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

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..