World Health Organization (WHO) officials are diverting attention away from the real causes of global pandemics, and the Chinese government’s culpability in the spread of the Wuhan Covid-19 coronavirus, by launching propaganda falsely linking pandemics to global warming. In the latest example, WHO researcher Arthur Wyns authored an article in Scientific American falsely claiming climate change may “make the effects of a current or future pandemic worse.” Overwhelming scientific evidence, however, shows a warmer climate reduces the likelihood and severity of epidemics and pandemics.
Wyns’ article, “Climate Change and Infectious Diseases,” dismisses without scientific support the likelihood that warmer temperatures inhibit the spread of coronavirus, just as scientists know warm weather inhibits the spread of influenza. Transmissible diseases like the flu and the coronavirus, are far more prevalent during the late-fall, winter, and early spring, when the weather is cold and damp, rather than in the summer months when it is warm and dry. Everyone knows the “flu season” runs from fall through early spring. And colds, while not unheard of, are less common in the summer as well.
In fact, cold temperatures kill many more people globally than warm or hot temperatures.
In an article published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W. R. Keatinge and G. C. Donaldson noted, “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”
More recently in a study published in the Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths, and found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700% more people than warm or hot weather.
Wyn also tells tall tales when he writes, “climate change is causing widespread drought and desertification in much of the world, threatening the availability of water for consumption, food production, personal hygiene, and medical care, including for infectious disease.” Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the supposed ‘gold standard’ of scientific consensus, finds no such link.
As reported in Climate at a Glance: Drought, “The U.N. IPCC reports with ‘high confidence’ that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years, while IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally. (See https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf, p. 191.)”
As reported by Climate Realism, this isn’t the first time that a WHO official exploited the coronavirus to promote climate change extremism and socialism. In an address for the radical activist group Extinction Rebellion about coronavirus and climate change, Michael Marmot, a commission chairman at the WHO, praised massive government programs that will “socialize the economy.”
Blaming pandemics on climate change may take attention away from the Chinese government’s culpability in the spread of coronavirus and the WHO’s incompetent response to coronavirus, but it advances shameful misinformation that is costing people their lives.
