Is climate change the biggest threat to global health in the coming years?

tallaght01

It's a stance that's gaining momentum.

I personally think the two biggest threats to world health are, and will continue to be, poverty and gender inequality. BUt happy to be proven wrong.

Does anyone here agree that global health is under significant threat from global warming? And if so, how?

Vorsprung

Absolutely. One way that pops out of my head:

Farming land will be threatened by changing and more unpredictable weather patterns, making the supply of food less reliable. Prices go up, the less well off can't afford basic goods and people's health will decline as a result of poor nutrition. In Africa/Asia, you could forsee a few more Ethiopias/North Koreas.

Be Do Have

Yes climate change is a major challenge for us now more then ever. The fact that we have spent 30 years arguing about whos fault it is really doesn't help things either.

Food, water and energy will be the hottest topics over the next few decades. So called Financial collapses will be a walk in the park in comparision.

Be prepared, educate yourself and enjoy the ride...

Turtwig

Yep it is...

Read an article on this recently and it's kicking my head in at the moment that I can't find it :mad:

nesf

Depends utterly on the timescale you're talking about. Next decade? Not a chance. Next fifty years? Maybe.

It also depends on how careful you are in attributing freak weather conditions to chance and to global warming. There's a silly trend at the moment to point at any extreme weather event and blame it on global warming despite extreme weather events happening regardless (i.e. we'll see an increase if the models are correct but we're not going from a situation of zero extreme events to begin with).


Honestly, I think it's a fairly meaningless question given a) how little we can accurately predict using climate models and b) trying to figure out the effects on human health from these already uncertain predictions. I'm not a global warming sceptic or anything, I just find there's a lot of very bad science being done on the topic right now. Climates are highly non-linear, you can't make simple predictions and expect it to be accurate and compounding this is that the effects of disease etc on human populations isn't particularly linear either as anyone who's done much study on how pandemics spread can tell you (i.e. there's a tipping point where it explodes from being a local problem to a global one and it's not possible to accurately predict in advance whether a local disease outbreak will be contained or not).


Edit: I should expand on what I'm saying because it won't be obvious to those without a bit of a background in mathematical modelling. Highly non-linear systems are basically very complex ones that can behave very differently at different "input" levels. When you've a limited data sample, as climatologists have, it's very difficult to make concrete predictions outside of conditions corresponding to the data that you have because the basic behaviour of the model might be completely different in certain zones for which you have no data on which to base models. This creates uncertainty in any predictions on the speed of change or behaviour of the climate due to global warming since we're dealing with a situation that doesn't correspond exactly to historical events that we have data for. This uncertainty is not a good thing for global warming sceptics, in reality global warming could as easily be a far worse phenomenon as a far less severe one. This uncertainty bothers me more than any predictions of future sea levels since it means that we cannot know if we can do anything to stop any potential change! But anyway, this is going waay off topic so I'll stop here..

drzhivago

tallaght01 wrote: »

It's a stance that's gaining momentum.

I personally think the two biggest threats to world health are, and will continue to be, poverty and gender inequality. BUt happy to be proven wrong.

Does anyone here agree that global health is under significant threat from global warming? And if so, how?

YES

Am working on a project now looking at how there may be forced migration of millions of people in US pacific Islands in next few years because of rising tides or falling islands, hard to be exact which is which

But there are numbers of islands who are so low above sea level taht their water supplies are threatened as is their physical safety in storms, hide tides, rising tides
this is one of those scenarios where rising tides dont raise all boats equally

Be Do Have

Of course nesf you are correct in what you have said, i have no doubt that the data required for computer modeling is not available, difficult to find and has never been modelled before. But it would never matter what phenomenon is being proven or disproven, because it is our will that decides in the end what to do about it.

Take the tobabco industry as an example here, after all the experiments are carried out and the results are published over and over again that certain chemicals do not belong in the human body. And has been scientifically linked to the direct cause of early mortality for millions of people...they still choose to smoke. Because this is the way they choose to live their lives in this moment right now.

In my opinion, even if Al Gore pulled a polar bear out of his ass for everyone to see live on television.... we would still say...oh we need more facts....its not conclusive....etc etc ....on and on untill your just too tired to care anymore.

I think its not a battle of science and proving this and proving that. I think its a battle of our hearts. Do you do what we know to be right, what we feel in the very vibration of our DNA and support that system which supports life itself...planet earth...our home.

OR do we let the lawyers get paid to argue the next precious few decades away on the technicalities of amospheric data modelling.

This choice now lays before us.

Tim Robbins

No it isn't. Read "Cool It" by Bjorn Lomborg and I guarentee you your opinions will change. Mine certainly did.

Climate Change is real, man is making it worse but the very worst predictions won't kill as many people as things like dirty water currently kill.