In the news this week is Julia Gillard, former Australia PM, who announced a sob-story, sorry, 'study' about pregnant women suffering due to extreme heat (like this hasn't been happening for the last ten thousand years). But the study turned out to be just a poll of 1,000 health workers who'd seen cases of something untoward that they "believed" was due to extreme heat. It's not like they had new actual data, trend lines, temperatures or anything.

The Wellcome Trust funded the poll, and released the paper, all of seven pages, titled Keeping Mothers and Babies Safe from Extreme Heat. But if you're a mother working up a sweat, don't look for answers here — all you'll find is a lecture from the UN about how every town and city should have a "heat-health action plan", "early warning systems" and "public health measures" — all of which sounds like a request for more bureaucrats. The great antidote of heat stroke, the airconditioner, doesn't even get a mention. Hello?

What pregnant women need, apparently, are high-resolution heat maps, and population-level pregnancy data.

United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell was also on the marketing team:

Extreme heat putting pregnant women, newborns at risk: UN climate chief

— Phys.org

Speaking at the "pre-COP" summit in Nadi, Fiji, Stiell will cite a new survey showing more than two-thirds of health professionals across five continents had seen complications caused by intense heat in the past five years.

The survey found nearly all midwives and doctors had cared for mothers or babies suffering the effects of extreme heat.

About a third of respondents said they had seen cases of low birth weight or restricted growth, feeding difficulties, and dehydration or heat-related illness, all resulting from what they believed was extreme heat.

The poll questions were so all-encompassing and vague, the amazing thing is that there were some health workers who couldn't remember any examples of this, that, or the other bad thing on a hot day, sometime.

Making the study extra meaningless, bizarrely the 1,000 health workers were not just drawn from Australia and the UK, but also from Zimbabwe, Brazil and India, so the data was mixing in the wealthy West with places where some people might not even have electricity. It looks for all the world like The Wellcome Trust needed a quick meaningless "study" they could milk for a press release and a speech. And we all know if you design a vague enough poll and include some some of the poorest people in the world, you'll get the results the media team were hoping for.

This is the kind of advice the Wellcome Trust put in their 7 page report:

By embedding protection for pregnant women and newborns in adaptation frameworks, adapting health systems, and building the data  infrastructure to track and respond to heat-related maternal harm – governments can protect lives while strengthening climate resilience and health-system preparedness.

Doesn't it just say "jobs for the boys" all over it? Give us a grant to embed that protection. Let's have another conference to discuss the adaption frameworks!