By Ben Pile
In my previous post here, I looked at the central claim in the Lancet’s Countdown report, that “Heat-related deaths reached a record-high of 710 000 estimated deaths globally in 2023, of which 71·5% [507,650] can be attributed to climate change.” That claim simply didn’t stand up against the evidence provided by a more authoritative database of health metrics, despite the Lancet report citing it as a source of data. In this article, I’ll look at another claim from the report – that climate change is increasing the potential for infectious diseases to spread.
Aficionados of the climate wars will remember the climate-malaria link controversy of the 2000s. Despite alarmists’ insistence that climate change would increase the spread of malaria, sceptics of the claim noted documentary evidence that the disease had been endemic at very northern latitudes, including within the Arctic Circle. The idea of ‘tropical diseases’ being pushed northwards by a warming planet therefore suffered from a major category error. Moreover, the disease had been abolished in lower, but still categorically temperate, not ‘tropical’, latitudes by draining land and spraying insecticide – both of which are interventions that the green movement objects to. But even worse news for the alarmists was to come. Rates of malaria deaths began falling through the 2000s.
The Lancet Countdown has attempted to conceal this rate of progress by hiding behind a novel metric. Rather than looking at the number of cases of vector-borne diseases, it has developed a measure called ‘climate suitability’. Of particular interest to the report are dengue virus, chikungunya, Zika virus, West Nile virus and malaria.
It’s hard to understand why the report includes West Nile virus, as it admits that it “has a near-global distribution”. In Europe and the US, the virus is attributed to around 100 deaths in each, and though the distribution of cases in Europe is attributed to warming causing a northward migration, that pattern is not evident in the US, where counties in northern states between east and west such as Montana and North Dakota appear to have greater incidence rates than southern states in general, such as Florida or Texas.
Global mortality statistics from chikungunya and Zika are hard to find, because deaths from them are rare. Global annual recorded deaths from Zika are often as low as zero and have only exceeded single figures in one year according to the IHME GBD database. Deaths from chikungunya are usually in the low hundreds, and almost exclusively in vulnerable people.
By contrast, dengue and malaria were the causes of 53,000 and 670,000 deaths in 2023 respectively, or 0.65 and 9.57 age-standardised deaths per 100,000 people, also respectively. We can see in the following chart that mortality from dengue has increased but that mortality from malaria has fallen radically from the turn of the century until the Covid era – a factor that created shockwaves in all health metrics, as I discussed in the previous article.
Since its inception in the middle of the 2010s, the Countdown report has been tracking vector-borne diseases using its bespoke statistical methodology. But malaria has been remarkably resistant to climate alarmists’ narratives, hence the report’s emphasis on ‘climate suitability’ for these disease vectors – malaria deaths might be down, but the opportunity for mosquitoes that carry it might be increasing. The 2020 edition of the report claimed that “There have been significant increases in the environmental suitability for the transmission of falciparum malaria in highland areas of four of the five malaria endemic regions, with an increase of 38·7% in the African region […]”, and illustrated the claim with the following chart.
This year’s report claims similarly that “Highland areas (>1500 million above sea level) show an increase in climatic suitability of 17·68% for P falciparum and 5·41% for P vivax from 1981–90 to 2015–25, with a 12·88% increase in highland areas in the WHO African Region for P falciparum”.
Using the UN FAO’s definition of African countries with highland areas, I obtained malaria mortality rate data from the IHME’s GBD database. As is very obvious, if there has been an increase in ‘suitability’ for malaria vectors in these regions, this hasn’t produced an increase in mortality. At the extreme, 16% of deaths in Malawi in 1990 were from malaria, but by 2023 this had fallen to 2.5%. Burundi bucks the trend, showing a significant increase in malaria mortality rate from 2012 to 2020, from 4% to nearly 7%. But that exists in the context of 1990 rates of more than 14%, in an extremely poor country where per-capita GDP is little more than $1,000.
I can claim no clinical or scientific qualifications, and only maths to A-level. But it seems to me that if the environment (climate) is hypothesised as a determinant of an endemic disease’s human cost, and if the human cost shows an opposite outcome, then there is a problem with the hypothesis. Climate-obsessed health statisticians were unable to sustain their claim of a link in global mortality statistics, so changed their metric to ‘suitability’. But scrutiny of the ‘suitability’ also reveals an underwhelming basis in evidence. Nearly four decades of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming has not revealed its hand in mortality statistics relating to the most climate-ravaged regions of the world, which are home to the world’s poorest people. How is that possible?
I have, in my career as an irredeemably evil climate change denier, tried to put myself in the position of my moral superiors in the climate change movement – to try to understand their unimpeachable good faith and their desire to make the world a better place. But despite my attempts, I have always been drawn into the moral abyss, probably constructed by Big Oil, where I find the idea that the link between climate and disease is not as strong as the relationship between poverty (i.e., wealth) and disease. Furthermore, from this hate-filled, callous, nihilistic and probably transphobic, disgusting amoral perspective, I cannot help wondering how making energy scarcer and more expensive for people is going to help them deal with problems like endemic disease.
But how can we explain the rise of dengue mortality, if malaria mortality debunks the link between climate and disease? I have to admit, from my amoral position, I find the question utterly irrelevant – quite possibly one of the least relevant things that preoccupies institutional science. Yes, infectious diseases should be tracked and ways to prevent their transmission and cures both sought. But the attempt to link such diseases with climate for political ends is to make the victims of disease the puppets of a grotesque morality play. Let’s put it into perspective.
The IHME GBD data has been turned into a grim league table of causes of mortality by the Oxford University project, Our World in Data.
Dengue does not even feature on this chart. There is, in these 31 other mortality causes, an argument for vastly more attention on these causes of death, many of which are also diseases of poverty. And, as this and my previous article have argued, their links with climate are wildly exaggerated, if not completely pulled out of thin air using extremely dubious statistical methodology – spinning grim statistics out of models that merely reproduce researchers’ ideology, despite the weight of evidence to the contrary.
It’s easy to see why the Lancet Countdown report team have highlighted vector-borne tropical diseases to illustrate their narrative. Mosquitoes that carry them elicit disgust, and the idea of diseases that afflict the most poverty-stricken regions escaping their putative ecological niche using our own carbon profligacy, to exact Gaia’s revenge on us, is a tale of our age and the stuff of B-movie plots.
But the numbers can’t support it. And what this shows is that institutional prestige that has been loaned to the global climate agenda has caused the standards of science and medicine to slip, slide and crash. If this report, along with countless bullshit reports like it, is allowed to influence policy any further, to put energy and wealth even further out of reach than it is now for billions of people, then it will be environmentalism that will need to be listed as a cause of mortality.
