Now NHS tells Scottish mums: Please DON'T use gas and air in childbirth … it's bad for the planet
No compassion for women in pain? Warmists are clearly all heart
The NHS is to warn pregnant women that they shouldn't use gas and air – because it's harmful to the environment.
The health service has launched a crackdown on harmful greenhouse gas emissions from the most popular method of pain relief for women during labour.
The Scottish Government has written to all health boards with an NHS plan which suggests women should be encouraged not to use Entonox for the good of the planet.
It proposes expectant mothers play their part in 'a collaborative mitigation approach' to cutting the impact of Entonox.
It warns: 'Future recommendations may require that education and training on the environmental impact of different analgesic techniques for labour should be made available to expectant mothers and care givers by antenatal services and delivery suite teams.'
Entonox, or gas and air, is popular with mums-to-be because it has no harmful side-effects for them or the baby. However, along with oxygen, it contains nitrous oxide – a powerful greenhouse gas.
Campaigners fear that the move could put women under pressure to shun Entonox for more invasive analgesics.
Milli Hill, author of the Positive Birth Book, said: 'I worry that if women are told the choice of gas and air could potentially be damaging for the environment, but not offered any alternative, then this could just put more pressure on women to make compromises and sacrifices at an individual level, when we know that there are many more impactful ways in which both the NHS and the government could address climate change at a national and global level.
'Birth in the UK is becoming increasingly medicalised, and any threat to the option of gas and air could exacerbate this, as women will probably turn to more invasive forms of pain relief.'
Studies show nitrous oxide is almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming.
In a letter to boards, the Scottish Government described it as a 'pollutant with a long atmospheric life' and 'an ozone depleting substance'. Attached to the letter was the NHS Scotland Nitrous Oxide Mitigation Implementation Plan which says the health service aims for zero nitrous oxide emissions by 2027.
Some hospitals have tried 'cracking' technology, which breaks Entonox down into harmless nitrogen and oxygen. However, the plan said that required 'excellent technique by patients and staff to correctly use a mask system'.
It then suggested mothers-to-be receive training on the environmental effect of different pain relief options, saying: 'The programme lead is keen to develop a collaborative mitigation approach working with expectant mothers, delivery suites teams and antenatal services to explore and articulate a full suite non-pharmacological and pharmacological options.
'Future recommendations may require that education and training on the environmental impact of different analgesic techniques for labour should be made available to expectant mothers and care givers by antenatal services and delivery suite teams.'
A spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said it is 'vital' that all women 'have access to safe and effective pain relief'.
Jaki Lambert, director for Scotland at the Royal College of Midwives, said it 'supports a move to a more sustainable and environmentally friendly NHS, but at the same time we would not want to see the pain relief options available to women reduced, until more sustainable ones are developed and available'.
Last night the Scottish Government said that although there are environmental concerns about Entonox, it would continue to be made available. A spokesman said: 'Women will continue to have the same access to pain relief they always have, with staff to support them in making the best choices about their birth plan.
'Any suggestion that nitrous oxide will be withdrawn or not be available for patients is simply false.'
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Greta Thunberg gets lambasted for deleting prediction of climate genocide after the date arrives
Social media users mocked and ridiculed climate-change activist Greta Thunberg after the date of a climate-genocide prediction came and went.
In 2018, Thunberg tweeted a quote from a scientist warning that humanity would become extinct unless drastic action against global warming was undertaken within five years.
"A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years," she quoted from the article.
After she began being criticized over the tweet five years later, she deleted it in 2023.
Critics piled on even more after the 20-year-old deleted her doomsday missive and reposted a screenshot of the prediction.
"I have a busy day planned. Can someone please ask Greta Thunberg what time climate change is going to wipe out humanity today," replied one user.
"Seriously though, how did the world get so dumb? We were never always this stupid, right?" read another tweet.
"According to Greta Thunberg, the world will officially end today. Good luck, everyone!" responded Ryan Fournier.
"Greta Thunberg has confirmed that all of humanity has been wiped out today, and she warns that it will happen again in another five years unless she is allowed to continue crying on national television," joked another user.
