Climate Climate & Energy

Death, disease, and infection, thanks to our friend climate change

Daniel J. Weiss and Robin Pam of the Center for American Progress have a new article on the health impacts of global warming. As they explain, "Some of the most severe health effects linked to global warming include the following":

• More illness and death resulting from heat waves.
• Worsening air pollution causes more respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
• Vector-borne disease infections will rise.
• Changing food production and security may cause hunger.
• More severe and frequent wildfires will threaten more people.
• Flooding linked to rising sea levels will displace millions.

Already, "WHO now says that 150,000 deaths annually are attributable to the effects of climate change." And we've only warmed about 1.5 degrees F in the past century. We might warm 10 degrees F each century!

The time to act is now.

Hunting and fishing groups worried about climate change’s effects on wildlife

Photo: iStockphoto The hook and bullet crowd, traditionally quite a conservative bunch, is worrying more openly about climate change, particularly its forecasted effects on wildlife crucial to their sports. The Wildlife Management Institute, a sportsperson’s organization, released a report recently highlighting climate change’s possible detrimental effects to oft-hunted species. Disappearing wetlands could contribute to a […]

A high-resolution map of U.S. CO2 emissions

Check out the Vulcan Project out of Purdue University (with funding from NASA and DOE). It’s an attempt to quantify and visually represent U.S. CO2 emissions over time: Here’s a nifty video introduction: (via Dot Earth)

Student charges that textbook downplays climate change

“[S]cience doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all,” says a random climate skeptic the widely used 2005 version of Advanced Placement high school textbook American Government. The text, written by two prominent conservatives, goes on to imply that […]

Climate change affects — noooooooo! — beer

If dire warnings about the fate of global health and security don’t move you to care about climate change, maybe this will: Climate change could make beer more expensive. (No! Anything but that!) Malting barley will likely be harder to grow in a warming world, especially in Australia, says climate scientist Jim Salinger. He warned […]

Question

What does it say about humanity if, knowing what we know, we stand by and allow a 4,000 MW dirty coal plant get built?

Paid in the shade

You’ve got to give credit to Felicity Barringer for this sentence: If he succeeds, the state that legalized medical marijuana may soon do the same for shade.

Uranium mine near Grand Canyon blocked

A judge has blocked a British mining company’s plan to build an exploratory uranium mine near the Grand Canyon. U.S. District Judge Mary Murguia agreed with litigious environmental groups that considering the location of the proposed mine and the risks associated with uranium mining, VANE Minerals Group should be required to conduct further environmental reviews […]

Hansen paper released; WaPo fails to link to Grist

Several posts on this site have mentioned a recent paper from James Hansen et al. — Target CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? (PDF) — which argues that the official E.U. target of 550 ppm global atmospheric CO2 is far too high, and that anything over 350 ppm risks putting human beings in a world radically […]

World Health Organization says climate change bad for world health

Officials at the World Health Organization used the occasion of World Health Day today to stress climate change’s negative impacts on human health, warning that warming temperatures are already affecting the spread of disease. Increased temperatures have slowly expanded the range of malaria-carrying mosquitoes into new areas, including South Korea and the highlands of Papua […]