Introduction
Almost all Finnish newspapers and TV and radio channels
recently told readers, viewers and listeners that a child born today will
suffer enormously because of manmade climate change unless political action is
taken. Their claims are based on a report from the medical journal, The Lancet,
entitled The 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on
health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is
not defined by a changing climate. Apparently the mainstream media has told the same story around the world.
The new report is mostly nonsense, and
dangerous nonsense too. For example, it assumes that the predicted increases in
global temperatures will bring vector-borne diseases in their wake, although
the validity of such forecasts is highly debatable,[i]
and the connection to vector-borne diseases is speculative and/or false. The
report also says that global warming will cause droughts and therefore food
shortages and malnutrition, although the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization
continues to report record harvests in most years.[ii]
It also claims that eliminating fossil fuel use will bring extraordinary health
co-benefits and that tens of millions of lives will be saved, if only
politicians make the right choices.
Neglecting
public health
Appallingly, Lancet Countdown ignores
the history of institutional environmental health practice, which raised
hygiene standards in rich countries over a long period from the 1880s to around
1960.[iii]
Institutional environmental health practice was pivotal in bringing about the
public health miracle seen in in these countries at that time. Effective
infection control by environmental health practitioners was critical in
eradicating repeated diarrhea in babies – the main cause of permanent
undernutrition and stunting – in many countries.3.[iv]
Abundant water and sanitation were the key factors, and without use of fossil
fuels (and later nuclear power) none of this would have been possible: the
public health revolution would never have taken place. Abundant water is
therefore vital in preventing malnutrition, and in fact environmental health
legislation in rich countries usually doesn’t refer to drinking water,
but instead to household
water.
Nothing has changed. In the developing world
today, only around 20% of childhood diarrhea transmission is water-borne and
around 80% is water washable. The solution to diarrhea and malnutrition is
therefore still the provision of abundant water to households. But because this
can only come through use of fossil fuels, environmentalists are vehemently
opposed, and have had to come up with a way to hide this. So they now promote
the idea that access to clean drinking
water must be defined as a human right. Remarkably, under pressure from green
groups, the word “hygiene” has been dropped from the text of UN Sustainable
Development Goal No. 6, which demands water in quantity.
And, copying this appalling tendency, the Lancet
report has no discussion of health protection infrastructure — water mains and
sewerage and the associated energy requirements – although its importance in
climate change adaptation has been acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change in its Fifth Assessment Report.[v]
Apparently, the institutions behind the Lancet Countdown do not want
poor people to enjoy the high standards of hygiene and sanitation that have
done so much to improve and extend life in the rich countries.
Inventing
health co-benefits
The report claims that children born today will
see enormous health co-benefits as society eradicates coal from the econom:
Coal phase-out is
essential, not only as a key measure to mitigate climate change, but also to
reduce morbidity and mortality from air pollution…
Placing health at the
centre of this transition will yield enormous dividends for the public and the economy,
with cleaner air, safer cities, and healthier diets. Analysis focused on one of
these pathways—cleaner air through more sustainable transport and power
generation systems—suggests that the economic gains from the health benefits of
meeting the Paris Agreement substantially outweigh the cost of any intervention
by a ratio of 1·45 to 2·45, resulting in trillions of dollars of savings
worldwide.
This is highly misleading. Many cities have
shown that centralized power production with coal can have a very limited
adverse impact on public health, while cheap power drives health benefits like
cold chains and water supplies. For example, in Helsinki, the backbone of the
municipal energy supply is heat and power co-generation in four power plants
with very efficient removal of air pollution. Helsinki has the lowest air
pollution levels of any metropolitan area in the world (perhaps with the
exception of Stockholm). It has PM 2.5 levels below even the stringent WHO
standards.[vi]
The city was awarded UN environment prizes for its achievements in ambient air
pollution control in the 1980s. Numerous Chinese delegations have visited these
plants and Beijing is now copying Helsinki’s model – the city already has a
district heating system, but one that uses obsolete Soviet boiler technology
from the 1950s. Similarly, in Stockholm ambient air pollution levels were
reduced after the installation of several large municipal waste incineration
plants.
Fake
solutions
The Lancet Countdown report mentions the
biggest pollution problem in the world, from decentralised heating and cooking,
but fails to stress that this is the origin of much ambient air pollution, particularly
in Asian megacities. The World Health Organization claims this kills millions
of people annually.[vii]
Remarkably, the Lancet report claims that the solution used by developed
countries – development of centralised power (and sometimes heat) production,
but instead demands the use impractical, unreliable and very expensive
renewables.
The report also fails to explain that a huge
improvement in air pollution levels in poor countries is already being found
through use of liquefied petroleum gas, which is rapidly penetrating markets in
India and is already making inroads in sub-Saharan Africa too.[viii]
By 2030 perhaps as many as one billion poor people will have access to LPG.
Dishonest
researchers in the world-renowned institutions
This new Lancet Countdown report, with
its highly questionable message, has been promoted worldwide. Its prominence
has come about because audiences are told that it was written by researchers
working in institutions like the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
I have previously shown6,[ix]
– without any rebuttals do date – that
scientific quality of these Lancet Countdown reports is very low. They
are the produce either of incompetence or something worse.
Unfortunately, the latter explanation appears
more likely: the Lancet Countdown cites the WHO climate change report,[x]
but without giving its crucial finding, namely that the impact on climate
change is expected to be rather small, increasing the number of deaths each
year by just 0.5%. Furthermore, the Lancet hides the enormous problems that
would be caused by expanding bioenergy, an idea pushed by the IPCC in one of
its recent reports.[xi]
The WHO pointed out in one of its reports[xii]
that an expansion of bioenergy would cause widespread famines, extinction of
flora and fauna and destruction of water resources.[xiii]
Yet the Lancet Countdown says nothing of this.
The mainstream media has – again – promoted a
nonsensical anti-development agenda. If they are successful the repercussions
for the world’s poor will be appalling. They should be ashamed.
[v] https://ift.tt/2T5Pg2Q.
See Chapter 8.
[viii] https://www.thegwpf.org/better-for-health-to-ignore-the-climate-movement/
[x] Hales S, et al. (eds.), Quantitative risk assessment of the effects of
climate change on selected causes of death, 2030s and 2050s. Report,World
Health Organization, 2014.
[xi] Global Warming of 1.5◦C – An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of
global warming of 1.5◦C above pre-industrial levels and related global GHG
emission pathways in the context of strengthening the global response to the
threat of climate change, sustainable development and other efforts to
eradicate poverty. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018.
https://ift.tt/35zxwU1.
[xii] Ebi K et al. The 1.5 Health Report. Synthesis on Health and Climate
Science in the IPCC SR1.5 Report, World Health Organization,2018.
[xiii] Shindell D etal. Quantified, localized health benefits of accelerated
carbon dioxide emissions reductions. Nature Climate Change, 2018;8(4): 291–295.
The post The Lancet Countdown report is dangerous nonsense appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
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November 25, 2019 at 09:38AM
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