From The Daily Sceptic
BYย BEN PILE
Last month, everybodyโs favourite intergovernmental agency, the World Health Organisation (WHO), published a โnew toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate changeโ. The toolkit is the latest attempt to enlist one of the most trusted professions into the climate war. But not only is this transparently ideological and condescending โtoolkitโ lacking in fact, it requires โhealthcare professionalsโ to use their authority to eschew science and lie to their patients and politicians. The climate war is, after all, political.
The problem for climate warriors of all kinds since the climate scare story emerged in the 1980s and became orthodoxy in the 1990s and 2000s has been the rapid improvement of all human welfare metrics the world over. On the one hand, all life on Earth and the collapse of civilisation hangs in the balance โ that is supposedly the implication of data that shows the atmosphere has got warmer. But on the other hand, people living in economies at all levels of development are today living longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any preceding generation. The era of โglobal boilingโ, as UN Secretary General Antรณnio Guterres put it, also happens to be the era in which unprecedented social development has occurred.
That is a paradox if you accept the green premise that economic development comes at the expense of the climate. The UN, which has staked its authority on being able to address โglobalโ issues such as environmental degradation, is committed to defending the โglobal boilingโ narrative. But, at the same time, actively trying to retard the development of low-income countries risks undermining its authority in the developing world.
The statement made by the WHOโs introduction to its new toolkit epitomises the feeble efforts to square this circle, which try to spin interference in the development of low-income countries as being for their benefit:
Our world is witnessing a concerning trend of warming temperatures, extreme weather events, water and food security challenges and deteriorating air quality. The frequency and intensity of these events are surpassing the capacity of both natural and human systems to respond effectively, resulting in far-reaching consequences for health.
Surprisingly, for a โtoolkitโ aimed at people such as doctors, who have a proven capacity to understand scientific literature, the toolkit offers little evidence in support of these claims. It says that โchanging weather patterns and extreme weather events can reduce crop yields, potentially leading to food insecurity and malnutritionโ and that the โbreeding window for mosquito-borne disease is broadening due to changing weather patternsโ. The reference for both of these claims is given in a footnote, which provides a link to the 2023 IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, which says in relation to the first claim:
The occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases has increased (very high confidence). The incidence of vector-borne diseases has increased from range expansion and/or increased reproduction of disease vectors (high confidence).
But dig a little deeper into theย IPCCโs discussion on vector-borne diseasesย and you find the following figure depicting mortality risk of various climate-related factors for six regions of the world.
As the data clearly show, since 1990 there have been radical reductions in mortality caused by malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoeal disease, natural disasters and exposure to temperature extremes. The only departure from those trends is dengue, which in any case is of far less significance than the other factors, claiming approximately just 1.75 lives per 100,000 per year, compared with malaria, which claims more than 50.
How do these data compare with the WHOโs claim that โthe frequency and intensity of these events are surpassing the capacity of both natural and human systems to respond effectively, resulting in far-reaching consequences for healthโ, and the โoccurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseasesโ and the โincidence of vector-borne diseasesโ have increased? They do not compare. In Africa, deaths from malnutrition have fallen by three quarters between 1990 and 2017. Diarrhoeal disease mortality has fallen by two thirds in the same period. Malaria deaths have halved. Consequently, more than 10,000 fewer infants die in the world each day than died each day in 1990.
This is, or ought to be, all the more remarkable to anyone who tracks developmental data, because of the WHOโs longstanding attempt to link these diseases of poverty to climate change. In the 2002 World Health Report, the WHO claimed that 154,000 deaths were attributable to climate change, almost exclusively in High Mortality Developing Countries (HMDCs) โ a figure obtained by estimating climate changeโs impact on each of these diseases of poverty. Yet despite the radical progress that has been shown since 2000, the WHO has shown no interest either in revising its understanding of climate change or in developing an understanding of what has driven these improvements in global health, in spite of its name. Instead, it has doubled down on the climate-health narrative.
A similar โparadoxโ can be shown by comparing the WHOโs statements on food security with other UN agenciesโ data. There is no evidence of climate change adversely affecting agricultural production in vulnerable economies.
Yet the WHOโs toolkit urges โhealth professionalsโ to โcommunicateโ the urgent climate crisis to ordinary people and to use their authority to influence politics:
Things you could say to a policymaker: Climate change is here now, and I am already seeing the impacts on my patientsโ health. The health of some people is affected more severely, including children and elderly people, disadvantaged communities, remote communities, and people with disabilities or chronic illness.
