The Lancet Countdown 2022 Climate Change and Health Report (LCCCHR) and the IPCC Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report are scientifically unsound and utterly political. They feed into the framework of the UN Paris Climate Deal Negotiations’ alarmistic, hyperbolic, misleading and even deceitful information about climate change and health. The LCCCHR unwittingly exposes the devastating public health effects of the UN’s current Sustainable Development Goals (SDG6), which crucially omit hygiene as a basic aim. Conservation ideals written out in the UN sustainable development classic ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987 started the process which derailed hygienic principles and environmental health policies from the centre of the development agenda, even though they had produced a public health miracle in today’s affluent countries. Affluent countries still benefit from the fruits of this agenda, which started in the 19th century. Western elites now deny the Global South the benefits of hygienic principles and good environmental health due to misguided green ideological beliefs – a cruel form of eco-imperialism. The deceitful, hyperbolically alarmistic and misleading LCCCHR was pivotal in promoting an alarmistic declaration on climate change and health adopted by over 120 countries at COP28 in Dubai.
The 2022 Lancet Countdown Climate Change and Health Report (LCCCHR) states that in the area of “climate change and food insecurity”, “diarrhoeal diseases are the leading cause of malnutrition in children younger than five years, while other infections can severely affect nutrient absorption and utilisation” – a statement that the World Health Organisation endorses. The origins of this idea came from the famous 1968 WHO monograph written by Harvard nutritionists.
LCCCHR fails to mention that this form of malnutrition is called stunting, which is a permanent condition. It develops if child has experienced sufficient number of diarrhoeal and other infectious disease episodes before his or her first birthday. Stunting is also intergenerational in nature. Accordingly, the LCCCHR authors confuse hunger and undernutrition and falsely claim that “food insecurity is increasing globally, with 720-811 million people hungry in 2020”. The FAO report LCCCHR is referring to defines “hunger in the world as, as measured using the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU)”. Thus, as stunting is a permanent condition and intergenerational in nature, the most important determinant of “hunger” in the Global South is lack of hygiene conditions according to WHO, not lack of food.
In the World Bank we came to the same conclusion in our peer-reviewed report published in 2008, based on an extensive review of cohort studies that showed that infections play a critical role in the development of stunting. We tried with this report to revitalise hygienic principles to the centre of the global development agenda, because environmental health policies and legislation administered across multiple sectors – with hygienic principles and infection control in its core – helped to eradicate undernutrition from the OECD countries over the period starting from 1860s to around the 1960s. Thanks to these policies we became one head taller and smarter in the developed world. OECD countries are still enjoying the full benefits of these policies, because it is unthinkable to abolish legislation and institutions which guarantee hygienic conditions and high environmental health standards in rich countries.
Towards the end of the 19th century two sanitary officials, one in Massachussetts State Board (H.F. Mills) and the other in Hamburg (J.J. Reincke), scrutinised death rates in their respective areas. They both independently of each other discovered that clean water supplies and effective sewerage systems in urban areas brought down child deaths more than expected. For every prevented diarrhoeal death there were two to four additional prevented deaths from inter alia respiratory infections. The Mills-Reincke phenomenon was widely discussed in the 1920s and 1930s among public health professionals but was afterwards forgotten. Yet we were correct in our World Bank report to propose that this enigmatic phenomenon can be explained with improvements in hygienic conditions, as the WHO has also implied. As undernutrition is an acquired immunodeficiency caused by infections, this leads to increased mortality from, for example, measles. This explains, for instance, why measles mortality came significantly down in affluent countries well before mass vaccinations began.
The classic sustainable development report ‘Our Common Future‘ from 1987 developed by the World Commission on Environment and Development set out the future sustainable development goals of the United Nations in embryonic form. The Chairman of the World Commission was Norway’s Prime Minister (Labour Party) Gro Harlem Brundtland (MD, MPH). In addition to being a physician trained in Norway, she also holds a Masters degree in public health from Harvard University. Brundtland later became the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), with unfortunate consequences due to her conservationist ideals.
