Academia and the new dark age: Part 9 – The doctor will propagandise you about climate change now

According to 5 US academics, doctors have an ethical duty to weave discussion of climate change into their patient encounters. But their claims of "climate sensitive health hazards" don't add up.

I know I'm frequently critical of medical doctors in my articles, but even I am starting to feel sorry for them. I mean, there they were, going about their business, believing that the practice of medicine was all about diagnosing and treating disease. And now they're expected to be agents of the public health apparatus (despite the mismatch between the aims of clinical practitioners and the aims of public health professionals), and recruitment agents for the vaccine-industrial complex and for the biopsychiatric-industrial complex and now on top of all of that, according to the authors of a 'Practice pointer' published in The BMJ, they're expected to propagandise patients about how their health problems are actually due to climate change. Here's their rationale for bringing climate activism into the consultation room:

"We believe that patient counselling around climate sensitive health hazards is an ethical duty of healthcare professionals.2 This duty is multifactorial and builds on bioethical principles of nonmaleficence and social justice: climate change associated exposures pose harm to an individual’s health, climate change worsens existing health inequities, and climate change poses a serious threat to societies and humanity."

How to communicate about climate change with patients

How big a threat do the authors - five academics from US universities - believe climate change to be? They claim that "climate change is arguably the most significant global health threat of the 21st century". Yes, that's right. Forget about the surging rates of disability in working-age people in the US:

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... and in the UK:

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... and pay no attention to the excess mortality observed in Australia:

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... and Germany:

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... and Ireland:

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... or how that excess mortality is oddly concentrated in young adults and oddly coincident with the roll-out of experimental transfection agents:

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No, don't believe your lying eyes. The COVID vaccines are Safe and Effective™ and the most significant global health threat of the 21st century is climate change.

How exactly does climate change threaten health, you ask? Let us count the ways. According to the authors of the BMJ piece,

• Air pollution is a "climate sensitive hazard". (Umm, what is that phrase supposed to mean?)

• "Access to air conditioning or cooling centres, and housing concerns such as mould in the home" are "environmental determinants of health" which are linked in some unspecified way to climate change.

• "Local climate related disaster[s]" - again, of unspecified nature - can cause "mental health impacts".

• "Climate or eco-anxiety" is afflicting young people, in particular: "A global survey of 10 000 children and young adults (ages 16-25 years) indicated that 84% of respondents were moderately, very, or extremely worried about climate change, and 45% of respondents said their worries about climate change affected their daily lives and functioning."

• Certain health conditions, for example asthma, are exacerbated by "proximity to busy roadways, access to air filtration at home, or the presence of mould in the home", which all purportedly constitute "climate sensitive harm to patients". (Oh, silly me. I thought people lived close to busy roadways, and put up with mouldy homes that lack air filtration systems, because they can't afford to live anywhere nicer.)

• Asthma flares might also be triggered by "wildfire smoke, particulate pollution, heat waves, or ground level ozone", all of which are related to - you guessed it - climate change.

• Pulmonary diseases in general are exacerbated by "poor air quality days driven by fossil fuel pollution or wildfires". Furthermore, doctors should be "educating patients about the impact of climate change on aeroallergens."

• Heat illness, such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion, are particular dangers to athletes and outdoor workers.

That's quite a list, isn't it?

The question you should be asking yourself at this point is, what evidence is there that "climate change" is causing these health effects? But how would we find that out? Well, how about consulting the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)? After all, the IPCC is the official body established by the United Nations "to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies". So what does the IPCC's AR6 say about the evidence linking "climate change" with the various health hazards listed above?

Let's take a look at the following table from Chapter 12 of AR6, which summarises the level of evidence for each phenomenon. Pay close attention to the table key. White boxes indicate that there is as yet no evidence that the phenomenon is linked to climate change. Orange boxes indicate that there is strong- or medium-confidence evidence that the phenomenon is decreasing (in specified regions) as a result of climate change. Blue boxes indicate that there is strong- or medium-confidence evidence that the phenomenon is increasing (again, in specified regions) as a result of climate change. RCP8.5 is the worst-case emissions scenario developed by climate modellers, assuming "high population and relatively slow income growth with modest rates of technological change and energy intensity improvements, leading in the long term to high energy demand and GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions in absence of climate change policies".

See all those white boxes? Remember, they indicate that there's as yet no signal that the phenomenon is changing as a result of climate change. So there's no evidence that either "fire weather" or "air pollution weather" are driven by climate change. Ditto for cyclones, hailstorms, avalanches, or any other natural disasters; according to the IPCC, evidence of these events constituting "local climate related disasters" is lacking. There is no signal for weather events (such as floods and heavy rainfall) that are associated with water damage to buildings, which is the main driver of mould in homes.

It's hard to conceive of a mechanism via which "climate change" could impact the prevalence or severity of aeroallergens, and the authors don't even bother to suggest one.

And it takes real chutzpah to wring your hands at how so many of the young folk today just can't function because they're wracked by "climate or eco-anxiety", when you're writing an article that ramps up that fear by fallaciously blaming all manner of maladies and catastrophes on "climate change".

