Woke Lancet: Climate Change ‘the Biggest Global Health Threat of the 21st Century’

ROME — The once venerable Lancet medical journal has launched the very unscientific claim that climate change is the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

In celebrating its 200th anniversary, the Lancet asserts that it is “more than a medical journal,” declaring that its mission is to “drive social and political change.”

According to Richard Horton, Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief, the publication has “a unique commitment among medical journals to improving health, achieving health equity, and advancing social justice.”

One way the Lancet promotes social justice is by pushing climate change alarmism to the point of calling global warming the biggest health threat of the century. This remarkable claim merits some fact-checking.

Globally, over 165,000 people die every single day from myriad causes, including cancer, heart disease, respiratory diseases, suicide, and accidents. Of these 165,000 people, however, not one dies from climate change.

In fact, worldwide, fewer than 10,000 people die each year from all weather-related incidents combined and that number has been dropping steadily every single year. To posit climate change as the greatest threat to global health is therefore patently absurd, unworthy of anyone with a high school education, let alone a medical degree.

If anything, global warming is preventing deaths globally, rather than causing them. In a 2021 article, the Lancet itself revealed that people are almost ten times more likely to die from cold weather than hot weather. As global temperatures have risen, heat deaths have increased but deaths from cold have simultaneously decreased by more than twice as much, producing a significant net drop in weather-related deaths.

These hard facts do not dissuade the Lancet in its quest to advance “social justice.” From its ideological bubble, it asserts that “minoritised populations bear the brunt of the health impacts of climate change, despite being least responsible for it.”

“Racism kills, and climate change kills,” it declares. “Together, racism and climate change interact and have disproportionate effects on the lives of minoritised people within countries and between the Global North and the Global South.”

The journal goes on to make the ludicrous claim that climate injustice is fruit of… colonialism.

“Colonialism has caused the decimation of land and resources, the enslavement of people, and plundered the wealth of colonised regions through continuing mechanisms of extraction and appropriation,” it contends. “Histories of colonial and neocolonial extraction have left low-income regions more vulnerable to, and less able to adapt to, the impacts of climate change.”

Moreover, developed first-world nations “have colonised the atmospheric commons for their own enrichment through forms of industrialisation and growth that have relied on colonial patterns of appropriation,” it adds.

The Lancet has proudly embraced its role in advancing a “progressive agenda,” swapping serious medical journalism for woke activism, a sad state of affairs for those who would like to follow the science.

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