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His patient was in her 70s, and suffering with several serious ailments… so naturally, he declared she was suffering from ‘climate change’.
If that sounds too clownish to be true, you underestimate the capacity for weirdness of Canada’s left coast.
Last June, Canada’s Pacific province, British Columbia was hit with a serious heatwave with some record-setting temperatures. Mix in the complications of wildfires and smoke inhalation, and you’ve suddenly got a lot of people having a bad day.
Emergency room physican Dr. Kyle Merritt saw one patient, in particular, struggling in these conditions.
“She has diabetes. She has some heart failure. … She lives in a trailer, no air conditioning,” says Merritt of the senior patient.
“All of her health problems have all been worsened. And she’s really struggling to stay hydrated.” — Times Colonist
Being as the region was in the middle of a heatwave, she was not the only patient dealing with this issue. What did the doctor do? He did exactly what so many other people in the sciences have been doing to undermine the hard sciences… he hitched the specific problem of the cases they were seeing to a political cause celebré.
Instead of connecting objective and measurable symptoms to objective and measurable causes, he pinned it on the far more subjective, nebulous and indefinable term du jour — ‘climate change.
Like death by heat, doctors have traditionally struggled to clinically attribute mortality and severe illness to air pollution. For Merritt, this summer’s wildfire season changed all that.
When a patient came in struggling to breathe, Merritt knew the smoke — that hadn’t lifted from the region for days on end — had made a case of asthma worse.
For the first time in his 10 years as a physician, the ER doctor picked up his patient’s chart and penned in the words “climate change.”
“If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” he told Glacier Media when asked why he did it.
“It’s me trying to just … process what I’m seeing. We’re in the emergency department, we look after everybody, from the most privileged to the most vulnerable, from cradle to grave, we see everybody. And it’s hard to see people, especially the most vulnerable people in our society, being affected. It’s frustrating.” — TimesColonist
What’s wrong with this approach? For one thing, it is unfalsifiable. That puts this diagnosis firmly in the realm of opinion and not in the scope of the hard sciences.
But there’s another reason to reject this claim — data from climate science itself.
Again, three weeks is a short-term event, not a long-term climate trend. The main flaw in Dr. Merritt’s claim is that he erroneously conflates weather with climate. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). A heat wave and the resultant fires is a short-term weather phenomenon. And, as Dr. mass points out, it would only become an indicator of climate change if it persisted for 30 years and showed an increased trend.
The wildfires were a temporary phenomenon, likely related to the short-term heat wave. NASA satellites have documented a global long-term decline in wildfires. NASA reports satellites have measured a 25-percent decrease in global lands burned since 2003.
Neither the temperature data or the wildfire data show an upward trend, rendering Merritt’s opinion of a climate change connection as flat wrong. — WattsUpWithThat
This diagnosis does provide one public service. It reminds us that claims from science-y looking people in lab coats are only as good as their source data, the soundness of their methods, and the objectivity of the scientists translating that data into inferences and applications.
If the pandemic drama has taught us anything, it’s that the devil is very much in the details in each of those three areas.
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