From the NOAA “Oceans and Human Health Initiative” website and press release, comes this warning that the algae, Moroccan dust, desertification, bacteria, bad seafood, heavy rainfall, old sewers, climate change is gonna get ya.
Climate projections show human health impacts possible within 30 years
New studies demonstrate potential increases in waterborne toxins and microbes
A panel of scientists speaking today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) unveiled new research and models demonstrating how climate change could increase exposure and risk of human illness originating from ocean, coastal and Great Lakes ecosystems, with some studies projecting impacts to be felt within 30 years.
“With 2010 the wettest year on record and third warmest for sea surface temperatures, NOAA and our partners are working to uncover how a changing climate can affect our health and our prosperity,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “These studies and others like it will better equip officials with the necessary information and tools they need to prepare for and prevent risks associated with changing oceans and coasts.”
In several studies funded by NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative, findings shed light on how complex interactions and climate change alterations in sea, land and sky make ocean and freshwater environments more susceptible to toxic algal blooms and proliferation of harmful microbes and bacteria.
Climate change could prolong toxic algal outbreaks by 2040 or sooner
Using cutting-edge technologies to model future ocean and weather patterns, Stephanie Moore, Ph.D., with NOAA’s West Coast Center for Oceans and Human Health and her partners at the University of Washington, are predicting longer seasons of harmful algal bloom outbreaks in Washington State’s Puget Sound.
The team looked at blooms of Alexandrium catenella, more commonly known as “red tide,” which produces saxitoxin, a poison that can accumulate in shellfish. If consumed by humans, it can cause gastrointestinal and neurological symptoms including vomiting and muscle paralysis or even death in extreme cases.
Longer harmful algal bloom seasons could translate to more days the shellfish fishery is closed, threatening the vitality of the $108 million shellfish industry in Washington state.
“Changes in the harmful algal bloom season appear to be imminent and we expect a significant increase in Puget Sound and similar at-risk environments within 30 years, possibly by the next decade,” said Moore. “Our projections indicate that by the end of the 21st century, blooms may begin up to two months earlier in the year and persist for one month later compared to the present-day time period of July to October.”
Natural climate variability also plays a role in the length of the bloom season from one year to the next. Thus, in any single year, the change in bloom season could be more or less severe than implied by the long-term warming trend from climate change.
Moore and the research team indicate that the extended lead time offered by these projections will allow managers to put mitigation measures in place and sharpen their targets for monitoring to more quickly and effectively open and close shellfish beds instead of issuing a blanket closure for a larger swath of coast or be caught off guard by an unexpected bloom. The same model can be applied to other coastal areas around the world increasingly affected by harmful algal blooms and improve protection of human health against toxic outbreaks.
More atmospheric dust from global desertification could lead to increases of harmful bacteria in oceans, seafood
Researchers at the University of Georgia, a NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative Consortium for Graduate Training site, looked at how global desertification — and the resulting increase in atmospheric dust based on some climate change scenarios — could fuel the presence of harmful bacteria in the ocean and seafood.
Desert dust deposition from the atmosphere is considered one of the main contributors of iron in the ocean, has increased over the last 30 years and is expected to rise based on precipitation trends in western Africa. Iron is limited in ocean environments and is essential to most forms of life. In a study conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey, Erin Lipp, Ph.D. and graduate student Jason Westrich demonstrated that the sole addition of desert dust and its associated iron into seawater significantly stimulates growth and persistence of Vibrios, a group of ocean bacteria that occur worldwide and can cause gastroenteritis and infectious diseases in humans.
“Within 24 hours of mixing weathered desert dust from Morocco with seawater samples, we saw a 10-1000-fold growth in Vibrios, including one strain that could cause eye, ear, and open wound infections, and another strain that could cause cholera ,” said Lipp. “Our next round of experiments will examine the response of the strains associated with seafood-related infections.”
Since 1996 Vibrio cases have jumped 85 percent in the United States based on reports that primarily track seafood-illnesses. It is possible this additional input of iron, along with rising sea surface temperatures, will affect these bacterial populations and may help to explain both current and future increases in human illnesses from exposure to contaminated seafood and seawater.