Defenders of Thunberg pointed out that the scientist she was quoting was not predicting all of humanity would be wiped out in five years but that humanity only had five years to address the issue before the effects of climate change would eventually lead to the extinction of humanity.
Snopes marked the ridicule as partly true because Thunberg did delete the tweet. It also reported not being able to obtain a comment about the controversy from Thunberg.
Thunberg was busy being arrested at an environmental protest in Malmo, Sweden.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/greta-thunberg-doomsday-prediction-mocked
**********************************************Earth is already at net zero
The climate cult will cost us all dearly
Ian Plimer
The greenhouse gas in the air that has the greatest effect on atmospheric temperature is water vapour. Why have governments tried to ban carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions and not water vapour?
Carbon dioxide is plant food. This is the first science that children should learn at school. Plants use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with water and nutrients from the soil to grow plant tissue.
The Earth’s first atmosphere contained hydrogen, helium, ammonia, carbon monoxide, rotten egg gas and methane. It derived from planetary degassing and didn’t last long.
The second atmosphere lasted for billions of years and contained up to 20 per cent carbon dioxide, again from planetary degassing. Much of the carbon dioxide from the second atmosphere dissolved in ocean water, was precipitated as the rock dolomite in warm shallow marine conditions and there it remains naturally sequestered.
During the times of very high carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the planet enjoyed a number very intense ice ages when kilometres of ice formed at sea level at the equator. We are told by climate activists that a few parts per million increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from human activities will lead to unstoppable global warming and a climate crisis. The past shows this is false.
The current oxygen-rich atmosphere formed some 550 million years ago. The oxygen came from life which is why there is a search for oxygen and ozone on exoplanets to determine if there is life somewhere out there. The planet does not degas oxygen gas. All oxygen in the atmosphere derives from photosynthesis. At times, the atmospheric oxygen content rose to 35 per cent and there were massive global forest fires. At other times during mass extinction events, the oxygen content fell to less than 5 per cent.
We hear that the Amazonian rainforests are the lungs of the Earth. This tree-hugging ideology is wrong. The lungs of the Earth are the floating phytoplankton in the oceans that have been around for billions of years and use carbon dioxide as plant food and excrete oxygen as a waste product. It’s very hard to get emotional about green slime being the lungs of the Earth.
For the last 550 million years there has been a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide from 0.8 per cent to 0.04 per cent. Because of an explosion of animal predation, carbon dioxide was used to make protective shells, most of which are locked away as fossils in ancient rocks. If oceans were acid during past times of high atmospheric carbon dioxide shells would have dissolved and would not be preserved as fossils. Shells removed dissolved carbon dioxide from seawater. Limestone reefs, limey muds and black carbon-rich muds removed even more carbon dioxide from seawater. Ancient carbon dioxide is now locked up in rocks.
Land plants appeared 470 million years ago and removed massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They still do. Massive accumulations of plants in cool climate wetlands led to huge volumes of plant material that were later compressed to thick coal seams. There were no plant-decomposing bacteria then and plant material accumulated into very thick piles. The carbon in coal came from the atmosphere. By burning coal, this carbon as carbon dioxide is put back into the atmosphere where it originally came from.
In a forest-rich large underpopulated country like Canada, there are 318 billion trees that use 7.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide as food each year. Canadians release 545 million tons of carbon dioxide each year from fossil-fuel burning, smelting and cement manufacture. Canada is already at net zero. Canadians pay tax for the carbon dioxide they release.
In the USA, there are 228 billion trees that each year photosynthesise 5.47 billion tons of carbon dioxide as plant food. Americans release 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, smelting and cement manufacture each year. This is 14 per cent of global emissions. The US is already at net zero.
In Australia, the grasslands, rangelands, forests, crop lands and continental shelf waters each year photosynthesise ten times the amount of carbon dioxide that is released by Australian industry and individuals. Australia is already at net zero and releases only 1.2 per cent of global emissions. Australians pay tax for the carbon dioxide they emit for plants to use as food.
