Speaking on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), International Council of Nurses CEO Howard Catton claimed that climate change is the ”grandmother of all health threats.”
“I talk to nurses around the world every week who tell me about how they see the impacts of climate change on the health of people they care for every single day in their practice,” Catton said. “There are 45 million-plus healthcare professionals who are witnesses to the health emergency that is unfolding in plain sight.”
“Their voice must be heard and acted on.”
He continues, conflating the damage caused by poor air quality and pollution — likely in places like China and India, not the developed countries of the West — with the supposed damage caused by minute rising temperatures. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom, of course, agrees with this radical climate change position.
“They see and work with young people struggling and old people struggling with respiratory disorders caused or exacerbated by poor air quality and pollution. People who can’t go out, who are struggling with their tasks of daily living, who are losing function, whose independence undermined,” Catton said.
“They support people who are not coping with extreme temperature changes from heat stroke and exhaustion to hypothermia. Many of these people are [the] most vulnerable, with underlying conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, which is made worse.”
According to Climate.gov, the global average temperature has risen by 1 degree Celsius over the last 40 years… This is the “extreme temperature” change that Catton speaks of, without going into the fact weather trends fluctuate and we, in the broader scheme of things, just came out of a little ice age, which probably should just be labelled a light cooling period between 1500-1850 AD (starting before the Industrial Revolution and ending as it was kicking off).
Catton continues, blaming the 1-degree Celsius change in global temperatures for natural occurrences like flooding and forest fires, which he says perpetuates the spread of disease.
For these reasons, Catton says that climate change is one of the greatest risks to global health and that health needs “to be at the centre of all our policies: energy, transport, agriculture, water, and food.”
