Climate change kills the unborn: The UN wants us to save babies with solar panels and wind plants
Climate change kills the unborn: The UN wants us to save babies with solar panels and wind plants
By Jo Nova
This week’s UN witchcraft is that a half a degree of global warming will kill babies and pregnant women, give us your money.
The UN COP29 meeting starting Nov 11th, fights for relevance in the shadow of the US Election, like a suckerfish under an aircraft carrier.
The latest confected attempt to get attention is to guilt trip the West — telling us that women and babies will die if we don’t install enough solar panels. This is despite humans being mammals which evolved to cope with the heat and the cold. We live a more closeted, protected existence than any time in the last million years. Not many people give birth in caves these days. Indeed we’re a species that inhabits towns with monthly temperatures that vary by 90 degrees Celsius and we are supposed to panic about another half a degree?
The truth is that being cold, poor and hungry increases stillbirths just as much as any heatwave, and the thing that saves babies on a hot day is an air-conditioner. The answer to all four killers thus, is cheap electricity and fossil fuels.
One day history students will study how the UN uses biblical paraphrasing to demand their tithe and control:
Miscarriages due to climate crisis a ‘blind spot’ in action plans – report
UK Guardian: The report follows an ultimatum from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, on the climate emergency: “We’re playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.” He said global heating was supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods and turning forests into tinderboxes, and said governments had to rapidly wean the world off its fossil fuel addiction.
Naturally, only babies that die from heat stress are politically marketable, the UN doesn’t care about the ones that die from the cold:
UK Guardian: Increasing climate extremes are causing more lost babies, premature births and cognitive damage to newborns, the report said. For example, a study in India found a doubled risk of miscarriage in pregnant women suffering heat stress, while another in California found a significant association between long-term heat exposure and stillbirth and premature birth.
Awkwardly, cold temperatures also cause stillbirths and miscarriages (Ruan et al) so if man-made climate change is warming the world, it must be saving babies too. Shh!
Five minutes of research, which the Guardian team don’t do, turns up a meta-study showing that poverty doubles the risk of death in babies:
UK Guardian: Numerous studies confirm that mothers of low socioeconomic status and unemployed parents face a far higher risk of having a stillbirth or a low birthweight child [7–10]. It has been demonstrated that women or families living in adverse socioeconomic conditions have twice the risk of having a stillborn baby compared to their more privileged counterparts [11]. Unemployment and unfavourable economic conditions are usually associated with poor maternal nutrition, elevated psychological stress during pregnancy and limited access to medical supervision and prenatal care. Several studies show that pregnant women with elevated levels of stress have considerably higher risks of a stillbirth, independent of age, parity, education, smoking and alcohol habits or other compromising characteristics…. Moreover, in low income countries or deprived environments, poor maternal nutrition and low body mass index can result in higher stillbirth frequency [15]. — Tsimbos et al (2021)
Thus to save babies, and follow the science — we must burn more fossil fuels
Wealthier nations have higher CO2 emissions, more heaters, more air conditioners, better food, and their babies don’t die as often.
It is a crime the UN is not helping poor African nations build coal plants.
Child Mortality falls as CO2 emissions rise per capita. | OWID
UPDATE#2: TonyfromOz asked where China was, and pointed out that it and many big countries were missing which is a great point. So here below are the top 25 largest in population plus a few other notables.
As expected, the largest countries almost all fall in the centre of the trendline.
Child Mortality, CO2 emissions. OWID https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-vs-co2-emissions-per-capita
REFERENCES
Cleon Tsimbos, Georgia Verropoulou Dimitra Petropoulou (2021) Economic crisis and stillbirth ratios: Evidence from Southern Europe, PLoS One, 2021 Nov 18;16(11):e0259623. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259623
Ruan T, Yue Y, Lu W, Zhou R, Xiong T, Jiang Y, Ying J, Tang J, Shi J, Wang H, Xiao G, Li J, Qu Y, Mu D. Association between low ambient temperature during pregnancy and adverse birth outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Chin Med J 2023;136:2307–2315. doi: 10.1097/CM9.0000000000002361
