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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Trans-sexualism can only exist with industrially produced, artificial drugs and surgery.
In other words, in the absence of surgeons and a pharmaceutical industry prepared to produce the necessary drugs, you don’t have trans-sexualism.
So, say what you want about trans-sexualism, but it’s not natural.
An alternative view might be that while in the past people with gender dysphoria had to simply put up with it (and perhaps suffer mental anguish), medical science has developed to the point where they can be helped.
This isn’t to say that they should be helped — it is very complex, not least the evidence of increased suicide rates in those who have transitioned. But it isn’t helpful to simply say ‘it is unnatural’.
Of course it’s unnatural, and, more than that, it’s an evolutionary aberration.
You’re right, it is very complex. Not having read about the condition in any depth, my concern is that what if something like body dysmorphia were approached by doctors in the same way as gender dysphoria, and people who thought themselves ugly ( but it’s all in their head as they look perfectly fine ) and wanted plastic surgery to change their appearance were allowed to do so, similar to people who want to change gender and so the doctors start them on hormonal treatments, progressing to surgery. To me, both of these diagnoses require talking therapy to work through the impact on the individual’s mental health, not hormonal or surgical intervention, because they are genuine psychiatric disorders.
Also, as in the article I shared, there’s now the ability, whether using a country’s census or records from these gender identity clinics etc, that the social engineers can now get feedback on just how impactful this whole ‘wokedemic’ is. I wonder, if stats exist on this, how many people are currently transitioning/have transitioned in the last 3 years compared to, say, 5 years ago. Because I definitely never used to hear anything like the amount of news and woke stories pertaining to transexuals or the whole ideology of the movement years ago compared to nowadays. Is there really more going on or is it just an illusion as the media shifts it’s focus after being consumed with all things Covid these last few years?
I’m of the opinion that psychotherapy should have a much higher profile as treatment for gender dysphoria.
This will bring howls of ‘conversion therapy’ from the usual suspects, but gender dysphoria really is very different from homosexuality — if your whole existence is telling you that you only want to love someone of the same gender (sex) and there are plenty of similar individuals around then simply allowing homosexuality to occur (in law but also persuading society to tolerate it) will result in a positive outcome.
With gender dysphoria the goal is to actually become a member of the opposite sex but that’s really not possible, with the best outcome being a simulacrum of the opposite sex, which might be ‘okay’ but in the end isn’t achieving the desired outcome. Hence psychological problems including suicidal tendencies for too many.
This isn’t to say that transition is inappropriate for all — I’m sure that in many cases it is a satisfactory (perhaps even near perfect) outcome, but the evidence suggests that it is unsatisfactory for rather too many others.
Gender dysphoria is just a form of body dysmorphia- like anorexia. The difference being that if someone has anorexia we don’t call them stunning and brave, we don’t surgically shrink their stomachs, and we don’t have huge campaigns in the media saying that any attempt to help them get over their condition is bigoted and that anorexics should be celebrated.
We are in the middle of a cultish wave of fanaticism, of insane and demonstrably illogical nonsense, that is grooming and encouraging vulnerable children to wreck their mental and physical health in order to satisfy the liberal fantasies of the cultists.
There is nothing good about it and when the magic-dust wears off and people return to collective sanity this period will be looked back on as a scandal of monstrous proportions akin to the witch hysteria of the 17th century.
Re gender dysphoria in children:
IMO there should be some research into the proportion of adults who experienced some gender dysphoria when going through puberty but who nevertheless matured into a sexually normal (whatever that is) adult.
You are confusing gender dysphoria, which of course is natural, given that (a tiny number of) people are born with it, with the pharmacological and surgical procedures to achieve a sexual transformation, which are entirely artificial.
That’s how much we have been overwhelmed by the trans-sexual movement. One can be accused of being unhelpful for stating simple, undeniable facts.
Would you object to me referring to trans-racism as unnatural if one day a pharma company produced a drug that allowed people with black skin to change it to white skin or vice versa?
What about trans-staturism if short people started adding a several inches to their height through surgical procedure.
How about when a lady dons gigantic surgically enhanced boobs. Is it ok to refer to that as unnatural?
My guess is that it all depends on the strength of the lobby and how much fear it can instil in people.
My point wasn’t that it is unnatural, but that it isn’t a helpful argument.
