More than 200 health journals worldwide are publishing an editorial calling on leaders to take emergency action on climate change and to protect health.
The British Medical Journal said it is the first time so many publications have come together to make the same statement, reflecting the severity of the situation.
The editorial, which is being published before the UN general assembly and the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow this November, says: “Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we – the editors of health journals worldwide – call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health.
“Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.
“The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.
Accept the claim for a moment.
Now note what they’re missing. What is the cost – in health terms if you wish – of meeting that 1.5 oC limit? This being the realm of economic analysis – opportunity costs. What can we not have because we devote resources to having this thing? We know that poorer people die sooner than richer. So, even delaying economic growth in the poor countries kills some people. We know that resources spent upon solar panels – say, just as an example – cannot be spent upon health care. So, as with ‘rona, how many die of cancer – again, just an example – because the resources to treat just aren’t there?
And so on – they’re not doing a useful analysis that is. There are many things that are desirable and each of them must be considered along with their price tags. That being exactly the thing that is not being considered, the price.
As soon as you hear ‘Below 1.5C’, you know they are just parrotting the standard line. This has nothing to do with specific health effects of +1.5C. But then The BMJ et al have been captured for years, sadly.
As Bjorn Lomborg never seems to tire of pointing out, cold kills more people than heat.
A retired editor of the BMJ reckoned that more than 90% of the peer-reviewed medical reports that had been published were subsequently proved to be wrong, why in God’s name should we be in the slightest bit concerned when they publish eco-wibble?
Add to that, if 200+ medical journals publish simultaneous editorials on said wibble, we can be sure that it’s an advertising campaign rather than serious science.
“The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse”,
They never do mention, do they, that we are already around 0.8c – 1.0c above pre-industrial levels and the vast majority of that occurred prior to 1950, before the anthropogenic use of fossil fuels was scientifically accepted as being able to cause that rise.
I love it when they take the starting point for warming as the Tailend of the Little Ice Age! It makes it much easier to distract from the balmier periods of the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warm Period, the Holocene Optimum…in all of which humans and the planet did rather well.
So no more flying to medical conferences in exotic locations then? Thought not…
OR, they could stick to treating sick people. Once that’s done they can worry about something else.
Are these by any chance the fuckers who, until a metaphorical five minutes ago, would bleed you as a sure cure for just about anything? While wandering about hospitals killing the new mothers with their unwashed hands?
Lying leftist scum join forces to promote lying leftist tyranny and evil?
Not much of a surprise. Fuck off deceitful eco-freaks.
‘ While wandering about hospitals killing the new mothers with their unwashed hands?’
Let’s not forget that the person who pointed that out was forcibly committed to a mental institution by his fellow doctors and then accidentally died shortly after.
As Bjorn Lomborg never seems to tire of pointing out, cold kills more people than heat.
Yes – and true both on small and large scales; winters bring more deaths than summer , and looking at geological time scales extreme temperature excursions are all to the low side – we call them ice ages. It seems that the negative feedback mechanisms (my money is on cloud formation) operate quite well on the side of higher temperatures, but break down in the face of the albedo effect from accumulated snow cover.
Almost all the journals come under a couple of umbrella groups.
BMJ group publish at least thirty alone.
A couple of similar boards and the 200 shrinks to a small number of rich, like-minded people. It’s not even close to 200 separate decisions. And they know it.
It’s like saying 200 politicians support something. Without noticing they are all from the same party.
“The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse”
Umm – what science says that the waring is catastrophic to *health*? So summers kill everybody? Summers destroy all crops and livestock?
Why link warming to biodiversity? And what link does that have to health?
I want actual, worked-out, real, chains of cause n effect. I’ll accept probabilities based on long-term observations, done competently.
Where’s the science that says what’s impossible to reverse? Are these blithering fools speaking of irreversible warming? Bizarre, because the place has been a lot warmer, so things do cool down. Irreversible effects on health? Like what? Death?
What’s the effect of closing down the automobile industry? Well, no cars. So massive reduction in (eg) silicon market. So phones n computers get more expensive, and volume drops. Pretty soon you have 1950’s cars and no cell phones and no computers (no volume, so no manufacturing) no networks and no data centers. And thus no electric cars. No MRIs. No ultrasound. No X rays. No….
Idiots.
BiTiN.
“Where’s the science that says what’s impossible to reverse?”
The theory is ‘runaway global warming’. This was popularised by Carl Sagan in the late 70’s early 80’s and referred to what was believed to have happened to Venus and was touted as what would happen here if we liberated the CO2 from the ground.
I should add that we know it’s bollocks as CO2 has been at 7000 parts per million in the past and the planet didn’t burn up.
I should add that we know it’s bollocks as CO2 has been at 7000 parts per million in the past and the planet didn’t burn up.
But the planet has (several times, as far as we can tell) got itself locked into a ‘snowball earth’ where ice sheets cover the entire surface for tens of millions of years at a time. These periods are only ended by massive vulcanism injecting gigatons of ‘deadly’ CO2 into the atmosphere.