According to renowned urban development researcher David Satterthwaite, Brundtland made an unfortunate decision to omit the ‘Brown Agenda’ from ‘Our Common Future’. Brown Agenda promotes crucial infrastructural urban development such as the provision of fresh water supplies and the installation of sewerage systems i.e., the build-up of infrastructure that protects health. ‘Our Common Future’, with its core demand that world must reduce energy consumption by 50%, helped to mainstream global environmental conservation policies and steer the global development agenda, with adverse effects on investment choices. African countries would need investments in coal fired power plants, which are needed to support municipal water supply and sewerage systems and to diminish now rapid deforestation. Poor countries are often unable to raise capital due to lack of credit history on their own and need bi- and multilateral assistance from rich countries.
Thus, it is not a coincidence that LCCCHR does not mention hygienic principles and the need to revitalise environmental health practices in the development agenda. Letter H was dropped from the formerly holy trinity of water, sanitation and hygiene (WSH), which historically has its roots in godliness. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6) mentions only water and sanitation, because H needs water in quantity (around 200-250 litres per day per person) and electricity provisions to communities to pump clean water in and wastewater out from households. Conservationists intentionally do not allow poor people in the Global South to be blessed with the holy WSH trinity, but are unable – even if they very much wish – to take away WSH trinity from us ordinary people in rich countries. The holy WSH trinity was in the centre of the development agenda of the United Nations until the early 1990s.
I have previously described in detail the bitter scientific battle around the origins of childhood nutrition between ‘infectionists’ and neo-Malthusian ‘food securityists’ and how ineffective nutritional interventions and programmes finally replaced environmental health activities in the UN institutions starting from the early 1990s. This was based on just one small observational study from Bangladesh. Ultimately, the decision to remove environmental health and hygienic principles from the development agenda was simply an ideological choice promoted by conservationists and their mighty neo-Malthusian allies.
LCCCHR does not mention the Bradley classification of water-related diseases, of which water-washable diarrhoeal diseases are dominant (around 75-80 %) in unhygienic conditions and LCCCHR only mentions one category of water-related diseases i.e., waterborne diseases. According to the authors’ view, transmission of waterborne diseases is increasing due to climate change. This tells us vividly that the authors are unaware of the significance of hygienic principles. However, they are not the only ones, as even among health professionals in the developed world there is a widely held view that drinking water is the sole vehicle transmitting diarrhoeal diseases in developing countries. This bias allows Western do-gooders to provide the poor child with various development projects to supply a glass of clean drinking water and perhaps opportunities to wash his or her hands but nothing more. I call this belief a clean drinking water bias. I speculate that this bias owes to the fact that most large diarrhoeal outbreaks in highly developed countries with high hygienic standards tend to be waterborne. In unhygienic conditions, however, 24/7 hyper-endemic transmission of diarrhoeal diseases dominates and result from the inability to prevent infections including diarrhoeal infections by washing in a myriad different ways, which I have discussed extensively.
Deceptive LCCCHR
The current ‘scientific consensus’ of the health effects of climate change is buried on page 1,046 of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6):
An excess of 250,000 deaths per year by 2050 attributable to climate change is projected due to heat, undernutrition, malaria and diarrhoeal disease, with more than half of this excess mortality projected for Africa (compared to a 1961-1991 baseline period for a mid-range emissions scenario) (high confidence).
Every year there are over 50 million deaths around the world. LCCCHR does not mention this figure.
The current hype of the devastating health effects of climate change is based on the LCCCHR and the Synthesis Report of the IPCC AR6. To give further credibility to these ‘scientific’ reports, mainstream media reported last summer on issues like the ‘scorched earth’ and shocking public health effects of heat waves. Both LCCCHR and the Synthesis Report of the IPCC AR6 do not provide any new numerical estimates of the health effects of climate change but instead use colorful language to predict doom and gloom if Net Zero policies are not taken seriously. The lead authors of the LCCCHR in their latest commentary even use extreme language like this:
The threat is now to our very survival and to that of the ecosystem upon which we depend. Grave impacts of climate change are already with us and could worsen catastrophically within decades.
Between 1955 and the end of 2021, greenhouse gases (GHG) have trapped the energy equivalent of 374 zettajoules of heat in our oceans and atmosphere, the energy equivalent of 6.23 billion Hiroshima bombs.
LCCCHR gives the impression (in its figure four) that malaria is a growing problem due to climate change, especially in the Global South, by showing that since 1950 especially the “average number of months suitable for malaria transmission” has increased by 30%. However, the authors did not inform their readers that malaria mortality has dropped globally since 1950 by 75-88%.