Increased rainfall and dated sewers could affect water quality in Great Lakes
A changing climate with more rainstorms on the horizon could increase the risk of overflows of dated sewage systems, causing the release of disease-causing bacteria, viruses and protozoa into drinking water and onto beaches. In the past 10 years there have been more severe storms that trigger overflows. While there is some question whether this is due to natural variability or to climate change, these events provide another example as to how vulnerable urban areas are to climate.
Using fine-tuned climate models developed for Wisconsin, Sandra McLellan, Ph.D., at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences, found spring rains are expected to increase in the next 50 years and areas with dated sewer systems are more likely to overflow because the ground is frozen and rainwater can’t be absorbed. As little as 1.7 inches of rain in 24 hours can cause an overflow in spring and the combination of increased temperatures — changing snowfall to rainfall and increased precipitation — can act synergistically to magnify the impact.
McLellan and colleagues showed that under worst case scenarios there could be an average 20 percent increase in volume of overflows, and they expect the overflows to last longer. In Milwaukee, infrastructure investments have reduced sewage overflows to an average of three times per year, but other cities around the Great Lakes still experience overflows up to 40 times per year.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on urban infrastructure, and these investments need to be directed to problems that have the largest impact on our water quality,” said McLellan. “Our research can shed light on this dilemma for cities with aging sewer systems throughout the Great Lakes and even around the world.”
“Understanding climate change on a local level and what it means to county beach managers or water quality safety officers has been a struggle,” said Juli Trtanj, director of NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative and co-author of the interagency report A Human Health Perspective on Climate Change. “These new studies and models enable managers to better cope and prepare for real and anticipated changes in their cities, and keep their citizens, seafood and economy safe.”
On the Web:
Image Gallery: http://oceansandhumanhealth.noaa.gov/multimedia/ohh-climate.html
NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative: http://oceansandhumanhealth.noaa.gov
Georgia Oceans and Human Health Initiative at the University of Georgia: http://www.georgiaoceansandhealth.org
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences: http://www4.uwm.edu/freshwater
“McLellan and colleagues showed that under worst case scenarios there could be an average 20 percent increase in volume of overflows, and they expect the [sewer] overflows to last longer. ”
Simple. When it looks like rain, everybody takes Kaopectate so the overflow will be clean. We’re done!
Ask yourself – what would be more effective and cost effecient:
(1) stop human CO2 emissions and push humanity back to the stone age.
(2) fix faulty sewerage systems everywhere.
(3) warn citizens not to go into the ocean or eat shellfish for a few days after major storms.
Then ask yourself – what would sound most exciting?
OK – let’s go for that.
They have already thrown their pride to the wind?
How about killer bees? Doesn’t climate change help spread killer bees too? I was sure there would be a computer model somewhere showing catastrophic risk from killer bees that can be blamed on climate change.
University of Washington, are predicting longer seasons of harmful algal bloom outbreaks in Washington State’s Puget Sound……..
Or could be—Nitrogen run off, from a few million new dark green lawns added in the last 30 years, that line Washington State’s Puget Sound. Yes people….not CO2.
Wow, they never give up do they? A good old dose of de-funding them would solve the problem.
These idiots could write the Movie Scary Story 15 -Climates Gonna Get you!
Now lest I be described as an armchair critic moaning and whining without offering any remedies let me offer up a couple of solutions, they are cheap and easy to enact and would work wonders.
All planning officials and engineers should be sent to the public records office to study past climate records and weather events to enable them to learn what will likely happen in the future. A call should be sent out to all old peoples homes/retirement communities/rest homes for all retired public health/service managers and engineers to attend each local government department to spread their wisdom and experience and actual knowledge to the modern generation of public service officials. Sack the entire NOAA high command and replace them with the old generation brought back into service
Only by learning from the past can we hope to manage the future, the cyclic nature of natural climate change means we need only look at previous cycles to see what awaits in the future.
We need to know all these things that a degree of warming will cause because it is well and truly known that it will never be cold again in Washington State.
What’s that you say? 6°F! No way.
Yes, way! Next Thursday.
WUWT?
“Brave New World”. We were warned so long ago yet still it is happening.
What does that say about us?