If something ‘unnatural’ can be done to help people then I’m fine with that.
I would agree with what you are saying if the transsexual movement we are seeing were about helping people. But it isn’t.
It’s an ideological movement used by a variety of people for a variety of different purposes most of which have nothing to do with helping people with sexual dysphoria.
The idea that it is about helping people is a weapon that is used by the various people pursuing their ideological goals. And they use thay weapon against anyone who opposes them.
So it’s used by those who want to teach young children about transsexualism, or by New York Times staff in a power struggle to control the editorial narrative of the paper, or by politicians against their rivals.
It’s a weapon that you’ve inadvertently used yourself in a similar way. Because I’m not arguing against helping the gender dysphoria. I’m arguing against the insane ideological attack against our society.
In that context, in which they are trying to brainwash our children into believing that changing sex is the most natural thing in the world, pointing out how unnatural it is is not only helpful but absolutely critical.
Affirming people’s obvious delusions is not helping them. Humans are sexually reproducing mammals and are – except in fringe cases – born male or female. Someone who hates his own body certainly has a problem. But not a problem which can be solved my mutilating this body chemically or chirugically. That’s nothing but self-harming.
Time to acquire a new recruiting department.
The march through the institutions as outlined by the Soviets in the 60s is now just about complete, each new set of graduates come out more twisted then the last.
I wonder if graduating in 2004 I was one of the last to come through unscathed. In my engineering degree there was no talk of anything political whatsoever, no opinions voiced by lecturers about anything other then the subject matter and the mutual interest of aircraft.
Perhaps the Grey Lady might appease its critics by rebranding itself as the more acceptably ambiguous Gary Lady.
Don’t humour them. Sack ’em.
Fire everyone who feels too entitled to have a proper conversation on the topic.
Speaking of the complex topic of gender identity politics, sparked by changes to the New Zealand census form, I thought this was a very good and comprehensive take written on the subject, with particular focus on how kids are arguably being groomed/indoctrinated by school educators;
”We believe there is a truly evil agenda funding this avant garde approach to coralling off the impressionable outliers within the normal distribution of our kids’ development. It has been transfected into the education system, and delivered throughout the curriculum – along with other nonsense like taking the knee to net zero, and how to recognise disinfo (actual answer: when most government officials or tenured academics open their mouths). But nowhere is this more obvious than in the sexuality training penetrating our kids’ impressionable minds. Some of our children and their friends openly refer to it as sexual grooming training. We are all for removing sexual ignorance as a source of life stress and unhappiness, and teaching how to ensure valid consent (oh, the terrible irony!) but, really is this not just encouraging gender dysmorphia? Some of the self-pleasuring techniques taught to our 12 year olds raised eyebrows for some of us parents. Pass the hairbrush…
Many of the clinicians advancing the Brave New World of the hormonal, surgical and psychological techniques required to ‘transition’ may believe egotistically they are advancing humanity somehow, and relieving suffering. But their legacy will be surely despised for the misguided and blunderbuss approach to a contrived epidemic of gender dysphoria that we have somehow missed and neglected through the ages.
It would seem that the same forces are at play which pushed that a man-made synthetic mRNA was more effective than natural immunity and that humans are to be enhanced by nano-machines. Have we become so conceited as to once again proclaim that we can improve on nature? That has rarely worked out.”
https://nzdsos.com/2023/03/03/gender-identity-politics/
Can we be surprised when children are now ‘taught’ that same sex couples can be mummies and daddies of children when, prior to the invention of IVF, such an approach would have led to the extinction of the human race?
As always, an incredibly small minority of media employees (both MSM and Social – maybe 0.1% of the total population) believe that their wacky views are held by the other 99.9% and use their employment positions to broadcast these beliefs to all and sundry.
Like most things, the situation regarding transexualism (and gender dysphoria) is complex and doesn’t have a simple solution.
Unfortunately, both the media and political-class are determined to distil the situation into a simplistic ‘with us or against us’ argument.
The recent ‘Matt’s messages’ fiasco serves to highlight how the public are manipulated to their agenda. The weird thing is, the public seem to have an incredible ability to not notice this happening, and instead let themselves get whipped up into a frenzy again and again.
Sorry, it’s not a complex issue. Not if we don’t allow it to become one.
