You can find almost anything on YouTube. I can imagine a future historian analyzing the millions of videos from a certain period of time, using it as a window into our contemporary society. I further imagine some videos would be quite mysterious, however. For example, why is there a video of a person whispering Genesis in Latin? Another video is a static picture of a wrapped present with the sound of someone wrapping presents (several people apparently loved this). There is also video of is a real people getting eye exams. This seems ordinary enough – but there is a strange connection between the eye exam videos and the previous two.

The phenomenon is called autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). I have been reading about this for a short time, it seems to be a growing subculture on the internet and is just peaking through to mainstream awareness.

By the way – this is perhaps another phenomenon worth pointing out, the internet allowing for previously personal and hidden experiences to come to general awareness. Human communication has been increased to the point that people who have what they think are unique personal experiences can find each other, eventually bringing the phenomenon to general awareness, giving it a name and an internet footprint. Of course, such phenomena are not always real – sometimes a real pattern emerges from the internet, sometimes illusory or misidentified patterns, the cultural equivalent of pareidolia.

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Yesterday’s post was the first in an exchange about the effects of climate change on public health. Today’s post is my response.

Part II

Climate change is a critically important topic for society today, and it’s important that the public have a working knowledge of the facts, causes, effects, and potential interventions regarding climate change, so I am always happy to discuss the topic. Unfortunately, it’s a very complex topic that has been highly politicized and polarized. The science often becomes wrapped up in ideology – the best indication of this is that one’s political affiliation is the strongest predictor of the public’s opinions regarding climate change. The media, as they do in general, is happy to sensationalize the topic and often does not provide good context or background. Scientists have gotten better communicating about climate change, but not enough to override political affiliation.

My sense is the core issue is that the complexity of climate change allows everyone to cherry pick those details that fit their narrative. You can find examples to support whatever narrative you want to believe. You don’t even have to be factually incorrect (although many people certainly are), you just have to be selective in your details and interpretation. Climate change is a Rorschach test of subjective validation and confirmation bias.

I say this all because I think Scott’s narrative comes through very clearly. He contacted me asking fervently for a debate on this specific topic, the health effects of climate change. I thought this was a little odd since I have never written or expressed an opinion about this topic before. It seems he assumed what my position was based on other things I have written about climate change – that I think it’s real, it is primarily being caused by humans, and the effects are likely to be bad for the environment and human civilization. This brings up another aspect of the climate change debate, that people generally take sides and think that everyone fits relatively cleanly into the “for or against” side. Once someone thinks they have detected what side you are on, they then ascribe the entire package of views to you.

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This is the first entry in an exchange between me and Scott Hastings, who requested the exchange. This is his opening arguments. My response will be tomorrow’s post.

Part I:

Hi Steven, first of all, I am tremendously grateful to you for taking time to engage with me on this very important topic. Thank you.

I’d like to start by sharing just a few media articles I found that are now over 3 years old:

New York Times: November 13, 2019 “Climate Change Poses Threats to Children’s Health Worldwide”

ABC News Australia: November 5, 2019 “11,000 scientists declare climate emergency warning world faces catastrophic threat”

CNN: November 12, 2019 “The climate crisis will profoundly affect the health of every child alive today,”

Wired: November 13, 2019 “How the Climate Crisis Is Killing Us, in 9 Alarming Charts, A new report from over 100 experts paints a devastating picture of how climate change is already imperiling human health.”

We are both physicians, so I don’t want to leave out the American Medical Association statement on climate change.

I think you get the point…We are daily inundated with a “climate emergency” just around the corner.  It also seems that all the experts (at least 97% anyway) are in some general agreement about the “devastating catastrophe” lurking somewhere out there. However, the official IPCC-5 report seems to be a whole lot less confident than the headlines mentioned above.

My aim is to take exact verbiage from IPCC-5, then apply the most up to date scientific literature available to cross-check their stated claims. Since I’m a physician, I am specifically interested in health outcomes as a result of climate change. I am looking at global health trends (since this is a global phenomena), as well as trends in global natural events like floods, fires, and hurricanes as these obviously contribute to health outcomes.  It’s simple really, in our world of experts, nobody needs to be an expert at opening the newspaper the morning after the superbowl to see who won the game. In this case, the “newspaper” is going to be scientific research literature based on global observational trends from generally that was published in the past 6 years. What I will not include is modeling studies. That’s like trying to predict who is going to win the superbowl. I’m not interested in that.  Just real-world objective observations found on google scholar or pubmed. I’m only interested in who won the superbowl, not in some supposed “superbowl prediction expert”.

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