On planet Earth, there are 3 trillion trees that suck up 72 billion tons of carbon dioxide as plant food each year. Humans emit 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. The planet is already at net zero, despite China’s massive emissions. Why even bother about net zero? Unless, of course, there is a quid to be made with energy used as a weapon for unelected elites to take away freedoms and control people.
And here is the problem. If the whole world is at net zero, where does the extra carbon dioxide come from? Obviously, it’s natural and it comes from a slight warming of the oceans. Some 97 per cent of annual emissions are from ocean degassing with minor amounts from volcanoes and animals. Carbon dioxide has an inverse solubility in water, as all beer and champagne drinkers know. The lower the temperature of water, the more carbon dioxide can dissolve in water.
Analysis of the chemical fingerprints in ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica show that whenever there has been a natural warming event, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content rises hundreds to thousands of years later. If the oceans warm, they release carbon dioxide. Maybe the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to solar-driven warming of oceans after the 1300 to 1850 AD Little Ice Age?
The conventional view is that the oceans warm up by increased solar radiation because Earth is closer to the Sun or because the Sun releases more energy. What has never been considered is that the planet has been releasing heat for 4,567 million years and still is. At present, 70 per cent of the heat released by the planet ends up in the oceans. There are thousands of submarine eruptions each year with basalt melts at 1100°C solidifying by transferring heat to 2°C ocean bottom waters. Submarine basalt melts contain up to 13.5% by weight of dissolved carbon dioxide, most of which is released into the oceans as the melt rises towards the ocean floor.
Although there is a paucity of data, there are hints that the El Niño-La Niña cycle may be related to submarine volcanic activity. There is stronger evidence that plate tectonics is a fundamental driver of climate change. This has never been considered in climate models.
Maybe the rise in oceanic temperature resulting in the increased emissions of carbon dioxide from the oceans is due to planetary cooling expressed as increased submarine volcanicity? These are fundamental scientific questions but, because they do not fit the government ideology, such research will never be funded because 97% of scientists funded by the government agree with those who fund them.
The natural world is far more exciting than a woke world that frightens folk with a dogma claiming that small amounts of a trace gas drive a major planetary process.We’ve been fed a pup. It will cost us dearly. `
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/earth-is-already-at-net-zero/
*********************************************************Stop blaming everything on climate change!
One of the educational pages about climate change on the BBC’s website for children laid out the negative impacts of future global warming. But it also pointed out that warmer temperatures could mean healthier outdoor lifestyles, open up shipping routes in the Arctic through the melting ice and allow easier access to oil in Alaska and Siberia.
Cue outrage from climate scientists and climate pressure groups. In response, the BBC removed mention of such ‘benefits’. Children were only to learn of the negative impacts of climate change.
This was a telling example of how the prevailing ideology of ‘climatism’ insists on a single narrative from which there can be no deviation.
For climate change is cited as the sole explanation for everything going wrong in the world. Drought, famine, flooding, wars, racism – you name it. And if it’s bad, it’s down to global warming caused by humans.
Group-think has taken over as climatism demands total allegiance. It has become an unchallengeable doctrine guiding individuals, institutions, cultures and social movements.
In the words of environment journalist George Monbiot: ‘Curtailing climate change must become the project we put before all others. If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.’
To this supreme political challenge of our time, everything else becomes subservient.
Climatism offers a seeming explanation for nearly everything – from the loss of sleep and rising divorce rates to the decline of insect populations. An academic study has even suggested that the occurrence and acceptance of racist content online could increase in the future as the climate gets warmer.
The doctrine was summed up by a climate convention in Germany in 2022 which declared: ‘Climate change threatens the foundations of life on our planet. The fossil era must come to an end. This will lead to profound changes in our ways of producing goods, our means of transportation and, ultimately, the way in which we live. We are at the beginning of a great transformation.’
This dangerously myopic view simply reduces the present and future state of our complex world to just the fate of global temperature or to the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Yet, there is no single story that can encompass or do justice to the complexities, paradoxes and dilemmas of a changing climate. It makes no sense to reduce politics to the pursuit of a single over-arching goal: to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by a given date.
