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| A cost of climate change that can't be counted in dollars - survival, or can it? |
paraclete |
03/08/07 |
In a week that has seen one group absolutely refute man's imput into climate change, isn't it time we stoped arguing the why's and started arguing the abatement of the effects? Who is going to make room for the displaced, look after the sick and increase food production to make up for losses? There will be no point Australia opening it's doors to the displaced of the Pacific rim when it's own agriculture will be devistated, or Europe opening it's doors to the displaced of Africa. America already has a migrant problem whether it admits it or not.
Tony McMichael
March 8, 2007
Doubts about the reality of human-induced climate change have largely dissipated, so now we must face the challenge.
The primary and urgent task is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, since the climate change genie is already partly out of the bottle, we must also devise ways of adapting and lessening adverse effects.
Much of the early public debate about climate change focused on the need to keep the economy ticking over, protect infrastructure, and maintain tourism and recreational facilities. The real problem, though, goes much deeper. Climate change, if not constrained, is ultimately a biological threat. We have been slow to grasp this fundamental point.
Warming is affecting physical and biotic systems. Icesheets are melting faster than was expected just five years ago. Long-term drying is emerging in southern and western Africa, southern Europe, India and Australia. The seasonal cycles of birds, bugs, bears and buds are changing, and are getting out of kilter with one another. This evidence that climate change is disrupting many of Earth's life-support systems means that human health is also at risk.
Initially, the health risks will be greatest in - though not confined to - poorer and vulnerable populations. Many of these vulnerable populations are in tropical and subtropical regions.
In Australia, climate change (including greater weather variability) will cause more death, illness and injury from heatwaves, storms, floods and bushfires. It will influence the range and seasonality of various infectious diseases. For example, outbreaks of the mosquito-borne viral disease dengue will tend to extend southwards, near the coastlines.
Changes in climate will also impair various ecological processes that underpin our health. Crop yields, for example, will be affected by changes in soil moisture, pollinating insect activity, and temperature-sensitive photosynthesis. Recent research indicates that rice yields will decline with warmer temperatures. Such changes in local food production and, hence, prices will affect food choices, nutrition and health.
Meanwhile, the rising probability of population displacement and environmental refugee flows in much of the Asia-Pacific region, due to climatic and other large-scale environmental changes, will pose other risks to social stability, wellbeing and health.
The severity of this drought raises another worrying prospect. Much of rural southern Australia now seems destined for long-term drying. CSIRO modelling indicates that drought frequency is likely to increase over much of Australia this century.
This prospect of prolonged dry conditions casts a long shadow over the outlook for rural livelihoods and living conditions. Rural communities are likely to suffer a range of adverse effects on their health. Their specific health risks include increased exposures to extremes of heat, airborne dusts, and bushfire smoke.
Mental health may be affected. In the more vulnerable communities, where collective resources and resilience are low, there are well-recognised risks of anxiety, depression and suicide. Child health, too, will be jeopardised - especially in relation to emotional experiences, family tensions and the loss of community facilities for play and development.
There are also issues of fresh water and hygiene; food choices and nutrition; and the effect of economic stresses and community erosion on unhealthy behaviours (such as smoking, alcohol consumption and self-medication). For remote indigenous communities, there is the additional risk of loss of traditional plant and animal food species.
This all poses a major research challenge. We need to understand the health risks. We need to understand how different patterns of community response can modify the impacts on wellbeing and health. This will help us shape intervention strategies, social policies and health-care services.
Such interventions are needed more generally in Australia. We should be developing adaptive strategies to protect communities everywhere against the health risks posed by climate change. This discussion is already well advanced in Europe, Canada and, recently, the US.
Meanwhile, two things are clear. First, some degree of human-induced climate change has very likely already occurred. Second, more warming is in the pipeline from recent greenhouse gas emissions whose climatic effects have not yet been fully realised.
Yet the world community has not really understood the full biological and ecological import of this remarkable human-induced environmental change.
The UK Stern report highlighted the long-term risks from unabated climate change to our economic system. Awareness of the risks to species survival, ecological systems and human health should draw our attention to the more serious, fundamental prospect of damage to the world's life-support system.
Tony McMichael is the director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. This is an edited version of an ABC Radio National's Perspectives program and is based on a paper given yesterday at the National Rural Health Conference.
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Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 03/08/07 12:55 pm:
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Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 03/08/07 12:59 pm:
Chicago : 9th coldest February in 137 years; 4th snowiest since 1929
FEBRUARY SUMMARY: It was the coldest February since at least 1989 (18 years) and possibly 1979 for the nation as a whole, and the month is expected to rank between the 8th and 15th coldest in 113 years of national records. National precipitation trended up 134% over last year with snowfall up 60% over last year.
An analysis of the United Nations widely-touted 2007 IPCC Global Warming Summary for Policymakers by UK Lord Viscount Monckton has found 31 errors and exaggerations. Since Lord Monckton alerted the UN about its errors , the UN substantially rewrote and corrected the report, Monckton claims in his new analysis.
The UN's climate-change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, did not reply directly to Lord Monckton's criticism, but made many of the corrections nevertheless. "The tradition of elementary but serious scientific errors, of which the notorious `hockey-stick' graph of estimated global temperatures over the past 1,000 years is an example, is alive and well in the UN's 2007 report," Lord Monckton said.
"The UN has still not corrected or apologized for the `hockey-stick', by which it falsely abolished the mediaeval warm period, when temperatures were 2 or 3C warmer than today, and disaster failed to ensue. But it has been forced to correct several schoolboy howlers - though it has not had the honesty to announce publicly and clearly that it has done so," Monckton said. "The heavily-corrected version of the IPCC report has been furtively posted on the IPCC's website, www.ipcc.ch. There has been no public statement by the IPCC admitting to the errors," Monckton added.
The UN has been forced to halve its high-end estimate of the rise in sea-level to 2100, and it has also sharply reduced its estimate of our entire effect on the climate since 1750, according to Monckton. Monckton echoed UK Lord Nigel Lawson's call that the IPCC be disbanded. "It is too politicized and too incompetent to serve any useful purpose," Monckton said.
Monckton's new analysis also points out significant science errors in Al Gore's Oscar winning film "An Inconvenient Truth." "The IPCC's exaggerations and errors parallel those of Al Gore in his notorious sci-fi horror film An Inconvenient Truth, now being peddled to schoolchildren worldwide," Monckton said.
The growth of methane -- one of the most potent global warming gases -- has stalled after rapidly rising in the Earth's atmosphere for more than a century, Oregon scientists say. In the most detailed look at methane measurements, researchers at Portland State University and Oregon Health & Science University find that the buildup of methane in the atmosphere has been slowing for nearly a quarter of a century. And the Oregon scientists don't foresee methane emissions increasing again anytime soon because of human activities. "It's good news because you have one global-warming gas that's not increasing very rapidly, or at all," said Aslam Khalil, an atmospheric physicist at PSU.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that the left will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly.
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