Credential abuse

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Oct 22

RE: ‘Line of Defense’ Climate Change having broad effects on health-care systems: Lancet. A CP story by Bob Weber.  The Hamilton Spectator 31 Oct 22.

RE: Canada’s healthcare system isn’t ready for new reality: doctors.  A CP sotry by Brenna Owen

The public is again being abused by the claims of false credentialism.  This time it’s medical doctors waving their irrelevant degrees around while yelling “Climate Change!”

The president of the CMA, Dr. Alika Lafontaine, claims that wildfire smoke caused his OR to be shut down, proving that climate is changing.  Then, a spokesperson for the Quebec Chapter of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Claudel Petrin-Desrosiers, claims that Canada’s health care system isn’t prepared for the effects of climate change.

Between 1920 and 1999 the earth’s climates changed a lot.  Temperatures rose from 1920 to 1940, declined from 1940 to 1979, and then rose until 1998 when the global warming pause began.  There was the Spanish Flu pandemic, and TB and polio were serious problems between 1920 and 1960.  The Canadian healthcare system grew dramatically in that period because of the massive wealth that became available through industrialization.

Nobody in 1920 could have forecasted what 1999 would have been like, and certainly no one would put the credibility of their degrees on the line to make such a forecast.

The fact is political activists are prepared to wave their degrees around to advance causes their degrees have no relevance to.  BC has had forest fires going back ten thousand years, and if an HVAC system can’t cope, that’s an engineering problem, not a climate one.

The climate change debate was corrupted from the beginning by politics.  The alleged authority of a politicized doctor doesn’t apply to climate.

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