This is a guest post by Matt Ridley:
Some years ago, presumably for having written books on genetics, I was elected a fellow of Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS). This was a great honour and I was even more pleased to be invited to speak at one of their annual dinners.
Then, towards the end of 2010, there dropped through my letter box a newsletter from the AMS which included an item on the academy having signed up to an “international statement” on the “health benefits of policies to tackle climate change” together with other medical science academies around the world. The newsletter said that the health “co-benefits” of tackling climate change “show that climate change mitigation strategies need not be socially and economically demanding”. Since everything I was reading at the time about rising food and fuel prices driven partly by climate change mitigation policies was pointing to the opposite conclusion – namely that malnutrition and hypothermia were being increased by such policies, outweighing any health advantages – I went online to read the statement, to find out what I had been signed up to as a fellow.
I found a four-page document, devoted to expounding the good health side-effects of fighting climate change by cutting emissions. For example:
Results for the cities of London and Delhi show that a combination of substantially increased active travel, such as cycling and walking, and lower-emission motor vehicles could lead to substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of chronic diseases.
Most of the statements in the paper referred to a special issue of the Lancet, which had appeared just before the Copenhagen climate summit and which I knew had drawn a heavily critical and very persuasive reply from the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Goklany’s point was that while of course there are health benefits to climate change mitigation, there are health risks too and that any reasonable discussion must come to the conclusion that today and through the foreseeable future, many other health risks outrank global warming in terms of death and disease, and are also more easily addressed.
The IAMP statement not only ignored Goklany’s argument but failed even to acknowledge that risks might outweigh benefits. It had only a three-sentence mention of the issue of health risks that did not even address the issue of relative weight:
However, some climate change mitigation strategies have the potential to damage health. For example, if biofuels are grown on land which could support food crops they could reduce food availability and increase food prices.28 Therefore all climate change mitigation strategies should be subject to health impact assessment.
I did not think this was good enough, so I wrote to the president of the AMS, Sir John Bell, a former university friend and colleague, as follows:
I recently received through the post the Interacademy Medical Panel (IAMP) report on the health co-benefits of policies to tackle climate change. I gather this has already been signed on our behalf.
I have to say I found the document very disappointing and not up to the standards of a scientific academy like AMS.
What it lacks is balance. There is no attempt to cite evidence of the harm that may be done by rushed mitigation of fossil fuel emissions, even though these are extremely well known. There is no attempt to balance the catalogue of harmsthat can come from warming with the catalogue of harms that come from othercauses, whose mitigation might be prevented by efforts to prevent warming.
For example, the report says that `Rising temperatures may increase heat related deaths and heat stress, particularly in urban centres as a result of the urban heat island effect'. Yet there is ample evidence that cold-related deaths exceed heat-related deaths - by about five to one in most of Europe. Even the excess death toll from the 2003 European summer heatwave was dwarfed by the excess death toll from cold in most winters. Last year there were over 25,000 excess winter deaths in England and Wales alone (see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574) and the death toll is disproportionately high among the aged who face acute problems from fuel poverty caused in part by carbon mitigation policies such as wind power subsidies, which have increased energy prices. It follows that if the world warms by 2 degrees, and that warming is greater in the far north, in winter and at night - all of which are predicted by the GCM models - then the death toll from cold stress will undoubtedly fall. It is wrong of the report not to mention these points.
As for the health cost of carbon mitigation policies, we have a perfect example of this in recent years in the effect of biofuel policies on the price and availability of food. There is now no doubt that biofuel policies, motivated substantially by concern about climate change, have caused real increases in hunger in 2008 and again this year (not to mention destruction of rain forest). You can debate how important this is relative to the threat posed by climate change, but to ignore these arguments is negligent.
Consider the case of an African family at risk from hunger, dirty water, indoor air pollution (caused by cooking over wood or charcoal fires), and malaria. These four factors are among the greatest causes of ill health in the world, killing respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute, far more than can be attributed to global warming. What this family needs is fertilizer, clean water, kerosene and bed-nets, not policies to slow a rise in global temperatures. Indeed, you can argue that getting kerosene cooking fuel to such families is the best way to reduce deforestation and hence carbon dioxide emissions.
