Climate change will erode foundations of health

WHO Director-General warns vulnerable populations at greatest risk of projected impacts

7 APRIL 2008 | GENEVA -- Scientists tell us that the evidence the Earth is warming is "unequivocal." Increases in global average air and sea temperature, ice melting and rising global sea levels all help us understand and prepare for the coming challenges. In addition to these observed changes, climate-sensitive impacts on human health are occurring today. They are attacking the pillars of public health. And they are providing a glimpse of the challenges public health will have to confront on a large scale, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan warned today on the occasion of World Health Day.

"The core concern is succinctly stated: climate change endangers human health," said Dr Chan. "The warming of the planet will be gradual, but the effects of extreme weather events -- more storms, floods, droughts and heat waves -- will be abrupt and acutely felt. Both trends can affect some of the most fundamental determinants of health: air, water, food, shelter and freedom from disease."

Human beings are already exposed to the effects of climate-sensitive diseases and these diseases today kill millions. They include malnutrition, which causes over 3.5 million deaths per year, diarrhoeal diseases, which kill over 1.8 million, and malaria, which kills almost 1 million.

European heat wave, 2003: Estimates suggest that approximately 70 000 more people died in that summer than would have been expected. Rift Valley fever in Africa: Major outbreaks are usually associated with rains, which are expected to become more frequent as the climate changes. Hurricane Katrina, 2005: More than 1 800 people died and thousands more were displaced. Additionally, health facilities throughout the region were destroyed critically affecting health infrastructure. Malaria in the East African highlands: In the last 30 years, warmer temperatures have also created more favourable conditions for mosquito populations in the region and therefore for transmission of malaria. Epidemics of cholera in Bangladesh: They are closely linked to flooding and unsafe water. These trends and events cannot be attributed solely to climate change but they are the types of challenges we expect to become more frequent and intense with climate changes. They will further strain health resources that, in many regions, are already under severe stress.

"Although climate change is a global phenomenon, its consequences will not be evenly distributed," said Dr Chan. "In short, climate change can affect problems that are already huge, largely concentrated in the developing world, and difficult to control."

To address the health effects of climate change, WHO is coordinating and supporting research and assessment on the most effective measures to protect health from climate change, particularly for vulnerable populations such as women and children in developing countries, and is advising Member States on the necessary adaptive changes to their health systems to protect their populations.

WHO and its partners -- including the UN Environment Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN World Meteorological Organization -- are devising a workplan and research agenda to get better estimates of the scale and nature of health vulnerability and to identify strategies and tools for health protection. WHO recognizes the urgent need to support countries in devising ways to cope. Better systems for surveillance and forecasting, and stronger basic health services, can offer health protection. WHO will be working closely with its Member States in coming years to develop effective means of adapting to a changing climate and reducing its effects on human health.

"Through its own actions and its support to Member States," said Dr Chan, "WHO is committed to do everything it can to ensure all is done to protect human health from climate change."

“‘Global warming’ is causing malaria, floods, and malnutrition” - SCAREWATCH

The truth: The WHO’s announcement appears to have been timed deliberately to coincide with the launch of Al Gore’s “$300 million” advertising campaign to whip up fear of “global warming”. It lacks any scientific basis whatsoever, and seems to be yet another of the numerous rent-seeking exercises in which public authorities worldwide are indulging on the basis of the half-understood and flagrantly exaggerated climate scare.

