\n <\/p>\n
Fifteen years ago, my friend and mentor, climate scientist Stephen Schneider, said something that has stuck with me. When it comes to climate change, the \u201cend of the world\u201d and \u201cgood for you\u201d are \u201cthe two lowest-probability outcomes\u201d.<\/p>\n
Extreme heat harms health \u2014 what is the human body\u2019s limit?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Steve\u2019s aphorism feels especially prescient today. As the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) plays out in Bel\u00e9m, Brazil, this month, misleading climate messaging in the media espouses both these extremes.<\/p>\n
At one end, take the actions of billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates. On 28 October, he astounded climate advocates by publishing a manifesto arguing that the climate crisis is less urgent than other major problems that humanity faces (see go.nature.com\/23xed). Jarringly, its publication coincided with the devastating Jamaican landfall of potentially the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, an event that human-caused warming made more likely to happen.<\/p>\n
Gates wasn\u2019t implying that global warming is \u201cgood for you\u201d, but his arguments are adjacent to that sentiment: there has already been enough progress on climate, and we should instead prioritize addressing what he feels are more pressing issues, such as poverty and disease.<\/p>\n
Despite substantial criticism from me and other climate specialists that this presented a false trade-off between climate action and public health, Gates dug in his heels. \u201cWhat world do they live in?\u201d he said in an interview with the news outlet Axios, telling reporters that he would \u201clet the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria\u201d.<\/p>\n
Climate change is also a health crisis \u2014 these 3 graphics explain why<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Indeed, what world is Gates living in? The idea that climate action must come at the expense of efforts to address human health is a provable fallacy. In our book Science Under Siege (2025), public-health scientist Peter Hotez at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and I detail how these challenges are, in fact, inseparable. Human-caused climate change will exacerbate pandemics, as it did for COVID-19, and vector-borne diseases, such as malaria. How Gates or anyone else proposes to \u201cget rid of malaria\u201d in a rapidly warming world is anyone\u2019s guess. This is a strawman argument.<\/p>\n
Gates\u2019 pivot has been celebrated by climate-change downplayers and fossil-fuel proponents in politics, including US President Donald Trump, and in segments of the media, including the newspapers The Wall Street Journal and New York Post \u2014 even if Gates has disavowed their characterizations of his position.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, those at the opposite \u2018end of the world\u2019 extreme are hardly any more helpful. \u201cIt may be too late\u201d announced Robert Hunziker, a freelance writer in Los Angeles, California, just one month ago on the news site Counterpunch. Such narratives of doom are often reinforced by media outlets that overstate the dire nature of the impacts that are baked in, with breathless headlines about supposed tipping points that have already been crossed. This feeds a collective sense of hopelessness.<\/p>\n
Why we still don\u2019t know the mounting health risks of climate change<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fifteen years ago, my friend and mentor, climate scientist Stephen Schneider, said something that has stuck with me. When it comes to climate change, the \u201cend of the world\u201d and \u201cgood for you\u201d are \u201cthe two lowest-probability outcomes\u201d. Extreme heat harms health \u2014 what is the human body\u2019s limit? Steve\u2019s aphorism feels especially prescient today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[142,186,12590,1903,7378,19548],"class_list":{"0":"post-34355","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-bill","9":"tag-climate","10":"tag-comments","11":"tag-dangerous","12":"tag-distraction","13":"tag-gatess"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}