Keeping climate at 1990 levels, assuming it could be done, would leave more than 98 per cent of human mortality causes untouched, and would consume resources that could be far more effectively spent on combating ill health now. You will be aware that malaria has been eradicated from large parts of the world not by cooling the world down but by combating it directly. You will be aware that death rates from natural disasters are down by 98% since the 1920s not because of policies to change the climate but because of improvements in transport, medicine, communication and technology.
I append some comments on the report from Indur Goklany, a highly respected scholar who has contributed to these debates in the peer-reviewed literature. His analysis confirms my suspicions that the paper is unbalanced and misleading.
I received a courteous but non-committal reply from Sir John saying that he would pass on my comments to his colleague Dr Robert Souhami and that he welcomed by engagement with the issue.
That was in January. I knew that the AMS was in the process of moving offices so I did not expect a quick reply, but by April I had still heard nothing from Dr Souhami so I decided to write directly to him myself as follows:
In January I wrote to Sir John Bell to express my disagreement with the unscientific nature of many of the things that had appeared in the IAMP statement on the health co-benefits of climate change to which the AMS had signed up. I explained my reasons and attached a paper from Indur Goklany who has made a special study of this issue and published papers in the peer-reviewed literature. Essentially the IAMP statement made many poorly supported statements about health co-benefits, but failed even to recognize that there may also be health co-drawbacks of climate change policy or that resources might be better expended dealing with other larger and more easily-addressed health risks.
Sir John said that he would pass on my letter and Goklany's paper to you and that he hoped AMS could benefit from my `engagement on this issue'. Did you receive my letter and do you have a response to it? If not I can re-send it.
I now draw your attention to a newly published paper by Goklany in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (http://www.jpands.org/vol16no1/goklany.pdf) that addresses the issue in stark terms and demonstrates that measures taken to combat climate change are almost certainly causing more deaths than climate change itself. I feel strongly that this issue should be properly discussed because I believe the AMS has signed up unthinkingly to a statement of policy that breaks the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
Souhami replied as follows:
I did indeed receive a copy of your message addressed to John Bell and he replied to you.
I think however that there is probably an important misunderstanding. There is no doubt that climate change has the potential to do serious harm to human health as may the switch to alternative energy sources without understanding the consequences (the subject of the reference you provide from Indur Goklany).However the AMS and IAMP statements do not concern that. They are based on the evidence, carefully described in the Lancet papers, that population based steps taken to mitigate climate change have the potential to bring concomitant health benefits to individuals. That is a different matter. Indeed such steps would be likely to bring health benefits whether climate change was occurring or not.The steps described in the AMS and IAMP statements do not concern the very important questions of producing energy from other sources and the consequences for health. They concern societal matters such as reducing private car use, diminishing the use of wood burning stoves for cooking in cramped conditions (for example in India), reducing particulate air pollution, reducing consumption of animal fats. The data are based on the likely consequences for health of policies introduced to change behaviours and harmful environments that will help to mitigate climate change.
When you read the original data you will see that such steps are likely to have different effects on health depending on the economic status of the countries concerned.
I hope that this clarifies the matter. The Lancet references are given in the statements.
I replied as follows:
Thank you for your reply. There is no misunderstanding on my part. Goklany's latest paper is on the health co-costs, rather than co-benefits, of climate mitigation policies, for sure, but it is the net cost or benefit that counts. His conclusion is that the cost outweighs the benefit. A death caused by malnutrition caused by biofuel subsidy is a negative health co-benefit of climate mitigation policy. To adapt your words, population based steps taken to mitigate climate change have the potential to bring concomitant health costs to individuals.
Besides, Goklany's comments on the IAMP report, which I included with my letter to John Bell, did indeed directly address the question of positive co-benefits and argued that they are better captured by normal air pollution policy than by climate mitigation. Here is what he wrote:
"(1) These co-benefits can be obtained much more cheaply via traditional air pollution controls than via mitigation. In fact, that is what we have been doing all along, which is why air quality is so much better in the US, UK and other developed countries even as their GHG emissions continue to grow. (2) Mitigation would reduce economic growth, which, in turn, would have adverse health consequences, particularly for developing countries. So the costs of mitigation should be properly accounted for. (3) It is possible to meet not only environmental and health goals but advance human well-being much more broadly by advancing adaptive capacity via economic development (than via mitigation).''