The truth about malaria. Malaria is not, repeat not, a tropical disease. The largest outbreak in the past 100 years was in the 1920s and 1930s in Siberia – not noted for its tropical climate...
The truth about rising sea levels. The IPCC’s 2007 report, confronted with evidence that sea level is not rising very fast, had to cut its high-end estimate of sea-level rise to 2100 by one-third, from 3 feet to under 2 feet. Its best estimate is that sea level will rise by just 1 ft 5 in 100 years, compared with 8 inches in the 20th century and a mean rate of 4 feet per century throughout the 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age...
The truth about malnutrition. There has never been a famine in a country that is fully and functionally democratic in the Western sense. Famine and malnutrition are caused by one thing and one thing alone: bad government. The WHO is a division of the UN, and the UN is in effect a dictators’ club, so the WHO cannot say that it is bad government that is causing malnutrition. So, in common with public authorities worldwide, it lays the blame for what are, at root, failures of governmental administration upon “global warming”. There is no scientific basis for the notion that “global warming” will increase malnutrition or famine by reducing the world’s food supply...
The truth about climate variability. The climate varies naturally, has always done so, and will always do so. Even the excitable IPCC says that no individual extreme-weather event such as those so luridly described by the WHO can be ascribed to “global warming”. The principal reason for the increase in the scale of climate-related disasters is not the increase in extreme-weather events: for there has been no such increase. The WHO mentions typhoons and tropical cyclones, but there has been no increase in hurricane frequency or intensity for 100 years, and the frequency of severe typhoons and tropical cyclones has decreased throughout the past 30 years. There is no basis either in theory or in observation for the notion that the climate has become any more unpredictable than it has always been...

Here is something I wrote in the mid-90's for a graduate school course in which we discussed public policy having to do with human nutrition. One of my professors described it as being "cynical." Ha ha ha. It's probably exactly the sort of thing Margaret Chan and Algore would want people to do.

Implementing Nutrition Policy: Means and Ends

The problem
Scientific investigation into the relationship of nutrition to health and disease has produced an immense body of data. Given the nature of science, the results of any one study must be understood within its narrowly defined context. Accordingly, a broad view of the relation of nutrition to health and disease is accurate to the extent that one understands those narrowly defined contexts and not by any superficial similarity or dissimilarity between test results centering around any particular theme--i.e., coffee and coronary heart disease, or herpes and arterial plaque.

It’s been said that the general public lacks the knowledge, ability, and experience necessary for an accurate overview of this topic. Of course, by definition “the general public” is the necessarily large group of people formed when selecting for any narrowly defined level of knowledge or expertise. Everybody is a part of someone else’s general public.

Still, the problem exists of how to get the knowledge out from where it is being generated to a more general level in such a way as to make the greatest positive impact on people’s health.

The ethical considerations
It’s at this point that ethical questions must be raised. To paraphrase Lenin, who is to decide who does what to whom, for what reasons, and for what ends?

At times it appears the temptation is to think that if it’s left up to others to make choices about their health, they won’t make the right ones; and because the experts' or policy makers' knowledge is so valuable, or of such potential benefit, or the situation is so critical, the decision must be made for them.

For one reason or another, this mindset is oblivious to the fact that a fact (the descriptive) cannot lead directly to a command (the imperative). It is always mediated through the idea of what one ought to do (the prescriptive). Such an idea is the product of individual judgment.

The difference between a society existing in a state of liberty or in what, thoughout most of history, appears to be its default mode is persuasion of the individual judgment by knowledge and example (accomplished in the context of limited proscriptive law) vs. coercion of individual will by force or by its threatened use (from “Your money or your life”--the Highwayman to “The American people are going to get a health care bill whether they want one or not”--Senator Rockefeller).

The public policy implications
We must look at the specific topic of effecting public health in the general context of social structure. What type of society do we have and what type of actions are appropriate to it? And for those involved in international efforts, what is the type of society in which we will work and what are the special constraints it places upon our actions within it? For instance, if the opportunity to care for the health of a people living under a repressive regime comes only by working through the official channels of that regime, do we accept the opportunity and do all we are permitted, though it may fall short of all we are capable of doing?

In either case, the political constraints upon and consequences of such actions are built directly upon the answers to these questions: What is the end to which we want to apply scientifically gained knowledge of nutrition and health? That answered, what are the means we will employ?

In the broadest terms, is the end to be a state of knowledge in which the individual is able to understand the possible consequences of his behavior and is then free to choose according to his own desires and goals, the general state of society then an amalgam of informed individual choices? Or is the end to be a state of being in which the individual’s choices are limited by others to a range calculated by them most likely to result in that state of being, the general state of society then an expression of coerced individual actions?

The latter end is characteristic of family (both nuclear and extended), of tribalism (the mythologized extended family), of socialism (re-mythologized tribalism in a suit), and of totalitarianism (demythologized socialism with guns). All consist in the individual being forced by others using various means into behavior which will be
1) for his own good later in life (the family),
2) for society’s good (tribalism/socialism), or
3) for the good of the individuals in control of the society (totalitarianism).
While this is universally seen as appropriate within the child/family relationship for developmental reasons, its application to society at large by some group within that society, or by one society to another, has been the cause of most social ferment throughout history.

The track record of authoritarianism has been excellent in terms of its persistence throughout history and across cultures but has been abysmal in terms of knowledge (Galileo and the Catholic Church, Lysenko and Soviet genetics, German anthropology and the Nazi state), in terms of human rights (the Inquisition, the Holocaust and other pogroms, China and family planning, most post-colonial African dictatorships) and in terms of technological inventiveness (the miserable record of Soviet-style five year plans, Mao’s fixation on steel production and its disruption of the flow of goods and services, the extreme environmental damage left behind in the former Eastern bloc as a direct result of centralized control of capital, labor, and resources ).

The reason for this is that such a social structure doesn’t allow the freedom for the wide range of viewpoints necessary for generating and testing hypotheses, let alone the ad hoc experimentation and innovation by individuals for their own reasons that form the basis of a developing, knowledge-based, technological society. Discovery is not allowed to take one where it will--it must be restricted to the party line (witness the vitiating of the ideal of the university by P.C. in some quarters).

Given the complexity of life, the narrow range of understanding possessed by any particular group is guaranteed to fall short at some point. Given the concentration of power exercised under a centralized system, the failures are guaranteed to have widespread and crippling effects. By contrast, the multiplicity of successes and failures over a wide range of scale that appear so chaotic in a state of liberty have the benefit of limiting the damage and of spreading throughout society successes which can be emulated and modified to fit local conditions.

Among some, the attitude seems to be “We know so much now, but people don’t care or won’t listen or aren’t changing fast enough. What can we do to change things now?" The yearning appears to be for some universal remedy. This may be “nice”, but is hardly practicable, let alone even conceivable. It would require an understanding of life and society beyond the capability of any individual or group. Universalist approaches in the realm of economics and government have proved uniformly disastrous.

So what can be done? Using available resources and even contributing their own, those of like mind should join together to form organizations for the purpose of getting out their message about nutrition and health. This is nothing new. Most of the greatest advances in science, education, medicine, and social welfare came about in just this way. Independent organizations have the flexibility to tailor their message and target it to those they know best and to adjust the message as conditions warrant. Independent organizations also assume social responsibility by recognizing that, when all is said and done, somebody is going to have to do the work--it won’t get done just because it ought to be done or is worthy of being done.

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the πνευμα of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.

Power accumulates power. Government grows until it meets a limit, either a systemic one (Constitutional limits), or a fiscal one (limits imposed by the amount of money it is able to generate or extort from its own citizens or those outside), or a social one (limits provided by massive societal non-compliance or armed insurrection or by other countries’ response to aggression or perceived weakness). Even then it still has great power to drain resources and people from productive enterprise and turn them to its own ends. In this way it is functioning as a parasite living off the body politic.

The question should not be the degree of insult the victim is able to take without expiring. It should be how free of the parasite he can be and still get any survival advantages it may convey. He needs to ask constantly what those advantages are and to question what the State and its advocates claim them to be. The danger comes from his turning over to it the control of larger and larger areas of his life, believing that he will then be free from insecurity, pain, and poverty. It is a misplaced trust. Many, if not most, of the modern state’s most intrusive and manipulative ventures (Social Security, the EEOC, the EPA, and OSHA, to name a few) have come into existence by someone promising that they were only trying to help society. In this way regulatory agencies prosper and extend their spheres of influence in ever more self-aggrandizing roles of protectors of society, yet limiting the ability of society to respond to its own changing conditions.

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