Bishop Hill Oh Godlee
Oct 2, 2014 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 Fiona Godlee has an editorial in the British Medical Journal on the subject of climate change (£, but free trial is available). It begins with a defence of the journal's climate campaigner position and moves on to discuss some of the science. For example:
The IPCC reports that it is highly likely that global warming is causing climate change, characterised by more frequent and intense temperature extremes, heavier rainfall events, and other extreme weather events.
Which is odd, because the evidence for rainfall having become heavier is limited to say the least: the IPCC summary for policymakers says that there are likely (not highly likely) that there are more land areas with increases than decreases and expresses only medium confidence (more likely than not) that there is a human influence. Given the almost total failure of GCMs in the area of precipitation, even this is probably overstating the case. I'm sure I don't need to rehearse the case regarding, for example, hurricanes for the benefit of readers here.
We move on to a similarly interesting position on emissions scenarios, with Godlee claiming that RCP8.5 represents "business as usual". This is, not to put too fine a point on it, incorrect. As Matt Ridley pointed out a few months ago, RCP8.5 involves 12 billion people burning ten times as much coal as today. The idea that this represents a plausible future almost defies belief. And even if you accept the absurd assumptions of RCP8.5, factoring in the recent observational evidence on climate sensitivity gets you only a couple of degrees of warming by the end of the century, rather than the 4 degrees ("in some parts of the northern continents temperatures ...more than 10°C"!!) touted by Godlee.
And if her grasp of the science was not shaky enough, here are her conclusions:
WHO has shown important leadership on climate change but has stopped short of declaring a global public health emergency. This may be understandable with Ebola raging. But it is what WHO should now do. Deaths from Ebola infection, tragic and frightening though they are, will pale into insignificance when compared with the mayhem we can expect for our children and grandchildren if the world does nothing to check its carbon emissions. And action is needed now.
Everybody involved in the climate debate accepts that major features of the climate system are not captured by the climate models - recent claims that the unpredicted pause in surface temperature rise was caused by deep-ocean heat transport are a case in point. Yet Dr Godlee wants to declare a public health emergency based on the output of these same computer models, inevitably diverting resources away from pressing real problems. This is beyond absurd.
The question is, is it moral?
Reader Comments (62)
Fiona Godlee
"doctors must understand the problem if they are to help tackle it"
Well, yes. I recently had a relative die from a cancer which was not diagnosed when it should have been. Godlee edits a journal which is one of the mouthpieces of professionals in that field.
I think she should focus on her day job, and not her inadequate understandings of what climate models say will happen in 100 years time.
Let's keep in mind that this is the same Fiona Godlee who a couple of years previous had penned another editorial in the same journal declaring climate change / global warming as the single greatest health threat to mankind. Forget about infectious disease, cancer, cardio-vascular deaths or a host of other top ten causes of death, Ms Godlee would have us worry about something not yet proven to have killed a single individual.
I think it was a Labour Party catchphrase I want to adapt. We must be tough on 'Fiona Goodlee's and on the causes of 'Fiona Goodlee's. I suspect there are a great many Goodlees out there, and they deserve a bit of sympathy for being intellectually pathetic and sentimentally distorted, but they mostly need to be corrected, and the causes of their silliness to be dealt with effectively. To further adapt a Mr T Blair
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/otr/intext92-93/Blair4.7.93.html
This struck me as ironic given the history of many climate science issues:
//
MISSING DATA: A THREAT TO THE INTEGRITY OF EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE
In 2009, The BMJ published an expert review that questioned the effectiveness of Tamiflu to prevent flu complications in healthy people – and highlighted the wider issue of missing trial data undermining doctors’ abilities to prescribe treatments with confidence. This led to the BMJ’s ‘Open Data’ campaign, which aims to improve the transparency of clinical trials around the world. More on thebmj.com/campaigns.
http://www.bmj.com/open-data
I wonder if Fiona and the BMJ leadership team are aware of the parallels?
http://www.bmj.com/company/who-we-are/our-leadership/
http://www.bmj.com/company/who-we-are/values/
Foxie1 makes a good analogy in the Delingpole comments
- Yes the Godlee the deluded Eco-warrior really thinks she is doing a more important job than those brave people African & foreigners who are suited up and doing the ebola care job ... what a disgracejorgekafkazar: "My father said his class never took any Hippocratic "Oath." He graduated as an MD in about 1924. I'm not sure doctors ever really took such an oath."
The Hippocratic oath was a requirement for graduation in medicine in Queens University, Belfast in 1949 when my father graduated. He told me that several students refused to take the oath for religious reasons. They only got their degrees several years later when the requirement was eased.
On the broader subject, much of what passes for medical research these days is "meta-analysis" where the results of multiple papers are combined to draw various conclusions. I haven't looked at many papers, but did take a day looking at a meta-analysis of statins' effects on cardiovascular disease. I was surprised at how combining a bunch of studies, some of whose confidence intervals didn't even overlap, could lead to a collective conclusion with a very narrow confidence interval (which, obviously, didn't overlap with some of the contributing studies). My training was in applied mathematics, but I'm a bit rusty having been a computer programmer for a couple of decades. Perhaps the rules have changed in the meantime, but this meta-analysis seemed to be nonsense.
For me, medicine suffers from much the same problem as climatology. The availability of cheap computing power has meant that people who don't actually understand the limitations of statistics can apply statistical methods like magic potions and believe/pretend that what comes out isn't rubbish.
And the caravan moves on.
With her obsession on climate as a health issue Dr.Godlee seems to be committing malpractice.
The reality is that so-called climate change is not killing anyone. Weather kills people. Conflating pollution with so-called cliamte change is deceptive. Deception has no place in ethical medicine.
Do any actual doctors read The BMJ?
It's the trade union journal for the British Medical Association which represents about 151,000 doctors and medical students and it would seem almost de rigeur for a student to become a member.
In my limited experience The BMJ arrives weekly wrapped in plastic at the homes of the doctors I know ... and there it remains, unread. They are busy people.
I am not even sure she has the first line correct : "The IPCC reports that it is highly likely that global warming is causing climate change, ...... "
Global warming causing climate change ? Doesn't she mean highly likely that man is causing climate change .... or that CO2 emissions are causing climate change ?
Don't tar all docs with same brush.
I am a doctor and agree with much of the above which rightly criticises Godlee and the BMJ for allowing a medical journal to become a fountain of climate change propaganda.
Bottom line is self interest. Covering climate (badly and lazily) generates impact for the journal, this is what journal wants.
bit late to the thread as per usual -
thanks Ben, as Billy said earlier Docs have more to worry about than BMJ statements.
but when you state -
"Bottom line is self interest. Covering climate (badly and lazily) generates impact for the journal, this is what journal wants."
do you mean impact with the media & big gov/funding bodies or the public ?
separatly - new role for Richard Black
"Who We Are
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit is a non-profit organisation that supports informed debate on energy and climate change issues in the UK.
Director
Richard Black studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University before joining BBC World Service in 1985 as a studio manager. He subsequently worked there as producer and presenter on a wide range of programming including current affairs, science, health and sport, and as Science Correspondent. He also ran an independent radio production company specialising in health and medicine. As BBC Environment Correspondent, his reporting assignments included many UN summits including five UNFCCC meetings and Rio+20. He reported from the field on issues such as carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, amphibian conservation, whaling, forestry, aquaculture and earthquake prediction. From 2012 Richard was Director of Communications for the Global Ocean Commission prior to setting up ECIU."
money,money,money it's a BBX world.