Climate and health links – let’s stop dancing around the issue

File photo of heavy smog covering parts of New York City on June 7, 2023. The average American had already been exposed to 450 micrograms of smoke per cubic metre by early July, worse than the entirety of the years from 2006-2022, according to calculations by Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab. — AFP

AS I mentioned last month, in December 2023 the great and the good will assemble in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to, once again, wring their hands and talk about the climate crisis (“The planet is boiling, and we’re turning up the heat by burning fossil fuels”).

If we’re really lucky, some sort of progress will be made – if our politicians and negotiators are sufficiently clear-eyed and understand that, as United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres said in June, we have already tipped into an era of global boiling. And that we are here because of our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels.