From UMEA UNIVERSITY
Climate change could risk progress in health — or be a global health opportunity
The threat climate change poses to human health is possibly so great that it could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years. But getting to grips with climate change could also present major opportunities for global health. Details can be found in a major international research report published in the journal The Lancet.
‘Impact of climate change on global health could be enormous, not only through the direct health effects, but also because of reduced social stability if people are forced to move or flee,’ said Peter Byass, professor of global health at Umeå University in Sweden, who has been a senior adviser to the work of the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change.
‘Meanwhile, we know that mitigation and adaptation around climate change can have positive health effects, for example both by reducing emissions and improving dietary habits. Effective climate action may actually prove to be one of the greatest opportunities to also improve global health that we have ever had,’ says Byass.
The work behind the report, published this week by the journal The Lancet, involved a number of European and Chinese climate scientists, environmental scientists, natural scientists, social scientists, medical and health scholars, engineers, energy policy experts, and others.
The report shows that the direct health effects of climate change are linked to increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, especially heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms. Indirect impacts come from changes in infection patterns, effects of emissions, uncertainty regarding the availability of food, and hence malnutrition. Health effects can also be linked to people involuntarily forced to leave the affected areas or movements of people planned because of impending changes in living conditions. Increased incidence of conflict is also a factor that the report highlights as a threat to global health.
But global efforts to reduce emissions can achieve positive co-benefits for health. The report highlights a number of such points. These include reduced consumption of fossil fuels leading to lower incidence of respiratory diseases, as well as people walking and cycling more, which both reduce emissions and lower the incidence of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke. Even the consumption of red meat, the production of which is not very climate-friendly, is expected to decline and also bring health benefits as a result.
The report proposes a new independent global action plan ‘Countdown to 2030: Climate Change and Health Action,’ with the formation of an organisation to monitor and report every two years to the UN on how links between health status and climate change are affected. The organisation would also report on progress towards reduced emissions, measures to promote health and to reduce the vulnerability of populations, and to create sustainable health systems with low carbon emissions.
‘Overall, a strong international consensus is needed to create a global economy in which we minimise carbon dioxide emissions. This in turn presents an opportunity to improve human health. Measures recommended in this report are particularly important for populations in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable areas, which are also currently most affected by climate change,’ says Maria Nilsson, researcher at the Division of Epidemiology and Global Health at Umeå University, who is one of the report’s main editors.
‘The health community has responded to a wide range of serious health threats over time; examples would be efforts to reduce smoking and the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now more efforts are essential in response to another major threat to human health and the environment: climate change. Shifting to a sustainable society is economically possible and would also provide health benefits,’ says Maria Nilsson.
The Lancet Commission report will be an important resource for talks on climate change on global health during meetings connected with the UN Climate Change Conference, COP21, held in Paris from 30 November to 11 December, 2015.
###
Read the report in The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/climate-change
Additional press material from the journal: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f8sa29hs65cwdjq/AACQCq161bLaHjc4hvI_8uB-a?dl=0
It really is disgusting now.
So when do we see the life expectancy age come down? That would make the Greens and all the other “overpopulation” alarmists very happy I’m sure!!!
These nutters are on the wrong side of the bell curve. I’ve been living in Hong Kong these past 4 and a half years and seasonal temperatures have ranged from about 8C to 34/35C. In the heat of the day I regularly wander around the hills of Hong Kong. The vegetation is in great shape, there are more than 450 bird species and staggeringly beautiful butterflies and reptiles. I have never been healthier and I’m in no hurry to return to a temperate climate.
Butterflies? Call Paul Ehrlich, that might be the only thing he knows anything about.
Has any researcher ever investigated some potential issue with “Climate Change”™ and found there was no problem?
All the time!
What difference, at this point, does it make. We are in the midst the 6th mass extinction event. We are all doomed.
/sarc
But on a note of reality, yes we all must die… someday. Even delta smelt and lesser prairie chickens.
As we have learned over the last 6 months or so, fat, that is lots of fat in our diets is good. Carbohydrates, particularly those in our crunchy granola diets, are bad. What a reversal in science. For four decades we and our food industry, our Michele Obama supported school lunch programs, have been wrong.
We also are now confronted by the specter of Plague, Small Pox, Measles, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Polio and other early immunization preventable illnesses as a rising tide, ascribed by our no-nothing sources, from our frivolous use of fossil fuels. How can this be? Primary, many people are listening to Hollywood personalities about the dangers of vaccinations. Loss of herd immunity, and yes, there will be future epidemics of preventable disease. One of the outcomes of a child dying of a preventable illness, the dizzy-headedness seems to dissipate, and mothers get their children vaccinated no matter what they have heard on Oprah or the local tribal/shaman/religious leader.
As for foreign countries? the impact of vaccination programs will exert an influence that trumps, at least for mothers, any ideological battle within their community. A dead child leaves a scar that will never be erased. Climate warmers would do well to advocate children’s vaccination, abundant and cheap energy, birth control as these are the women’s issues for the 21st Century. Ignore them at one’s political peril.
This article infuriates me. Lack of nutrition, contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation remain the biggest health threats to global populations outside the top richest few percent of lucky people. Hard to see how any plausible warming can make them worse, they are already terrible. At least cheap energy could bring to them what advanced economies have enjoyed for the past 75 years or so. And *if* the price we in advanced economies pay is a few extra deaths from heatwaves, it will be nothing to the alleviated suffering. Have any of these quacks been to a third world slum? Even if they haven’t, surely they can envisage the problems based on common sense?
Climate change will lead to more numerous and bigger, scary spiders. Another theory leads to instances of camouflage mice and cockroaches moving in phalanx formation. So far, there is mixed evidence supporting these assertions, but why take a chance with such dangers, when modeled studies prepared for peer review can prove their merit. Proper levels of grant financing is needed, of course. These studies will undoubtedly lead to even more scary stories.
A completely steaming pile of…. rubbish…
The increase in CO2 levels from 280 ppm in the 1900’s to the current 400 ppm has already increased crop yields and forest growth by 25% and will increase them by 50% when CO2 levels reach 560 ppm.
Their claims that crop yields will fall at higher CO2 concentrations is not supported by the empirical evidence. They’re also wrong in assuming higher CO2 levels will increase severe weather frequency and intensity, as all empirical evidence show no increasing trends in severe weather over the past 50~100 years. If anything, warmer global temps will DECREASE severe weather incidence because of a decrease in latitudinal temperature variance.
This is just more scare mongering by CAGW zealots that realize their hypothesis is on the cusp of disconfirmation given 19 years of no global warming trends, despite 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being made over the last 19 years.
Health progress is mainly due to two things: Antibiotics and sanitary sewers. Human life expectancy didn’t change much throughout history until the invention of the sanitary sewer, then it began to take off. Add water treatment, refrigeration, antiseptics (Listerine was developed to kill listeria) and finally antibiotics and that accounts for the vast majority of our health progress over the past 200 years or so. Calvin Coolidge’s son died from an infected blister on his heel from playing tennis at the white house. Climate change isn’t going to reverse any of that unless the idiots pushing that agenda make energy so expensive we can no longer run sanitary sewers, clean water supplies, and refrigerators.
+1
It’s worse than that according to
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/bye-bye-birdie-civilisation-will-collapse-in-2040-apparently/story-e6frflp0-1227410724306
We only have until 2040 before all around us collapses in a heap. The first two pars are:
“FLOODS, fire, famine. The collapse of industrial civilisation. The end of the world as we know it.
Scientists predict a global catastrophe in the next 30 years if we don’t change our ways now — and Australia won’t be spared.”
Clicked through the authors affiliations and it seems like about 1/3 of them are affiliated with Centre for Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Haidian, Beijing, China. The paper has like 40 authors, only a few of which are actually researchers in areas of health:
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60854-6.pdf
So we’re being informed of heath risks by researchers who are mostly climate scientists or energy policy advocates. Small wonder the paper totally missed the catastrophe of bread not rising properly.
