It’s no surprise that doctors drift with every woke wind that blows, since so many are married to doctors’ wives. Even some of the women are. But ideological drift risks neglecting scientific rigour and the vow to ‘First, do no harm’.

On the very day, 20 March, that the United Nations posted its latest piece of violent climate porn, the Medical Journal of Australia posted a cover story, ‘Health and climate change’, with an ominous image of Parliament House swathed in smoke.

Turning first to the UN report: their Intergovernmental (i.e. purely political) Panel on Climate Change instructs sovereign nations to self-harm with greater severity – abolish all coal-fired power within the next seven years ‘to defuse the climate time bomb’ – while China builds hundreds of new coal-fired plants to power their military-industrial complex to stockpile bombs of their own. That’s not all bad: knowing these munitions are made of good Aussie steel fired by good Aussie coal should give us a warm glow, sooner or later.

The socialist UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres dialled up the frenzy: ‘Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.’ He calls the IPCC’s Synthesis Report ‘a survival guide for humanity’, but in fact it is a suicide guide for the morbidly self-loathing West and a homicide guide for keeping the huddled billions in their dung-smoked huts. Even the World Health Organisation admits that indoor air pollution from using dung and wood instead of electricity to cook and heat dwellings – the daily reality for 2.4 billion souls –  is ‘the most serious environmental problem in the world’. Let this statement from the WHO sink in: ‘Household air pollution was responsible for an estimated 3.2 million deaths in 2020, including over 237,000 deaths of children under the age of 5.’

What sort of aristocratic arrogance would say to these billions of poor, ‘Tear down your handful of coal-fired power stations within seven years, burn more dung and bury more toddlers. For that is the sustainable way.’

Energy poverty means medical poverty means death. 800 million people have absolutely no access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. Where I was born in darkest Africa, no reliable electricity means no fridges for vaccines, no incubators for premature babies, no sterilisers for used instruments, no anything that we take for granted. But the rich who control the narrative on climate want to deny to the poor the cheap and reliable fossil fuels that made us wealthy and healthy.

And so to the Medical Journal of Australia. Does that smoke-tinged cover mean the editor will plead the case of the 237,000 toddlers dying each year of smoke-related, electricity-deprived, preventable illness?

Imagine my astonishment as I turn to the lead article and see this whimsical, but scientifically sound, opening:

Can doctors offer any insight on the climate debate? We do only one thing well, which is to diagnose and treat illness. Let us then, as a thought experiment, examine the planet as a patient. Let us respond to her anxious offspring who believe she is suffering from fever and respiratory difficulty which could be terminal.

First, the question of hyperthermia. After a full history and examination we note the following: our patient is quite an elderly lady and for most of the past 600 million years her temperature has been higher than today. She is currently near the end of a brief ten-thousand-year plateau of global warmth she typically experiences between ice ages. This golden period of warming and human flourishing peaked eight thousand years ago, and the patient has trended cooler since then. Over the last century we have passed through what she describes as one of her hot flushes: a regular once in a thousand years spike in temperature, similar to the well documented Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm periods. There is nothing in recent temperature data, colleagues, that falls outside the range of natural variation, and we conclude the patient is suffering no fever. 

Similarly, the concern about respiratory failure and retention of CO2 appears ill-founded, since this vigorous lady spent almost all her life with CO2 levels three to fifteen times higher than today. It is known that plant life evolved and thrives optimally at CO2 levels over 1000ppm; that we, at 415ppm, are still in an age of unprecedented CO2 starvation. Indeed, we note with concern that our forebears came within 30ppm of mass extinction. All plant life perishes when CO2 drops to 150ppm, and during the most recent ice ages we reached an all-time historic low for Mother Earth of 180ppm. A climate emergency!

All clinical facts considered, our advice to the patient and her offspring is to drill, baby, drill! Free those ancient oceans of algae from their rocky prison, those buried forests from their sooty grave. Put their life-giving emissions back in the biosphere where they can buffer the planet against impending cold and add to the record crop yields and global re-greening observed in recent decades. The prognosis for our patient is very good.

Alas, of course, I had dozed and dreamed. As the lines of the lead article came back into focus, I was assaulted by the opening words, ‘Recent extreme weather events’ and the fatuous assumption that human CO2 emissions are a driving force behind ‘bushfires, floods and cyclones’.

Has the author not read the IPCC’s AR6 report, The Physical Science Basis? It specifically dismisses as ‘low confidence’ (i.e. junk science) any claims ascribing ‘human influence’ to recent floods, cyclones and drought (with implications for bushfires). Baseless science but approved ideology, duly published.

The AMA, which publishes the MJA, is wokely devoted to ‘climate action’, but neglects, in my humble opinion, our duty to weigh up the risks and benefits of any treatment. That is especially important where there is no confirmed illness needing treatment, and where the harm of the treatment –  energy starvation –  is terrible and real.

Do the woke even care about the Third World? Or is it a case of let the rich feel righteous and let the poor burn dung?