Last week, researchers from Harvard and the American Cancer Society published a commentary piece in the ACS’s journal about the ways in which cancer and climate change interact. By making extreme weather more intense and frequent, climate change is exposing more people to industrial pollution through floods and wildfires that release otherwise buried or contained carcinogens. Those events also make it harder for people with cancer to get better, as evacuations interrupt treatments and otherwise disrupt medical facilities.
And finally, they point out that because burning fossil fuels produces carcinogenic pollution as well as greenhouse gasses, “providers involved in cancer care delivery have compelling reasons to be actively involved in the development of climate policies.”
Meanwhile, a commentary in The Lancet Planetary Health argues that since Australian mortality records underestimate deaths from heat waves, death certificates should be modernized to include additional information, secondary causes, or “external factors contributing to death,” so that “the impact of climate change” can be “fully appreciated.”
Deniers, of course, were none too thrilled about either set of health experts trying to do their jobs and more precisely and accurately measure how climate change is killing us.
Heartland felt the need to try to debunk it twice, once at their new Climate Realism site, which has taken shape as a place for James Taylor to say “nu uh!” to climate coverage with stale denier myths, as he does here, and again in H. Sterling Burnett’s weekly mailing that adds a section about how really fossil fuels are saving lives because, “fossil fuels are the bedrock of modern medicine,” and “fossil fuels power the fire trucks used to fight wildfires…”
Now, some might think that maybe doctors and nurses and other medical professionals are the bedrock of medicine, or barring that, maybe the pharmaceutical industry and its, y’know, medicine?
And the idea that fossil fuels are good because they help put out fires is certainly … a weird way to praise a product whose sole purpose is to burn.
Very advanced thinking on display here.
Speaking of which, over at Breitbart, James Delingpole complained about the calls to put climate change on death certificates, and unsurprisingly made the link to the baseless conspiracy theories about the coronavirus death count being artificially inflated by anti-Trump doctors listing it as the cause of death for patients without any symptoms of COVID-19.
Not to be outdone with the rank speculation, Marc Morano not only published a ClimateDepot post about the Lancet’s argument for more comprehensive death certificates, but also blasted it out to his email list. He too makes the COVID-19 conspiracy connection, before taking a bizarre turn with a section titled “Climate fueled Cannibalism?”
Morano asks “if ‘climate change’ becomes a cause of death listed on birth certificates,” (yes, he wrote “birth certificates,”) then “It could result in some interesting reading” because “many climate activists have claimed that ‘global warming’ will lead to cannibalism.”
His examples are of recent satire, and past statements about how if nothing is done about climate change, crops will fail and people will be forced to resort to cannibalism, which yes is hyperbolic.
But how does, “hey maybe let’s add a line for secondary information about causes of death to more accurately capture large scale public health threats” lead anyone to cannibalism?
Also, who’s adding causes of death to birth certificates? Perhaps that’s just an innocent mistake, but given that it’s part of Morano’s nonsensical jump to cannibalism, and Burnett’s incomprehensibly shameless insistence that gasoline is the best fire-fighter, there’s really no way to know for sure!
And seriously, if you have genuine answers to our genuine confusion, please let us know
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