Citing a single new study, the corporate media was abuzz recently with stories claiming ‘climate change’ is likely to cause the spread of a variety of diseases, including often deadly or debilitating insect-borne diseases. This is false.
The study’s claims are based on computer-model projections of the impact of ‘climate change’, not real-world data.
In addition, large volumes of prior research refute the claim that global warming increases the range and incidences of diseases.
ABC News, USA Today, Weather.com, and Esquire, among many other corporate news outlets, carried stories linking supposed human-caused climate change to the spread of diseases.
The stories all cited a single new study in Nature as proving the connection.
Esquire’s story, titled “Apparently Climate Change Is Good for One Thing: Disease,” was typical of the mainstream media’s uncritical coverage of the Nature report titled: “Over half of known human pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by climate change.”
Quoting from Nature’s summary, Esquire writes:
We found that 58 percent (that is, 218 out of 375) of infectious diseases confronted by humanity worldwide have been at some point aggravated by climatic hazards; 16 percent were at times diminished.
Empirical cases revealed 1,006 unique pathways in which climatic hazards, via different transmission types, led to pathogenic diseases.
The human pathogenic diseases and transmission pathways aggravated by climatic hazards are too numerous for comprehensive societal adaptations, highlighting the urgent need to work at the source of the problem: reducing GHG emissions.
Although there is no question climate changes have contributed to the spread of various diseases historically, the right climate conditions are only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, for the spread of diseases, including insect-borne diseases.
Esquire follows the authors of the Nature study down the rosy path of climate being the primary factor in the occurrence, incidence, and spread of disease. It is not.
In dozens of articles, Climate Realism has presented copious research which refutes the claim that climate change is, or is likely to, cause an increase in viral, bacterial, or insect-borne illnesses, or exacerbate existing allergies.
Chapter 7 of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change’s (NIPCC) report, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, and Chapter 4 of NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered: Fossil Fuels, provided thorough reviews of the literature concerning the links between disease and climate, concluding that there is limited evidence, unless the Earth unexpectedly cools dramatically, that climate change will result in diseases becoming more common, either where they are already endemic or in countries and regions where they are currently uncommon.
Indeed, studies from Africa, England and Wales, North and South America, Thailand and beyond refute any link between climate change and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases.
For example, a previous 2010 study in Nature reported:
“[The study’s authors] compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58 percent of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30 percent by 2007.”
In short, despite warming, vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria have become less prevalent and deadly as the climate has warmed.
The other confounding factor that undermines any confidence peer reviewers and reputable journalists should have had in the Nature study is that it relies on climate-model projections of worsening of extreme weather, “for example, … heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, floods, sea level rise and so on,” per the summary, as the reason for more, and more widespread, diseases.
Yet, as the data shows in the various Climate-at-a-Glance summaries on each of these types of extreme weather events, there is no evidence warming is causing or making heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, floods, or sea-level rise worse.
Computer models say they should be getting worse, the data says they aren’t.
In the end, climate-woke members of the mainstream media search each day for the next “major study” they can glom onto in order to gin up alarm about the climate crisis they assert is happening.
No single study, set of studies, or so-called scientific consensus can prove global warming is causing a climate disaster. Only data can do that, and a world facing a climate crisis is just what the data does not show.
Thankfully, contrary to the impression the writers at Esquire, other media outlets, and the authors of the study in Nature are trying to leave, various communicable and insect-borne diseases have become less likely to cause illness or death as the Earth has warmed.
Our ability to prevent and treat diseases has improved dramatically over the past century, which is why premature mortality related to ‘climate change’ has fallen by more than 99 percent over the past century, even as the Earth has warmed.
See more here: climatechangedispatch
Editor’s note: Regarding malaria, the IPCC claims that “Mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18C.”
Professor Paul Reiter, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, is recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on malaria and other insect-borne diseases. He was a member of the World Health Organisation’s Expert Advisory Committee, was chairman of the American Committee of Medical Entomology at the American Society for Tropical Medicine, and lead author of the health section of the US National Assessment on the potential consequences of climate variability.
He points out that mosquitos thrive in very cold temperatures, NOT in warm temperatures.
He said mosquitos are “…extremely abundant in the Arctic. The most devastating incidence of malaria was in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s, there were something like 13 million cases a year, and something like 600,000 deaths. Archangel had about 30,000 cases, and about 10,000 deaths. It is NOT a tropical disease, yet these people in the global warming fraternity invent the idea that malaria will move northwards.”
Professor Reiter’s quote is taken from The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary, which can be seen here: