by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-12-23
© 2011 Peter Belmont

RSS Recent Essays (All Topics)   •(12/23) How did we get to October 7th? •(11/23) Our Political Habits Are Ending The Human Race •(10/23) Sketch of Israel-Palestine History •(10/23) Whoever controls the discourse controls emotional reactions to reality •(08/23) Russia On Trial •(01/23) The Purpose of "Conservatism" •(10/22) The project of returning the earth to the cockroaches couldn't be in better hands! •(05/22) Abortion, The Constitution, And The Supreme Court •(03/22) The Problem of Climate Change Framing or Discourse or Understanding •(06/21) Israel-Palestine: If not apartheid, then what? We should all read this article Could Public Health Benefits Make Combating Climate Change Free? in Scientific American. Global warming is now credited with damaging health in various ways in much of the world. Not only in the future. Today. As the article says, “Climate change threatens human health, therefore reducing greenhouse gas emissions may help our medical well-being, too.”

As a result, WHO—and a consortium of other public health organizations—declared climate change to be among the most pressing emerging health issues in the world at the recent climate negotiations here in South Africa. Consider some of the changes that are already taking place: extreme heat waves, such as the one in Europe in 2003 that killed 46,000 people; changes in bacterial diseases due to water contamination and a quickening of bacterial growth rates in warmer temperatures; worsening levels of ground-level ozone, otherwise known as smog, which is responsible for worsening asthma and heart attacks (among other health effects); changes in pollen making allergies worse; changes in vector-borne diseases; as well as droughts, floods and other forms of extreme weather such as the 12 natural disasters in the U.S. this year that caused at least $1 billion in damage.

”Those things are with us now,” says Dr. Hugh Montgomery of the U.K. Climate and Health Council, one of the groups calling for action to combat climate change—and to consider public health when doing so. “If we continue this script, we are writing a death certificate for humanity on our planet.”

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