BBC Repeats False Claim ‘Climate Change’ Harming Public Health
The BBC is among several mainstream media outlets, like USA Today, hyping a report which claims human health is suffering due to ‘climate change’. This is false.
Data shows premature deaths related to temperatures, extreme weather, and insect-borne diseases have each fallen dramatically as the earth has modestly warmed.
A BBC article by Ella Hambly, titled “COP27: Climate change threatening global health – report,” cites a report published by Lancet Countdown, which claims human health outcomes are being worsened by climate change.
Describing the report’s findings, Hambly writes:
Climate change is severely impacting people’s health around the world, a report by a leading medical publication has found.
The Lancet Countdown report says the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels increases the risk of food insecurity, infectious disease, and heat-related illness.
The … describes how extreme weather has increased pressure on health services globally already grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The timing of the report’s release and attendant media coverage of it is intended to spur ‘climate action’ by government negotiators at the forthcoming UN’s 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to be held in Egypt in November.
If it does spur governments to make increasingly stringent emissions reduction commitments at COP 27, they will be acting on false information.
Interestingly, much of the data refuting the new report is contained in large-scale peer-reviewed studies published in The Lancet.
It should be noted at the outset, Lancet Countdown is not, as Hambly’s story claims, a leading medical journal.
The Lancet is, Lancet Countdown is not.
Lancet Countdown is a climate change activism project founded by the publishers of The Lancet composed of purported climate experts, all of a like-minded alarmist bent.
Neither Lancet Countdown nor the BBC evidently follows the science when it comes to claims that ‘climate change’ is hampering food production.
Dozens of articles on Climate Realism here, here, and here, for example, present solid data collected by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization showing food production has grown substantially during the recent period of ‘climate change’, and the increase in production shows no sign of abating anytime soon.
The evidence demonstrates conclusively that global cereal production, as well as most other crops, like fruits, legumes, tubers, and vegetables, in every region around the world has increased substantially as the earth has warmed.
This has resulted in the largest reduction in starvation, hunger, and malnutrition that the world has ever known.
Data show that during the period of modern warming, deaths resulting from non-optimum temperatures and extreme weather events have declined even more dramatically than deaths from starvation.
Articles on Climate Realism, here and here, for instance, present real-world data proving that as the Earth has warmed, deaths tied to temperature extremes have fallen dramatically.
The so-called experts assembling the Lancet Countdown report should be well aware of this fact since The Lancet published two large-scale studies establishing the huge decline in temperature-related deaths.
A July 1, 2021 study published in The Lancet was arguably the largest study ever to examine excess mortality associated with temperature.
The study’s authors, 68 scientists representing universities and research institutes in 33 countries spanning all regions of the world, came to two very clear conclusions: Cold temperatures contribute to far more deaths each year than warmer temperatures; and deaths associated with extreme temperatures, hot or cold, are declining.
The study found hundreds of thousands fewer people have died in response to non-optimum temperatures each year as the Earth has warmed in recent decades. (See the figure below)
Figure 1. Global heat and cold-related deaths graphed by region, from 2000-2019. Graph created by Willis Eschenbach from Monash study data.
In the 2015 study, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths, and found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 15 times as many people than warm or hot weather.
The 2021 study confirmed what the large-scale 2015 study published in The Lancet previously found.
It now shows a staggering 85 times as many deaths due to cold as there are due to heat.
Thus as the Earth has warmed, the data clearly show that deaths from extreme temperatures have declined.
Also, contrary to the claims made by Lancet Countdown and uncritically echoed by mainstream media outlets like USA Today and the BBC, deaths resulting from extreme weather events have declined even more dramatically over the past 100 years of modest warming.
Data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters presented in its Emergency Events Database show that between 1920 and 2021, deaths resulting from extreme weather events like hurricane strikes, flooding, and wildfires have fallen by more than 99.6 percent.
Finally, the claim that climate change is causing the spread of viral and insect-borne diseases has been debunked multiple times in Climate Realism articles here, here, and here, to cite just a few.
As writer and humorist Mark Twain once famously quipped: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
As a result, it is simply false to claim as Lancet Countdown and the media echo chamber do that climate change is threatening “global health.”
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The press and the global warming crowd deliberately suppress the fact that ANTARCTICA has had record cold, snow and ice accumulation for decades. Even the last few years, ANTARCTICA cold, snow and ice have hit record numbers.
The number of catastrophic hurricanes and tornadoes has dwindled the last couple of decades.
The oceans have not risen appreciably other than the normal waxing and waning of ice melt and evaporation cycles. If you try to google it, the first few pages will be pro global warming but when you drill down to the more reputable “scientific” sites it says no global warming. Also droughts, cold snaps, and weather extremes are the rule all throughout recorded history. There are records clear back to the 1400’s verifying this fact. One has to dig for this data because the political and globalists agenda has big-tech, the leftist media, et al working at sequestering real facts as the “Brown Shirts” did for Hitler. Most folks don’t even go past the first page and these hyena Globalists at google know this.
Lastly, look up the sun-spot cycle which is an eleven year cycle. The weather patterns on earth are affected profoundly by this cycle.
They try to explain it away with all kinds of mental gymnastics but it doesn’t pass the smell test. Funny one never hears of this, but then again suppression of reality by ideologues is commonplace.
The so-called doomed Great Barrier Reef is thriving and growing.
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