You use the example of wood burning stoves in India that causes indoor air pollution and hence ill health. One of the Lancet papers says this: "New stove technologies have the potential to bring emission of products of incomplete combustion from biomass stoves down nearly to those of clean fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas."
In other words, a policy that tackled indoor air pollution by the most effective means available, regardless of climate-change mitigation policy, would encourage `clean' LPG - as indeed is happening in Nigeria, for example
(http://www.charcoalproject.org/2010/03/women-key-to-reduce-impact-of-climate-change-in-nigeria/)- rather than trying to improve biomass stoves. This is precisely the kind of potentially counterproductive consequence that Goklany and I are unhappy about the IAMP failing even to address in its report.
Would you be kind enough to agree to publishing a version of this exchange, or a letter from me, in a form that can be circulated to fellows?
Souhami chose to present no counter-argument to this at all, and did not answer my question:
Rather than be drawn into this correspondence further, I think it is time that you made your points directly to the scientists responsible for the data on which the AMS and IAMP reports are based and who were involved in the wording. So, assuming you agree, I shall ask those who are more expert than I to take up these issues with you.
I replied as follows:
I appreciate the offer to forward the correspondence to the individuals who wrote the report, but the matter concerns not just the individuals but the institution as well. Since the report has already been issued in the name of the AMS, there is no chance to influence its content, and I wish to appraise fellows of the fact that there are other views on the matter supported by evidence. So I still would like to know your answer to my question at the end of my previous email, namely will you agree to circulating my concerns to the fellows of the AMS in some form? This could be by means of a letter by me included with normal mailings.
That was the last I heard from him. I was told by an AMS official that I should now address my concerns to her and not to the busy Dr Souhami. (So much for ‘welcoming my engagement’). She put my request before the council of the AMS and then gave me the following reply:
I can report that Council discussed your correspondence regarding the Academy and IAMP statements on climate change and health at its meeting yesterday. Council welcomed your engagement in this aspect of the Academy’s work. Council considered the points raised by you and Indur Goklany. They felt that the purpose of the IAMP statement was to show that some mitigation strategies would bring health co-benefits, but that the statement also adequately addressed the issue of potential negative health impacts of mitigation strategies such as the planting of biofuel crops (noting the first full paragraph in column 2 on page 2). Council members rehearsed the process by which the statement had been prepared on behalf of the Academy, noting the expertise and international standing of the Fellows involved and the high quality of papers on which the statements were based. In conclusion, the Academy’s Council remains committed to this statement, and maintained our general policy not to circulate the views of individual Fellows to the entire Fellowship.
I replied:
I am sorry that the council declined to take this matter further. I disagree that the purpose of the statement was to show that "some" mitigation strategies would bring health co-benefits, since the document makes clear throughout that it considers these health co-benefits to be net positive. The statement was issued to coincide with climate talks. I disagree that the statement adequately addressed the negative health impacts of mitigation strategies in the paragraph mentioned since the discussion there consisted of one sentence about one the cost of one policy, and was cursory and dismissive. I disagree that the papers on which the statement was based were "high quality" given the strength of the argument published by Indur Goklany in the Lancet in response to those papers. I do not see what the international standing of the fellows has to do with the strength of the argument.
Let me restate the position clearly. Carefully researched work by Goklany has established a powerful case that climate mitigation policies are already producing large net health co-costs for society, and especially the poor. This argument was not properly considered, let alone rebutted, in the statement and nor has it been in any of the responses I have had from members of the AMS council since. If they have arguments as to why Goklany's calculations are wrong, I feel sure they would have shared them with me. I conclude that far from "welcoming my engagement with the issue" the council would much rather I had not raised it at all and has no interest in engaging in a reasoned, open and fair discussion.
This shocks me and diminishes the AMS in my eyes considerably. I have brought evidence that policies supported by the AMS may be doing net harm, in contravention of the Hippocratic oath, yet the premier medical academy does not even wish to engage with the argument. Shame.
I presume you have no objection to my publishing our exchanges.