Daniel J. Weiss and Robin Pam of the Center for American Progress have a new article on the health impacts of global warming. As they explain, "Some of the most severe health effects linked to global warming include the following":
- More illness and death resulting from heat waves.
- Worsening air pollution causes more respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
- Vector-borne disease infections will rise.
- Changing food production and security may cause hunger.
- More severe and frequent wildfires will threaten more people.
- Flooding linked to rising sea levels will displace millions.
Already, "WHO now says that 150,000 deaths annually are attributable to the effects of climate change." And we've only warmed about 1.5 degrees F in the past century. We might warm 10 degrees F each century!
The time to act is now.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:37 am
11 Apr 2008
1908: 1.75 Billion People
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html
2008: 6 Billion People
4.25B/1.5F = 2.8 B / degree F
So each degree of Fahrenheit gives birth to 2.8 Billion people.
Look! Nuclear Batteries!
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birdboy Posted 11:02 am
11 Apr 2008
most others will not survive.
With foreign invasions and mass starvations,
rampant infections and rapid extinctions,
the climate in chaos
will eventually slay us;
the fever that kills the host.
a liberal in redsville
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 12:02 am
13 Apr 2008
Many too many leaders are woefully inadequate. These economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, with great wealth and power as well as responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, have evidently chosen to take the human community down a "primrose path" and to race toward oblivion without a care for what our children could confront because of the spectacularly self-seeking behavior of their selfish elders.
The primrose path chosen by too many of our leaders is not the only path, not the one right way to live. Despite all they and their minions have said and we have heard so often, the path of endless economic growth, reckless dissipation of natural resources, irreversible degradation of the environs, and unrestrained population increase is not the only path, not "the only game in town." Perhaps the relentless pursuit of precisely this "unbridled growth path" to the future could result in a colossal catastrophe like the one witnessed by the King of kings named Ozymandias.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 7:47 am
20 Apr 2008
A particularly pernicious disturbance exists in the human community. ELECTIVE MUTISM is one of the great, clear and present dangers to human and environmental health, I believe. It is a worldwide "plague" in our time from which many too many in the vast community of science suffer egregiously. That elective mutism has afflicted so many in the social sciences is one thing. The family of humanity can understand, I suppose, how social scientists do not possess the most adequate expertise to speak out loudly and clearly regarding the emerging and converging global challenges derived from the human overpopulation of Earth.
On the other hand, what I find reprehensible and unbelievable is the way scientists with appropriate expertise in the physical and biological sciences, whatever their excuses, are choosing not to fullfil their professional responsibilities and not to discharge duties only they can perform. Their willful refusal to comment on good scientific evidence of the human species' overpopulation of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit is as unacceptable as it is perverse.
Click on the following link for a presentation of the apparently unforeseen evidence,
http://www.panearth.org
Thanks for your consideration and, if you like, comments.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 5:06 am
21 Apr 2008
I have received a question regarding my previous posting on ELECTIVE MUTISM. If you will bear with me, the question and my response to it follow.
begin-----
Thanks so much for responding to my post.
Absolute global human population numbers are not coming down nearly fast enough. Even with a substantial decrease of the population growth rate in some countries, the total population of the human species has been skyrocketing and is continuing to increase much too rapidly.
Perhaps the widely shared and consensually-validated "demographic transition" that is anticipated in the middle of Century XXI is an example of specious preternatural thinking and theorizing, borne of political convenience and economic expediency.
You have asked a wonderful question,
"Assuming you are right for the moment, do you have any concrete policy proposals which we might consider to enable us to think about what we might do?"
Perhaps we could follow what we already know from good science, reasoning and common sense. We can choose to respond ably and much differently, in a more reality-oriented way, to the global challenges before humanity, challenges we can certainly manage because we have induced them by our spectacular unrestrained overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the ones now threatening to engulf the surface of Earth.
Of course, it is fair to ask what the family of humanity could choose to do "ably and differently." Several ideas come to mind.
Implement universal, voluntary and humane programs that encourage people to limit the number of offspring to one child per family.
Establish an upper limit on the growth of the individual human footprint.
Restrict immediately the reckless dissipation of limited natural resources so that the Earth is given time to replenish them for human benefit.
Substitute clean, renewable sources of energy, through the use of substantial economic incentives, for the fossil fuels we rely upon now.
Recognize that everything human beings do on the surface of our tiny planet utterly depend on the finite resources of Earth. One consequence of this realization is understanding that there can be no such thing as an endlessly expanding global economy, given its current leviathan-like scale and anticipated growth rate, on a relatively small and noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth.
The family of humanity has huge global challenges to address and overcome. Our leaders appear much too contented with arguing about which country will take the first step forward. Meanwhile, as reasonable and sensible actions are not taken, the threats to human and environmental health grow more daunting day by day.
As I see it, many leaders understand quite well the precarious status of the natural world we inhabit; nonetheless, they adamantly refuse to acknowledge or speak openly about the distinctly human-induced predicament that looms ominously before the family of humanity in our time.
Billions of human beings-- some overconsuming, others overproducing and still others overpopulating the Earth --are ruining our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation and life as we know it. At least to me, what is incomprehensible and tragic is this: our leaders know what all of us are doing that is destructive of human and environmental health and still they remain resolute in their reckless pursuit of a "primrose path" to the future.
For a moment please consider that our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the unregulated increase of human population numbers, the unbridled growth of per-capita consumption, the reckless dissipation of Earth's limited resources and the relentless degradation of the planet's frangible environment could result in the destruction of our celestial orb as a fit place for habitation by humankind and life as we know it. When taken together, these distinctly human activities appear to be growing at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic 'wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed.
end-----
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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