitigation and vax, 2m americans would have died including 500k children.
Peer review long since became “Pals review”
Great post, Eric!
“Historians are going to look back on the climate crisis and wonder how we ever believed that today’s mild warming was any kind of threat to our civilisation.”
And about that mild warming itself, future scientists may also wonder how the attribution of any part of it to incremental CO2 was able to gain traction among climate investigators, when the modelers knew all along that dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation massively overwhelms the static radiative effect.
https://www.regulations.gov/comment/EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194-0305
And more directly to the point here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knv0YdUyIgyR9Mwk3jGJwccIGHv38J33/view?usp=drive_link
Thank you for listening.
They are doing what I call qualitative science. Alarmism is based on it. Vague untestable claims.
“with rising temperatures, mosquito biting rates rise as well”
Been slightly warmer the last few summers here in Wokeachusetts. Last summer, I think I got one mosquito bite and I spend a great deal of time outdoors. I recall some summers, decades ago, that there were so many mosquitoes I couldn’t get out of my truck or they would have devoured me.
(edit: pasted in the wrong tab)
«Trump says»! Perhaps they should leave public word games to the preachers — ah, excuseme, they self-identify as journalists now.
I always thought mosquitoes were a tropical insect given the whole story about malaria around the Panama Canal dig, but it seems that above the Arctic Circle, where there are no natural predators to the mosquitoes, they thrive in huge swarms.
So… now that the EF is history- what about the states that still worship the climate cult? Can they still demand that everyone buy EVs by a certain date? And heat pumps? I suppose they can still push for wind machines and solar “farms” but the feds will certainly try to stop the wind machines at sea and end subsidies and tax breaks for all green energy. I would expect those states to say something about this great event- the end of the EF. So far, nothing here in Wokeachusetts. Probably because it’s so off their charts- they can’t admit that it happened. They’re in disbelief. Not sure if it’s been mentioned in the Boston Globe as I don’t get it anymore- or the NYT which owns the Globe. Any mention of it in the MSM in CA? MSM TV networks which I don’t watch?
the merger of man made climate change and climate change is most interesting- so any change in the climate which there has been since the beginning of the earth is now proof that we need to stop using fossil fuels- nice trick but it can’t stand scrutiny
From 1990 to 2020 world population grew by 33%, but more importantly the over 65 population grew by much more.
When a person looks at extreme heat, what one finds is that it occurs mainly in urban areas. I’d say the way we have constructed megacities is the greatest source of the problem.