Health Experts Huff and Puff over Climate Fears

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Oct 2018

RE: Climate change is a global health emergency (published both in the Hamilton Spectator of this date and on the EvidenceNetwork.ca  The authors are Tim K. Takaro, associate dean for research and professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.  Jennifer Miller is executive director for Global Climate and Health Alliance.)

There is nothing like hysteria and panic to stampede people into acting unthinkingly.  We simply can’t do something stupid fast enough.  Writing for an opinion blog called Evidence Network the authors invoke their health credentials to opine hysterically about matters of engineering, law, climatology, economics, and public policy - all in pursuit of hack policies concerning “climate change.”  When reason fails, invoke fear - based on their authority as health experts.

And their reasoning does fail.  For educated people, their dialectics is shockingly poor; and in their hands the word health has an Alice-in-Wonderland elasticity of meaning.  There is global health, health opportunities, socioeconomic health, global and local health, health leaders, health professionals, human health, health risks, a global health crisis, health impacts, cumulative health impacts, healthy people, and a healthy planet.  As concerns dialectics, the authors should reflect upon the meaning of “far-fetched.”  I can imagine the guesswork involved in what they call for: assessing the ‘cumulative global health impacts” of expanding the Trans-Mountain pipeline.  (Of all the things to go DefCon 1 over!)

The authors assure us that ordinary epidemics, droughts, and famine over this century will be minor, because the death and illnesses caused by storms, wildfires, floods, food shortages, forced migration, and related conflict that will attend a rise of 1.5 C in world average temperature will be so great.  The Spanish flu of 1918 killed more people than WWI and WWII combined, but something like that won’t happen in the 21^st century - because the World Health Organization called climate change the “greatest threat to global health in the 21^st century.”  Ordinary epidemics like those that happened in the past simply won't happen, because they will be blamed on climate change this time around.

The article was a confection of health hysteria, appeals to false authority, and an exercise in virtue-signalling.  For all the hatred and fear expressed for fossil fuels, the real world still needs oil and lubricants.  That’s why the professor’s BMW start in the morning.

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