For instance, these misleading statements are found in the LCCCHR:
Access to clean energy and technologies improves health, especially for women and children; low-carbon electrification, walking, cycling and public transport enhance air quality, improve health, employment opportunities and deliver equity. …
Accelerated decarbonisation would not only prevent the most catastrophic health impacts of accelerated heating, but, if designed to maximise health benefits, could also save millions of lives with healthier diets, more active lifestyles and improved air quality. …
Phasing out coal is particularly urgent because of its high greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution intensity.
In real life there are no practical clean energy solutions proposed by the ideologues to prevent the horrendous indoor air problem in many poor households of the Global South. Instead, as I have reported, the only way to climb the energy ladder in order to achieve clean indoor air is to rely on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). This feasible technology is rapidly spreading to South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The energy ladder concept was abolished in order to strategically steer discussions on energy policies in the development agenda similar to the effect of abolishing H from the WSH holy trinity for political reasons.
LCCCHR does not mention that it is not the industry, power production and traffic in megacities of the Global South that are polluting ambient air, but rather residential heating and cooking is the root cause of high levels of particulate matter in households and in ambient air in these cities. Thus, the implication that coal is to blame is misleading, since electricity and heat are produced in power stations with effective scrubbers. In Helsinki we had two extremely efficient coal plants, which were producing simultaneously electricity and heat, until green ideologues managed to close them (one is still running until 2025). Helsinki has among the cleanest ambient air quality of any metropolitan area in the globe. These efficient coal plants were granted a United Nations environment award for their cleanliness in 1991 among many other environmental awards. The closure of the first of these plants might jeopardise heat security of the population in Helsinki this winter if cold spells hit Helsinki in January and February.
One should also note that London got rid of the deadly smog of the 1950s primarily via the Clean Air Act of 1956, which banned use of the most polluting household fuels (e.g. the dirtiest coal) and permitted only smokeless fuel in cities. It also led to increasing the height of some industrial chimneys and built new power stations away from cities, so that the pollution was dispersed more widely.
One core policy statement or recommendation of the LCCCHR is that by discontinuing eating red meat and drinking milk, public health would miraculously improve across the globe. Alternative forms of proteins promoted by these ideologues include lab-grown hamburgers, fermented fungi patties and insect-based protein shakes. I do not want to eat these foods.
Health and adaptation issues are now high on the global agenda thanks to the Lancet Countdown 2022 Climate Change and Health Report and the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate. During the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai in November 2023, a political declaration was adopted by more than 120 Governments to increase efforts to find solutions to better adapt to a changing climate and to accelerate mitigation efforts based on “health co-benefits” mitigation. As IPCC assessments reports continuously stress, the best way to improve climate resilience is to bring back the Brown Agenda in the centre of the development agenda. The main reason why developed countries have better ‘climate resilience’ compared to the developing nations is their health protection infrastructure. The green do-gooders do not want the Global South to be blessed with this vital infrastructure, which resulted in a public health miracle in the now affluent countries.
Mikko Paunio is an Adjunct Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Helsinki, Department of Public Health.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67770990.amp
Andrew Bridgen has quit the Reclaim Party.
Its a party of one, and a few hangers on who will never be elected. Becoming an independent is that best move for him.
Now then, our hux. How come whenever you do an off-territory dump it’s all good but when I do so all the ass-hats crawl out of the woodwork for a mass whinge-athon, remember?? LOL Are you sure you don’t feel the urge to apologise to the author?
Perhaps it’s just because I’ve more of an extensive following of haters…Are you jel? 
But regarding our Andrew B, I did not see that one coming. However, I wish him all the best because he’s a cracking bloke and has proven he has the courage of his convictions many times over now. Can you imagine having him as a PM? My god, how different life would look for the British people.
But Bridgen would only be any good as Emperor, since parliament can get nothing done. Ideology trumps common sense. If one say black the other lot say white and then you have the SNP who say RED/GREEN
Ah I know but he’s a good egg isn’t he? There’s also something Bilbo-esque about him, don’t you think? I’ve always had Hobbit vibes from wor Andrew, but perhaps that’s just me…
Yep I like the guy——-No idea if he compares to Hobbit vibes as I never watch any films with castles dragons and gargoyles. But if I were to have an emperor I might like it to be him
“Are you sure you don’t feel the urge to apologise to the author?”
I don’t particularly like ‘dumping’ on a thread but as you proved Mogs it is the only way to get information out there after about 11 am because after that the NR BTL thread dies.