These funny climate `scientists’ are a hoot, are they not? Do they not have any sense of irony or all they all just incredibly obtuse? Look at my new model, and what doom it predicts. Good Lord …
What used to be a guess is now a ‘thought experiment’. What used to be a thought experiment is now a ‘plausible mechanism’. What used to be a plausible mechanism is now a ‘potential threat’. What used to be a potential threat is now …….. etc etc
Not to worry…apparently all the oysters will be gone in a few years due to global warming. And I have a model which indicates clams and mussels are teleconnected to oysters. Without these mollusks there is no problem with “red tides” and my model, which incidentially does not actually use bristlecones and is based on the data from one rock at the very south end of Vancouver Island, proves categorically that climate change impacts oysters and thereby clams and mussels.
Essentially, according to my model, the red tide problem will solve itself. (/sarc)
RiHo08 says:
February 19, 2011 at 9:48 pm
And given the geological evidence that the areas in and around the Great Lakes have continued to experience a “rebound” effect from the last great Ice Age 10,000 or so years ago, Great Lakes levels could end up lowering even more, leaving even more room for fresh water to fill in. Oh, those “finely tuned models.”
It wasn’t long a ago that the EPA (with Greenpeace) tried to ban chlorine (needed for sterilizing drinking water) with the result that many in Peru died from cholera. EPA was thankfully slapped down and their ban was overturned.
Combined flow sewage systems where it is possible for the flows of sanitary sewers and storm drains to commingle have been declining since the passage of the initial Clean Water Act. Smaller towns and cities are probably well ahead of major urban centers because they lacked the political pull to negotiate waivers that the big towns possessed.
In the early days little burgs that were not much more than a wide spot in the road were strong armed into doing expensive upgrades. I know because I worked on quite a few. Eventually even the large urban centers ran out out of slack and had to start addressing the problem. The process is by no means complete, but is still ongoing. The study references Milwaukee, so this story should be relevant
http://www.mkeriverkeeper.org/content/mmsd-studies-merits-increasing-sewer-overflow-capacity
Looks like they’re on top of the situation, if not yet in complete control, but with 50 years lead time they ought to be able to make significant progress. Maybe they can use some of money they can save on public employee compensation to speed it along a little.
SJB says:
February 19, 2011 at 8:57 pm
“More atmospheric dust from global desertification could lead to increases of harmful bacteria in oceans, seafood”
“Increased rainfall and dated sewers could affect water quality in Great Lakes”
How can we have GLOBAL DESERTIFICATION with INCREASED RAINFALL?
Concerning the “dangerous levels” of food prices, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick declared: (see http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/15/us-worldbank-food-idUSTRE71E5H720110215 )
“Catastrophic storms and droughts have hurt the world’s leading agriculture-producing countries, including flooding and a massive cyclone in Australia, major winter storms in the United States, and fires last year in Russia.”
In September 2010, the World Bank released a report emphasizing “the World Bank confirms that large-scale farmland deals whereby industrialised and emerging economies acquired land in developing countries amounted to around 45 million hectares last year – an increase of more than 10-fold on the average for the previous decade of just four million hectares a year.
The report attributes this land grab to recent food price volatility and the increased demand for land that has resulted from biofuel targets in the US and EU. Specifically, it notes that “biofuel mandates may have large indirect effects on land use change, particularly converting pasture and forest land.
(http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/1805151/world-bank-biofuel-mandates-fuelling-land-grabs )
Has the World Bank a very short memory?
“With 2010 the wettest year on record and third warmest for sea surface temperatures, NOAA and our partners are working to uncover how a changing climate can affect our health and our prosperity,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D
Maybe NOAA should do some science on what caused the SST warmth and precip.
The extra rain is due to low solar activity causing specific humidity at the tropopause to fall in response to diminished ionisation.
The warm sea is due to excess energy leaving the oceans due to low solar activity causing an energy flow reversal. Big el nino’s occur at low sunspot counts.
If these facts were acknowledged by NOAA, the reaction to the rest of what they have to say here wouldn’t be so negative. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff. It’s notable that the element carbon gets no mention, though this is because NOAA assumes its readers will accept co2 driven change as ‘a given’.