A tiny minority of people have a physical condition. It gets dealt with in the best way possible as with many other physical conditions.
Some people are conflating that tiny problem which is a non-issue for most of society with an ideological crusade to tranform our society and convince people that sex is a cultural construct and switching genders is perfectly natural.
Don’t get drawn into the deliberately created confusion.
It’s dead.simple really.
Mentally ill freaks. Sick. In need of either a serious beating or a white jacket in a loony jail cell.
Which ones are mentally ill freaks — the ones suffering from gender dysphoria, or the people who drive themselves into a mania demanding that children be allowed to transition while they’re going through a complex period in their gender-life?
In German, there are two terms for madness, Wahnsinn and Irrsinn. Sinn means sense in the sense of senses, eg, sight or hearing, and also sense in the sense of meaning. As prefix, Irr- refers to something that’s know to be wrong and Wahn- to a delusion or obsession. I think this answers the question nicely: People who believe that sex is assigned at birth suffer from Wahnsinn and people who believe to have been assigned the wrong sex at birth from Irrsinn.
Both?
Their gender life? Really?
He is clearly referring to the lunatics that want our society to deny biological reality and pretend there aren’t two sees, but many. And switching sees is normal.and natural.
This has nothing, nothing at all to do with people born with rare biological conditions.
Bang out of order and talking like a bloody knuckle dragging thug.
Comments like yours are an insult to DS.
The ignorance on the subject of transexuality being spouted here, with one or two exceptions – tips o’ the hat to Amanuensis and Mogs in particular – is absolutely breathtaking.
Ninety-nine percent plus of the transexual / trans community would have nothing to do with the current shenanigans and would absolutely NOT support all the trouble and publicity that is being manufactured around this subject. And the constant MSM fuss is just that – fuss. Genuine trans people have nothing to gain from all these stories, campaigns and headlines. Nothing.
Genuine trans people would not in any way support Drag Story Hour and associated behaviours and most certainly would not wish to see the sexualisation of our children. Believe it or not the majority of trans people are very similar to the people we meet on a daily basis and most of those weighing in on this discussion don’t even realise.
The sensationalism that is being stoked around transsexualism is being done for deeply malign purposes but it is not being pushed by the real trans community. The purpose of the manufactured trans debate is primarily to undermine the sanctity of the family. The push is to break down family life and as ever with any attempt to wreck societal change and havoc TPTB have to target our children.
As Neil Oliver would say:
“It’s not always about what they say it’s about.”
Yes spot on Hux and I agree entirely. I feel like what is going on at the moment, which is definitely *not* representative of the vast majority of trans people, is just getting people riled up and stoking animosity towards the trans community. As you say, most individuals would, I’m sure, just want to get on with their lives quietly and be respectfully left to do so, simultaneously staying in their own lane and not interfering with others. The whole thing has become so warped. It reminds me of the similar situation with feminism, which is something else that has been highjacked for the purposes of furthering an agenda. This fringe minority of extremists do not speak for me or represent my core values or beliefs but certain people will lump us all together and tar us all with the same brush, purely to legitimize their hostility and resentment towards these women, and I am somehow meant to answer for a minority of nutty outliers? Jog on! It would appear that ‘Trans”, along with ‘feminism’, now exists on a spectrum and has become an umbrella term for an entire ideology which definitely was not so complicated and ever-evolving years ago. I can’t even keep up with it myself! lol
Thanks Mogs.
Neil Oliver laid it out bare tonight ! He is right over the target ! Also Mahyar Tousi covered the Dutch Farmers plight which is being Ramped up to the point that their farms are going to be taken !!
‘U.S. intelligence whistleblower Chelsea Manning, herself [sic] a trans woman, who was jailed after leaking hundreds of thousands of secret files about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’ – typical MSM. How about ‘Chelsea Manning, who risked life and liberty to expose an unconstitutional, un-American shadow government working within the US and aided by at least eight US security agencies including the CIA.
Using the term ‘Red Guards’ will give the childish idiots more delusions of grandeur.
Some if the ‘Woke’ generation does not want to be criticized and scrutinized.
Maybe they went to universities where it was not allowed to dispute any of the ‘woke’ ideology and therefore were indoctrinated instead of being educated.
They seemingly do not understand free speech, preferring to censor those they disagree with.