So long as Andrew Bridgen’s constituents have the good sense to return him to Parliament at the next election I don’t really care which party he stands for.
The author has put up a good article. The denial of electricity to the Third World condemns many to a short life of ill health and early mortality. Very much what is being planned for we in the first world.
Oh I’m very pro-dumping. Only the anally retentive would take issue with it, and now I know who they are. Especially seeing as the article linked is still relevant to the material shared on the DS site and if that particular comments section is quiet, then I see no reason to whine about such trivialities at all.
That was a reference to one of the haters who went to the extent of using an alias account just so they could follow me around and harass me further. Some seriously disturbed and unpleasant members/visitors to this site, as you know only too well, being quite the veteran, like myself. The only time anybody should apologise is if they’ve legitimately done something wrong, and sharing a miscellaneous article under an unrelated subject hardly qualifies, but some people will always find fault and reason to moan over anything. Sadsacks.
So where next?—–Reform?
I’m not surprised. I’m afraid Laurence Fox shot himself and therefore the Party in both feet with his “shagging” remark and also the ULEZ campaign. Politics is a very rough game and when you’re obviously a target, you don’t give the Opposition so much easy ammunition.
Precisely. ————–Fox wasn’t so foxy after all was he?——-You cannot make it so easy for the silly Liberal Progressive parasites to fire bullets at you
The whole green movement could rightly be accused of mass murder in Africa. By holding back economic development there they are shortened far more lives than Hitler ever managed to do with his gas chambers etc.
I wonder how future generations will see this vast project, which is built on lies, and every one of its actions is entirely counter-productive to its stated aim.
You put it bluntly, but that is exactly what is happening. There is nothing more horrific to so called environmentalists in the wealthy west than poor third world people having the same standard of living as them and using up finite resources.
Sadly the aid agencies all seem to have bought into the idea that climate change is already the biggest cause of harm in the developing world – I suspect because they have swallowed the idea that if there’s a drought or a flood, it is evidence o9f climate change.
They all seem strangely quiet on the impact of Net Zero and Ukraine sanctions.
Let me expand on that. The big agencies take their cue from the UN, and may often be as corrupt. The small agencies take their lead from the larger agencies, which is not unnatural as they have the resources – just as the average well meaning citizen takes it for granted that the government is telling them the truth until experience bites them.
In view of the exploding birthrate there over the past few decades, perhaps that was their aim.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/19/eu-fingerprint-checks-uk-travellers-british-passengers-entry-exit-system-facial-scans
Fingerprinting and facial recognition starts in Europe next year.
The paragraph about the replacement of local power stations in London is right, but the other historical fact is that at least one of them used to provide local district heating. E.g. the old Battersea power station did that, and the heating system is still in use, albeit fuelled by gas. More detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimlico_District_Heating_Undertaking
Loads of district heating elsewhere – more bumf here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating However, designing things like that is probably inimical to the way in which housing development is done in some areas, like most of the UK now.
Another related issue is that the idea of combining electricity generation with providing available hot water doesn’t gel with that of using “renewable” sources with only the occasional use of thermal power.
“Eco Imperialism”. ——–I have used that term a lot. ——Yes all you poor people leave your coal in the ground and we will send you some cash for turbines and a few solar panels. You are going to stay poor but hey you will have a nice warm glow inside that you are saving the planet. —–A diabolical disgrace.
Sometime in the future, if we get there, I can see a good case for reparations from those that caused mass energy and food insecurities. But it won’t be paid for by country but by groups or individuals that were solely responsible.
You just conjured up an image in my mind of Ed Miliband with handcuffs on. But to be fair they are mostly all in on the scam and all signed up to the NET ZERO impoverishment of their own citizens to get a little gold star on their lapel from the UN
So there wasn’t any other impact on public health in developing countries caused by the lockdowns then? Obviously absolutely nothing happened over the last 4 years?
Even though the ‘extremely intelligent’ and ‘well meaning’ non productive individuals within the UN. WHO etc. pushed the lockdowns it seems some were pointing out the collateral damage caused as far back as July 2020:
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-07-2020-who-and-unicef-warn-of-a-decline-in-vaccinations-during-covid-19
GENEVA/NEW YORK, 15 July 2020 – The World Health Organization and UNICEF warned today of an alarming decline in the number of children receiving life-saving vaccines around the world. This is due to disruptions in the delivery and uptake of immunization services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to new data by WHO and UNICEF, these disruptions threaten to reverse hard-won progress to reach more children and adolescents with a wider range of vaccines, which has already been hampered by a decade of stalling coverage….