@Cassandra King
The kind of thing that you are referring to has happened repeatedly in the UK as documented in the book Scared To Death. The book goes chapter by chapter over all the potential disasters of several decades, non of which eventually happened. In every case the real harm was caused by expensive and ill advised government action. The real tradgedy is the inability to learn from such errors, new scares pop up with predictable regularity and the usual panic measures inevitably follow.
Contrary to what the above referenced article implies the evidence suggests that ice ages are much drier than interglacials. The level of dust in the atmospeere is higher during ice ages.
http://www.climatedata.info/Impacts/Impacts/dust.html
The reason for increased desertification at the moment is anthropogenic – not due to increases in CO2 but by overgrazing in the countries bordering the Sahara.
It is also generally accepted that an increase in iron in the oceans is a good thing; phytoplankton, which take in CO2 need iron in which the oceans are generally deficient. Indeed one form of bioengineering proposed dumping iron filings in the ocean.
I guess its all possible …. but doesn’t this catastrophism ignore the fact that those parts of the world where life is most prolific and which have been successfully populated by humans for thousands of year are the hot wet tropics ??? I mean, its not as if India and Indonesia are uninhabitable !
There has been a fair amount of research on Saharan dust deposition in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They have all come to the conclusion that the amount of dust is a good proxy for climate at higher latitudes. The relationship is:
More dust = Colder climate
The only “projection” that matters is that we’ll get more and more third rate “scientists” coming out with alarmist, shroudwaving BS computer models in the hope of squeezing out the last drops of taxpayers’ money.
Along with taxpayers, the victim in all of this is science. There actually are honest scientists that don’t invent stories of ever increasing doom and gloom to secure their funding. The problem is that governments and citizens have allowed themselves to be stampeded by fear mongering and it is giving honest scientists a bad name.
It is time to replace fear mongering scientists with scientists that offer practical, economical solutions to problems. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge already demonstrated what happens when try and turn back the clock and eliminate technology in the name of ideology. In Cambodia it killed millions. Globally it will kill billions. There are some in high office that may see this as a solution.
Life is full of hazards. We discover new ones every day. Starting with the domestication of fire, what sets humans apart is technology. Rather than looking at problems as disasters waiting to happen, we look at them as opportunities to develop solutions. Those with the best solutions gain the most advantage. This has allowed us to settle and thrive almost everywhere in almost any climate, with wealth and abundance that could not have been dreamed only a few generations ago.
The greatest technological advance in human history has occurred during a time of global warming. The question we should be asking is this: was the warming the cause or the result of our advancement? If warming was the cause of our advancement, then we may well be shooting ourselves in the foot (or the head) if we try and stop it.
Here is some interesting reading from Wikipedia about Obama’s science czar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren
Eight years later, President Barack Obama nominated Holdren for his current position as science advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in December 2008, and he was confirmed on March 19, 2009, by a unanimous vote in the Senate.[6][7][8][9] He testified to the nomination committee that he does not believe that government should have a role in determining optimal population size[10] and that he has never endorsed forced sterilization.[11][12][13]
Overpopulation was an early concern and interest. In a 1969 article, Holdren and co-author Paul R. Ehrlich argued that, “if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.”[21] In 1973 Holdren encouraged a decline in fertility to well below replacement in the United States, because “210 million now is too many and 280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many.”[22] In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls, including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and recommended “the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences” such as access to birth control and abortion.[12][23]
John Holdren was involved in the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager in 1980. He, along with two other scientists helped Paul R. Ehrlich establish the bet with Julian Simon, in which they bet that the price of five key metals would be higher in 1990. The bet was centred around a disagreement concerning the future scaricity of resources in an increasingly polluted and heavily populated world. Ehrlich and Holdren lost the bet, when the price of metals had decreased by 1990.[5]
NOAA, you should have stuck to weather.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/20/water-poverty-uk-scarcity-bills
How about this from the Guardian.. Water scarcity in England. The definition of Drought ion England is 15 days with rain. The bets bit though is this line:
Water poverty is expected to be acute in “urban heat islands” – built-up environments that retain heat more than surrounding areas.
Total nonsense of course. The main point being that the Authors did not read the Jones paper.
What a total bunch of jerks.