But by making other political goals subservient to this one is to create a short-sighted view of political, social and ecological wellbeing. The problems facing the world – Putin’s war in Ukraine, migration, the triumph of the Taliban, wildfire management – become ‘climatised’.
Don’t get me wrong – limiting the rate of climate change is a desirable long-term policy goal. But climate change isn’t the only thing that matters. Indeed, it might even be a distraction from doing the things that really do make a difference. Racism, for example, is unlikely to be tackled by doubling-down on carbon dioxide emissions.
The spread of climatism has become an increasingly alarmist discourse of apocalypse just round the corner. In New York’s Union Square, there is a massive clock that counts down ‘the critical time-window remaining for humanity to act to save its only home from the ravages of climate chaos’.
I disagree with the doom-mongers. Climate change is not like a comet approaching Earth. There is no good scientific or historical evidence that it will lead to human extinction or the collapse of human civilisation.
True, climate kills and climate change is real. The risks are serious. Efforts to mitigate these risks and to adapt to them are important. But climate change will not wipe out human life, let alone all life on planet Earth. Also, it is questionable whether annual deaths from climate change will ever exceed those from heart or lung failure, dementia or stroke.
Climate change is a risk that needs to be attended to, but this must be done in the context of other risks, such as nuclear war, pandemics, preventable childhood mortality, failed states and so on.
Unfortunately, the climate science world seems to have lost that vital perspective, instead declaring a perpetual climate emergency.
This is dangerous talk that can lead to hurried decisions and misguided, one-eyed solutions.
By ‘doing whatever it takes’, without wider considerations of the consequences, will not only lead to short-term thinking but also panic, fear and disengagement among people as ‘the end’ is imagined to be approaching and we supposedly run out of options.
That same loss of perspective also ignores the fact that climate is not, and never has been, static.
It is a changing condition to which all life continually adapts as a natural response. Corals evolve to cope with ocean warming and acidification. Human societies continually adapt – finding new materials to keep buildings cool or through new land-use, for example.
But instead of recognising nature’s power to adapt, climate ideologues consider all meteorological events as man-made. Hurricanes and heatwaves are seen as manifestations of the behaviour of fossil-fuel companies, colonialism, capitalism, Amazonian loggers, rich meat-eaters or frequent flyers. It is forgotten that hurricanes and heatwaves are a natural feature of the world’s climates. Climate’s ‘naturalness’ gets lost.
Certainly, human actions have caused changes in climatic patterns, and will continue to do so. The evidence is crystal clear. Nor am I suggesting that efforts to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its effects are worthless or should be stopped. But climatism, with its narrow view, is not the solution. We need to take a more sensitive, diverse and pragmatic approach. And we need to distinguish politics from science.
The fact is that there is an anti-democratic impulse within climatism that brooks no public dissent.
This is most explicit in Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and the new ‘climate Left’ – for whom climate change is all that matters. But it has also crept into a range of businesses, charities, professions and institutions, such as Amazon, Oxfam, the BBC and the World Bank.
But I question whether the ideology of climatism is supported by science. Since the mid-1980s, plotting global temperature has became a fetish. And yet, global temperature is a flawed index for capturing the full range of complex relationships between climate and human welfare and ecological integrity.
Many scenarios that inform these analyses also overestimate the likely magnitude of future climate change. They are based on the worst possible outcome in which fossil-fuel burning, especially coal, continues unabated.
Some 7,000 scientific papers produced on climate change between January 2020 and June 2021 took this as their baseline assumption. But it is clear this is now the least likely scenario, given the massive reduction in the growth of coal use.
This methodological flaw might not matter much if such scenario analysis was presented in neutral terms. But it becomes misleading when it is taken literally, when it is believed by the public and by policymakers to be describing a real future. Risks are exaggerated and climate is elevated to be a more dominant factor shaping the future than is warranted.