The WHO published on this topic again in July 2022,
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-07-2022-covid-19-pandemic-fuels-largest-continued-backslide-in-vaccinations-in-three-decades
The largest sustained decline in childhood vaccinations in approximately 30 years has been recorded in official data published today by WHO and UNICEF.
The percentage of children who received three doses of the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP3) – a marker for immunization coverage within and across countries – fell 5 percentage points between 2019 and 2021 to 81 per cent.
As a result, 25 million children missed out on one or more doses of DTP through routine immunization services in 2021 alone. This is 2 million more than those who missed out in 2020 and 6 million more than in 2019, highlighting the growing number of children at risk from devastating but preventable diseases. The decline was due to many factors including an increased number of children living in conflict and fragile settings where immunization access is often challenging, increased misinformation and COVID-19 related issues such as service and supply chain disruptions, resource diversion to response efforts, and containment measures that limited immunization service access and availability…
The National Library of Medicine published a report on the affects of lockdowns on global vaccination programmes in Aug 2022
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9403570/
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (hereafter, “the pandemic”) and its control measures have disrupted access to healthcare globally. A systematic review performed during the first months of the pandemic found an overall 37% reduction in health service utilization, including hospital admissions, diagnostic and treatment services, highest during March and April 2020. In May 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the first Pulse Survey amongst Ministry of Health officials globally; nearly 90% reported disruptions to essential health services. Disruptions were greater in low-income countries (LICs) than high-income countries (HICs). Immunization services were amongst those most frequently reported to be affected, with UNICEF estimating that 23 million children did not receive routine vaccinations during 2020; 3.7 million more than in 2019…
I’m sure there are more as the 3 links above are from a quick 15 minute search. While it is laudable that WHO have written about this they have not shouted this from the roof tops as they should have done, because they must surely know that COVID-19 (Wuhan Flu) is not a child killer while disrupting all the existing and proven distribution of medicines has a real devastating impact (not even Bill said anything on this). Add in the insane green agenda of net-zero along with Marxist style demands for equity then the real underpinnings of public health, which is cheap and abundant energy and food, will cease to be cheap and abundant and the prospects for many will not be good.
Good piece by Mikko Paunio.
Those who have read RFK Jr.’s “The Real Anthony Fauci” will remember that Kennedy makes the point that Gates, Fauci and the other usual suspects, ‘charitably invest’ millions in health projects in Africa, curiously ignoring clean water, drainage and hygiene projects (where the potential benefits are enormous).
Instead they spend on huge “vaccine trials” to recoup billions when fake and incompetent “data”, (hiding the harms of his dodgy vaccines) and facilitate obtaining permissions to sell them at huge prices in the West. Gates and his chums are, by any measure, guilty of killing millions. But even his dad was an eugenicist.So that’s alright.
On a similar theme, whenever I see the expensive and heart wrenching Water Aid adverts (frequently), designed to get well meaning little old ladies here to fund clean water in Africa, I always wonder why African governments can’t themselves find the money to provide clean water (and sewerage) for their citizens?
They could very likely find enough cash, down the back of their opulent sofas, if not, in their numbered Swiss bank accounts. How many water pumps could you buy for the cost of an armour plated Mercedes Maybach?
Boris Johnson was in Africa not that long ago, promising financial aid but only to those countries that create energy by “sustainable” means.
The late African activist, Fiona Kobusingye, eloquently summarized why cheap and constantly available electricity is a necessity of life:
Not having electricity means millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.
Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.
Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this?
Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.
So Boris was over their bribing them was he? ——–This is the eco socialist scam masquerading as saving the planet. Poor people in poor countries where about one billion people have no electricity, and another billion only have enough for a fridge are being told “LEAVE YOUR COAL AND GAS ALONE” and “HERE IS SOME MONEY FOR TURBINES AND MAYBE A NEW SCHOOL AND SOME FRESH WATER”——-What we in the west are really telling these people is that they can never develop and become prosperous and are not going to have much in the way of electricity. ——A Diabolical disgrace.
I just came across this link, where the WEF have shot themselves in the foot!
Climate change on Venus made it uninhabitable – without humans present!
Anyone sending a Thank you Letter to WHO? WEF? or To The Gates Of Hell?? Exclude me