People are living longer and healthier lives. Infant mortality is way down. Far fewer people are living in poverty. But the WHO wants doctors and nurses to claim that the opposite is true. And worse than that, the toolkit advises those doctors and nurses not to debate:
Donโt debate the science Donโt get caught up in conversations that question climate science. Itโs not up for debate. If conversation veers into this territory, redirect it back to your professional expertise and the links between climate change and health.
But there are no โlinks between climate change and healthโ. And if there appear to be, these local or regional health trends run counter to the global trends. Therefore, there must be a better explanation than โclimate changeโ. It may well be that extreme weather afflicts a place, or even that unusual weather causes the population of that place a number of problems, as it always has. But โextreme weatherโ is both rare and as yet not attributable to climate change, on the IPCCโs own analysis. And so, if small changes in weather are coincident with negative economic change or health metrics, the cause is less likely to be meteorological than political in nature. For example, incompetence, especially that of undemocratic regimesโ bureaucracies, is very often the cause of hunger, thirst and the lack of basic services. And in their haste to find politically expedient correlations between weather and welfare metrics, researchers fail to consider alternative causes, despite the knowledge that humans are far more sensitive to economic forces than to natureโs whims.
Donโt believe me? Well,ย the evidenceย is extremely stark. Whereas the WHO wants to persuade doctors to ignore science to claim there are โlinks between climate change and healthโ, by far the strongest predictor of health is in fact wealth. Accordingly, the WHO 2002 report found practically no climate-related deaths in โLow Mortality Developing Countriesโ and โDeveloping Countriesโ. There are no deaths โfrom climate changeโ where malaria, malnutrition and diarrhoea are eliminated by rising income levels.
Seen from this perspective, the WHOโs mobilisation of health professionals looks very much like a political campaign against wealth. Only such an ideological โ and anti-science โ aversion to wealth could put such emphasis on the link between health and weather, because whereas doctors can and should say that income and health are linked, the WHO presses them not to: the best thing that can be given to poorer people is โstable weatherโ, apparently, not higher incomes. The toolkit even anticipates this criticism, advising people how to answer the argument that โclimate action is perceived as detrimental to the economyโ. According to the WHO, this is โan untrue and unhelpful perception held by some peopleโฆ which was repeated by some businesses and governments to delay the implementation of climate solutionsโ. A conspiracy theory, no less, which is supported only by the highly dubious claim that โfor every dollar spent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, approximately $2 are saved in health costsโ.
Any doctor who took such an extraordinary and unevidenced claim about a new drug at face value and promptly started prescribing it to their patients would have his or her licence taken away. Britain, for instance, spends around ยฃ10 billion per year on subsidising its green electricity transition alone, yet there is no evidence of the NHS budget benefiting by ยฃ20bn. An analysis of Germanyโs Energiewende estimates the annual cost at โฌ45 billion, yet per capita expenditure on healthcare rose from โฌ3,500 in 2009 to โฌ5,700 in 2021 โ an increase of 62%. Moreover, Germanyโs green deindustrialisation has come at a heavy price, signalling to the world that not even a first-tier industrialised and wealthy nation can survive such environmentalism, with far reaching consequences looming for similar policies in the rest of Europe. The countryโs status as Europeโs deep-green policy champion has passed and now half of Germans believe that lower prices should be put before emissions-reduction policies. German tractors, and for that matter French and Dutch ones as well, arenโt heading to the capitalโs streets to protest against green economic and health miracles. The WHOโs claim is simply mad.
The reason the WHOโs toolkit is so bereft of evidence and logic is because itโs just political propaganda. The document credits authors who are not medical doctors and climate scientists, but psychologists at the Centre for Climate Change Communication located at George Mason University, led by Dr. Ed Maibach. As I have pointed out previously in the Daily Sceptic, climate shrinksโ unwelcome intrusion into climate politics does nothing to improve debate and only serves to antagonise increasingly intense conflicts. And their involvement in producing the WHOโs toolkit is no exception. This remote, conflicted intergovernmental agency claims the authority of โexpertsโ, but its guidance instructs doctors to eschew science, evidence and debate โ it literally advises them not to engage in debate โ and instead to promulgate green ideology: the mythical claim that there are โlinksโ between climate and health, that the green โtransitionโ will improve health and that complying with emissions targets is cheap as chips.
The toolkit may give โhealthcare professionalsโ the justification to lie to the public and politicians, but thatโs not โempowermentโ, itโs just fibs. And its recruitment of psychologists to mobilise doctors and nurses as the instruments of a political agenda is yet more evidence of the urgent need to dismantle the WHO, for the sake of billions of peopleโs health and wealth.
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Christine Anderson, MdEP
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