As a result, the World Health Organisation predicts 250,000 additional deaths from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress as a result of climate change – despite other factors, such as wealth distribution, lifestyle choices and public health infrastructure, having a larger impact.
It implies that if future changes in climate can be arrested over the next years, 250,000 lives will be saved. This simply isn’t true.
Rather than being motivated by a disinterested ‘search for truth’, the scientific enterprise is in danger of being perceived as pushing its own interests, whether securing research funds or furthering individual scientists’ prestige and access to power.
I am certainly not claiming that climate science is necessarily biased, misleading, untrustworthy and worthless.
Rather, I am drawing attention to the fact that scientific research is always conducted within a specific social and political context and it cannot escape the influence of the society which funds it.
Remember, too, that many are beneficiaries of climatism, such as politicians who use climate change for ‘things going wrong’ to mask their own deficiencies, negligence or bad management.
Others find that flashing their climate change credentials gains them access to specific financial and political resources.
Ultimately, the rush to take political action without properly thinking through the consequences can backfire spectacularly. For example, Germany pursued an aggressive, unbalanced and rapid energy decarbonisation to meet climate mitigation targets – and then became hostage to Putin in order to keep the country supplied with gas.
The EU biofuels directive is another example.
Rather than using oil from the ground, it gave priority to palm oil as a source of energy, without considering the impact. The result? Once-rich rainforests in Sumatra have been stripped to make way for palm plantations, meaning that indigenous people have been squeezed from their homelands.
The consequences have been devastating for some of the world’s poorest communities and their quest for food security and livelihood sustainability.
A policy designed to reduce the impact of climate change 50 years from now has undermined the livelihoods of people and the habitats of species living today.
But that’s the price you pay if your sole aim is stopping climate change. Debate is closed down in favour of ‘there is no alternative’. And from that it is a short step to ‘the end justifies the means’, the motto of all totalitarian projects. Other important political values, such as liberty, equality and self-determination, are sidelined.
Politically, climatism endangers fundamental democracy by suppressing any public challenge to the dominant position. Even those with legitimate doubts are damned as ‘deniers’ and silenced.
Yet, democracies require dissent if they are to remain democracies.
How, then, do we counteract the dangers of narrow-minded climatism? First, we must challenge the hubristic certainty displayed by many climate scientists and replace it with a humbler approach that recognises the limits of human knowledge and foresight.
That means acknowledging the unforeseen contingencies of the future: pandemics, military or cyber-wars between states, global economic recessions and failed states.
As American author Ted Nordhaus wisely put it, we have to accept that ‘the present is a muddle, and the future is an even bigger muddle whose basic co-ordinates we cannot predict, let alone control’.
Second, we must defuse deadline-ism and the tyranny it imposes, along with the emotions of failure, cynicism, apathy or fear that result.
In Britain, we live neither in the best of climate, nor in the worst. In England and Wales, around 800 excess deaths are caused annually due to heat – a number vastly outweighed by the excess deaths caused by cold.
Yes, climate fatalities are large. Droughts in China and South Asia in the 20th Century killed millions, but fatalities from such climatic disasters have been greatly reduced since through better forecasting and early warning, improved infrastructure and more efficient management.
Climate fatalities can be reduced further by better land-use planning and more adaptative infrastructures. We should move beyond the doomism and adopt the language of possibility and emancipation.
Above all, we must change the message to teenagers and young adults that their generation is doomed and has no future.
Instead, we should offer the hope their lives can be better than those of their parents and grandparents.
Yes, we, as their grandparents and parents, have set in motion this ongoing change in the climate. But human ingenuity and effort can limit the extent of future warming and can develop new technologies and strategies to adapt to the changes.
Rather than repeating messages of failure and endings, the alternative to climatism should motivate young people to contribute to a future that can be so much better.
Once people recognise that what is at stake is not human extinction, nor the collapse of civilisation, nor billions of unnecessary deaths, it ought to be possible to see that there are legitimate human values and political trade-offs that must be navigated when designing our responses to it.
The present isn’t all about climate change, and the future must not be reduced to climate. Stopping climate change isn’t the only thing that matters.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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