Health Risks Posed By Climate Change

Children, the elderly and the poor are much more vulnerable to health impacts than the rest of the population. Children's metabolic rates are higher, so they naturally breathe faster resulting in greater intake of polluted air. Children are also at risk before they are even born. Exposure to pollutant carrying polen of pregnant women increases the likelyhood that their child will have asthma. Additionally, children's bodies are at much greater risk of dehydratation.
Scientists are working to identify the effects of a changing climate and in particular of a carbon pollution of individual people, but the web of relationships between particules and human health is very complex and more research is needed.
Here are some key health risks from climate:
- more than doubled asthma rates and lenghthened asthma season (20 days longer)
- threatened access to clean drinking water
- increases in airborne and insectborne illnesses
- increases in diarrheal, respiratory and heart disease
- increased risk of salmonella spread as average temperatures rise
- increase in hospital use results in rising health care costs

Middle East and Climate Change

The recent unreast in the Middle East, which has been attributes, in part, to high food prices, gives a warning of the type of global unrest that might result in the future years if the climate continues to warm as expected. A hotter climate means that more severe droughts will occur. We can expect an increasing number of unprecedented heat waves and droughts like the 2010 Russian drought in coming decades. This will significantly increase the odds of a world food emergency far worse than the 2007-2008 global food crisis. When we also consider the world's expanding population and the possibility that peak oil will make fertilizers and agriculture much more expensive, we have the potential for a perfect storm of events aligning in the near future, with droughts made significantly worse by climate change contributing to events that will cause disruption of the global economy, intense political turmoil, and war.

Climate-Driven Food Crisis in Second Half of the Century

The statement in the title is a conclusion from a 2009 study in Science "Historical Warnings of Future Food Security with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat". The University of Washington news release explained that rapisly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yiealds in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half of the worlds's population facing serious food shortages.
David Battisti said: "The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesen't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures."
Currently 3 billion people live in the tropics and subtropics, and their number is expected to nearly double by the end of the century. If we end up with 5.5 degrees C warming or more by the century's end, and if you throw in the desertification and sharps drops in soil moisture then simply developing crops that are tolerant to heat and heat-induced water stress along with better irrigation is likely to prove utterly inadequate and irrelevant for billions of people.
The only genuine hope for avoiding the worst form of triage is aggressive and immediate agreenhouse gas mitigation.

The Good Man

The good man is the friend of all living things.
Mohandas Gandhi