The higher number of authors the deeper the level of BS , is an old and often accurate saying.
While there is little doubt that the warming of the last 150 years brings disease-carrying types of mosquitos into further high latitudes (like Aedes aegypti), there is certainly no reason to expect that health systems and pest control systems we cannot adapt to warmer temps and wetter climate… no matter the cause. I’m a believer in adaptation to CC. CC is most likely natural variation, with maybe a small part anthropogenic. But regardless of the underlying cause of global warming since 1850, I am not in the camp that advocates that we should run in terror and fear while we hand-over our cash to redistribution schemes for Progressives who seek more power. There is already lots of money going to poor countries via the Gates Foundation, the PEPFAR, and other malaria and parasite control NGO’s, very worthy causes, that do not need the burden of CC theatrics and the UN WMO’s pontifications. Indeed, it is wetter weather, more so than temperature that brings mosquitos, since it is always warm enough in the summer months for mosquitos to breed and spread disease. the controlling factor is rain and available stagnant water sources for breeding.
Cases in point: Yellow fever was a persistent and widespread viral disease in the US in the late 19th Century. Until the Yellow Fever vaccine was widespread adopted after WWII, it was a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the US in the 18th and 19th century in urban outbreaks. 1793, Philadelphia had an outbreak where 5000 people died. In New Orleans, YF epidemics in 1833, 1853, and 1905 (the last in the US) killed many 10’s of thousands. The 1905 YF outbreak was controlled when a strong anti-mosquito control program was instituted, which brought the outbreak to an end. Today we see Ebola in West Africa becoming near endemic, but with a likely successful vaccine it too will be controlled. Dengue Fever too is close to a good vaccine for all 4 serotypes, not perfect but likely good enough.
As for bacterial infections, all the nightmare scenarios surround antibiotic resistance evolution. It is on-going and happening now. Not some futuristic novel nightmare. Go to most hospitals today for inpatient surgery and you risk a life-threatening MRSA or enterobacter ab resistant infection. The dirty secret of today’s hospitals is you may get a bacteria infection that they have few weapons against. While we battle mythical climate change, ab-resistant bacteria are ripping our hospitals apart.
That has zero to do with CC. It has everything to do with antibiotic overuse, over-prescription, limited diagnostics for resistance (and thus proper ab selection), and poor patient dose monitoring during infection-treatment. Newer antibiotics are too slow in coming. Currently there are still poor market incentives for pharmaceutical companies and high liability barriers (lawsuits). But this is race we will need to spend lots and lots more more money on, than the $40-$50billion we spend on CC based on probable-fraudulent AGW claims from NOAA and NASA para/pseudo-scientists.
+
Greenhouse gas warming is a huge, wasteful and dangerous distraction from climate change. It’s absurd that we fret about the subtle influence of a minor change in IR while much more important changes are happening. We’ve been lucky on disease, it will adapt regardless of warming. Resourses will become more difficult to find, particularly water, for which ghg warming is likely to benefit us.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/worlds-fresh-water-supply-running/
The only people who talk about the world running out of fresh water are Californians. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world it is pouring with rain (on and off throughout the year and sometimes it comes down frozen).
Although the chances of correctly predicting the climate in 50 years time are low there is a balancing factor.
All the health advice will have changed by then too.
So, while the effects may be predicted to be bad today, by the time we get there they may be fine.
Umeå? Nobody listen to them in Sweden anyway. Why should the rest of the world? And, they are wrong: according to the latest IPCC report; no global trends in flooding, draughts, hurricanes, preciptation. etc Heatwaves? Well, there is a 20:1 ratio of excessive deaths due to cold compared to heat. Less cold and more heat should save lifes! Particularly in Umeå with the long dark winters (no sun). Anyone who can, leaves, i.e. climate refugees.
