Health problems tied to climate change are all getting worse, according to two reports published Wednesday. “Rising temperatures are having consequences,” said University of Washington environmental health professor Kristie Ebi, a report co-author.
Image Credit: AP Photo/Tony Avelar
WASHINGTON — As it drafts its next decadal strategic plan, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) should shift its focus to providing insights that help society prepare for and avoid the worst potential consequences of climate change, while protecting the most vulnerable, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Overpopulation has been a threat to the planet since long before anyone heard of climate change.
English economist Thomas Malthus first sounded an alarm about the potential for population growth to overwhelm the planet's natural resources in 1798. The alarm rang again in 1968 with Paul Erlich's doomsday treatise "The Population Bomb," and has reverberated since in the background of the climate crisis: All else being equal, more people means more emissions, more hungry mouths, more potential victims of natural catastrophes.
It’s virtually certain that 2020 will be on the top five list of hottest years on record for the planet, according to atmospheric scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In a briefing, NOAA officials announced their three-month outlook for this summer, with above average temperatures expected across almost all of the United States. The likelihood of excessive heat is highest in the West and Northeast.
Although the link between climate change and health is “becoming increasingly clear,” the medical community is generally unaware of how much climate change is impacting patients today, experts told Healio Primary Care.
Climate change is already causing widespread harm to the health of all people living in the United States, with extreme heat making workers less productive and toxic air contributing to 64,000 deaths in a single year. In a new brief on climate change and health in the U.S. published Nov. 13, University of Washington and Harvard University researchers say it is still possible to prevent some health effects and mitigate others, and that aggressive action on climate is also action to protect health.
With urban populations surging around the world, cities will struggle to keep residents safe from fast-growing heat risks turbo-charged by climate change, scientists and public health experts warned this week.
Heat is already the leading cause of deaths from extreme weather in countries including the United States. The problem is particularly severe in cities, where temperature extremes are rising much faster than the global average, they said.
When mosquito season brought past dengue outbreaks to regions across the Asian tropics, Nepal hardly had to worry. The high-altitude Himalayan country was typically too chilly for the disease-carrying insects to live. But with climate change opening new paths for the viral disease, Nepal is now reeling from an unprecedented outbreak.
At least 9,000 people — from 65 of Nepal’s 77 districts — have been diagnosed with dengue since August, including six patients who have died, according to government health data.
Around this time last year, news outlets blared alarming headlines: Breathing the air outside was as bad as smoking several cigarettes. Wildfire haze blotted out the sun and turned the moon orange. Weather apps simply listed the forecast as “smoke.”
Just because this summer has been clear, though, doesn’t mean that the environment is doing just fine.
Sometimes you have to spend money to save money — and a major new report finds that spending $1.8 trillion on climate adaptation projects would result in $7.1 trillion in total net benefits. The report predicts that the most impressive returns will come from investments that strengthen early warning systems for disasters like storms and floods.