The only claim made by the BMJ article that is supported by the IPCC AR6 is the "high confidence" evidence that climate change is driving increases in mean air temperature and extreme heat. But this assertion has been challenged by scientists who contend that "urbanization bias" - that is, the siting of weather stations in built-up areas that experience the urban heat island effect - is polluting the temperature data, and after correcting for this, there has been a much smaller rise in average temperature since 1850 than is claimed by the IPCC.

To top it all off, the BMJ article's authors conveniently fail to mention that cold stress is a significantly greater health threat than heat stress. Consider the following chart, which depicts deaths due to cold and heat in Europe. The left panel is how the chart originally appeared in an article published in The Lancet Planetary Health, while the right panel depicts the same data, but using an identical scale for both cold and heat deaths:

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Now take another look at the chart from IPCC's AR6 above, and note that a reduction in "cold spells" has been observed in Australia, Africa and the northern regions of South America, and is expected to emerge pretty much everywhere else by 2050 in the worse-case emissions scenario. Whether or not this decline in cold spells is attributable to anthropogenic "climate change" or simply a continuation of the gradual warming trend that began in 1695, as Earth slowly emerged from the Little Ice Age (1250 – 1800)...

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... it's passing strange that the authors of the BMJ piece failed to even mention the beneficial health impacts of fewer cold spells, no?

(Psst, want to see a chart of temperatures derived from Greenland ice cores over an even longer timescale? Here it is:

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Sure puts things into perspective, doesn't it?)

For all its many glaring flaws, the BMJ article does make some valid points. Environmental exposure to air pollution and mould is a health hazard, and doctors should ask patients about such exposures if they present with associated symptoms. Natural disasters most certainly do have mental health impacts on survivors, and doctors should be sensitive to these. Bushfire smoke does cause breathing difficulties, and doctors should ensure that their asthmatic and COPD patients have an action plan to mitigate their risk of exacerbations. Elderly people, athletes and outdoor workers should be taught the signs of heat stress and know how to prevent and treat it.

But none of this has anything to do with climate change. These are just things that a good doctor should do. It's beyond disingenuous to claim, against the evidence, that these illness phenomena are linked to climate change. It's verging on sinister to argue that doctors are morally obliged to tell their patients that they are suffering from "climate sensitive health hazards". And in my opinion it's malpractice to affirm patients' "climate anxiety" by encouraging them to become climate activists, rather than inviting them to explore a wider range of viewpoints on the subject (for instance, read the World Climate Declaration, which critiques the "climate emergency" narrative) so that they can consider whether their eco-dread is rationally founded.

The authors acknowledge that one of the chief barriers to propagandising communicating with patients about climate change is that health professionals feel they lack sufficient knowledge of the topic to engage in such discussions. It's somewhat ironic that any healthcare professional who read the BMJ piece would come away from the experience less knowledgeable; in fact, downright misinformed about the impact of climate change on human health.

Publication of such shoddy work in a top-tier medical journal like The BMJ is, of course, part and parcel of the overall New Dark Age phenomenon that I've been documenting in this ongoing series. To revisit Steve Patterson's formulation of the problem,

“By a ‘dark age’, I do not mean that all modern beliefs are false. The earth is indeed round. Instead, I mean that all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors, at all levels, from the trivial to the profound, periphery to the fundamental. Nothing that you’ve been taught can be believed because you were taught it. Nothing can be believed because others believe it. No idea is trustworthy because it’s written in a textbook.

The process that results in the production of knowledge in textbooks is flawed, because the methodology employed by intellectuals is not sufficiently rigorous to generate high-quality ideas. The epistemic standards of the 20^th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Our academy has failed.” [emphasis in original]

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

I'm not generally inclined to give unsolicited advice, but here's my tuppence-worth which I offer freely to health and medical professionals: It's not your job to induct your patients or clients into the climate apocalypse cult. Focus on doing the job you were trained to do to the best of your ability, remembering always that your own field of expertise is as peppered with erroneous concepts and practices as so-called "climate science". If you wish to make a significant contribution to posterity, focus on uncovering these errors and attempting to remedy them. Don't multiply these errors by succumbing to the pressure to incorporate even more erroneous thinking about "climate sensitive harms" into your already badly-flawed understanding of human health and disease.

P.S. If you're up for a laugh, you might enjoy reading 50 Years of Failed Doomsday, Eco-pocalyptic Predictions; the So-called ‘experts’ Are 0-50.

P.P.S. There are genuine environmental problems that do impact on human health, and I'm totally in favour of addressing these with effective policies. The environmental movement of my youth was all about getting toxic chemicals out of our air, water, food, homes and businesses, along with preserving wilderness areas for the sake of both human and non-human life on earth. This rather rag-tag, run-on-the-smell-of-an-oily-rag assemblage of "greenies" was infiltrated and eventually completely co-opted by the big oil billionaires, as James Corbett explores in his must-watch documentary, Why Big Oil Conquered the World.

For information on my private practice, please visit Empower Total Health. I am a Certified Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, with an ND, GDCouns, BHSc(Hons) and Fellowship of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.