+1
Heard this on BBC Radio 4 this morning – quite dreadful. The interviewer did not challenge any of the ludicrous claims made. Was this through stupidity, lack of knowledge or, more probably, toeing the BBC line. Sooner they get rid of the BBC the better.
Both Grimwig and Indefatigablefrog will have noticed that the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 creates “great radio” by always putting up two opposing forces against one another. On every single issue of the day they will interview someone with one view of it and then interview someone else who has an opposing view. Often, they have them on together and there is a lively discussion and occasionally heated words are exchanged. On every issue. Oh. Except one. Whenever the discussion is about global warming – please stop using the term “climate change” as the warmists are desperate for us to forget the phrase “global warming” (because…er…it isn’t) – they mysteriously fail to put up a respected sceptic to argue for the other side. So whatever happened to “great radio”? Listening to the unchallenged, breathtakingly arrogant and ignorant interview this morning about the need to reduce CO2 emissions to enable people to live healthier lives it was more “grate radio” than anything else.
Didn’t you get the memo? After the 28gate climate meeting the decision was made and science was settled. No more unbelievers to appear on the BBC and only lollipops to be bowled at the warmists when interviewed (h/t Geoffrey Boycott). Recall the astonishment of a greenie when Humphries was it (?) bowled a couple of bouncers and an inswinging Yorker. Does the attendance of the Head of Comedy at 28gate sum it up?
“Peter Byass”
Or to give it the English spelling.. Bias
Climate change will cause doctors, nurses, surgeons etc to forget all they know….
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the
scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue….”
The Lancet
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/to-the-truth-well-be-blind/
Climate change does indeed represent a serious and present threat to world health: The drive towards ‘renewable’ energy will leave nations bankrupt and bereft of the energy they need to support the technological lifestyle on which their populations and their healthcare depend…
Greens are bad for our health…
Gee this doom and gloom schtuff is coming thick and fast. Can you imagine what it will be like in the month before Apris??
This latest tosh from the Lancet takes me back to their effort on the casualties in the Iraq when they published a piece of blatently partisan drivel. Put simply the raw data would have had some completely ridiculous number of civilian casualties as its result. It turns out that the Falluja data were about 5/7 of the total so obviously a complete outlier. They authors then presented the remaining data as robust and the Lancet published the paper. The real problem of course was it was a piss poorly designed method with a coarse sampling model completely unsuited to the similarly coarse incidence of such casualtyies. It was prone to massive errors of the sort encountered and of course wide open to manipualtion for the same reasons. he authors hired people on the ground to gather rthe data where there was legligible chance of quality oversight and ample scope and chance of extreme bias in the data collection.
It was utter junk and obviously so. The authors admitted they were ‘after’ George W in the lead up to the US presidential election which confirmed their motivation for bias. The Lancet was just plain AWOL in predential oversight.
The Lancet are just a joke IMO. About at the level of Skeptical Science and the like.
The month before Paris… that should be. Also … Iraq War, .. Fallujah, … casualties…, … manipulation…, The…, …the.. , …negligible…..prudential.
“Schtuff” and “tosh” are technical terms meaning ‘drivel like’ or ‘pertaining to drivel’.
Gee, reading about the sort of drivel such as in the Lancet is having health effects right now! Doc, Doc! I can’t spell!
Interesting article and very interesting to hear the commentary here. Climate change is not going to reverse the progress made with unless energy is made so expensive clean water supplies are no longer available. http://www.wecointernational.com/
It’s just another extrapolation without any scientific basis. I must agree that the atmosphere of the many eastern cities is bad for pulmonary health due to particulate emissions from coal stations and also factories and households that use coal and wood. But with scrubbers and precipitators these emissions can be reduced significantly. But as to warming per se I have yet to be convinced living in a tropical climate where it doesn’t get beyond 34 degrees C and below 18.
FYI more on this
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2015/6/23/the-lancet-goes-all-andrew-wakefield-again.html#comments
Fantasy based on fantasy……….the gravy train roles on!