Climate Change Health Impacts Loom Large

AFP - Marlowe Hood

A crescendo of scientific studies paints an alarming picture of the human suffering in store due to disrupted weather patterns, rising seas, droughts and climate-enhanced superstorms (AFP Photo/Dominique Faget)

Paris (AFP) - The world should brace for potentially devastating impacts on human health due to climate change, top policy makers and officials from around the globe meeting in Paris said Thursday.
Some of these consequences may be avoided if humanity radically curbs its use of fossil fuels in coming decades, but many are already being felt, they said at the opening of a two-day conference run by the World Health Organization (WHO) and hosted by France.
"Health and climate are inextricably linked because human health depends directly on the health of the planet," French environment and energy minister Segolene Royal told participants.
Royal, also the rotating president of UN-led talks on how best to cope with global warming, said health impacts must play a more central role in future negotiations.
"From now on, I will do my best to ensure that health is integrated into all future climate conferences," starting with a special forum at the next high-level gathering of the 196-nation UN climate meeting in Marrakesh in November, she told AFP.
The Paris Agreement, inked in December last year, calls for holding global warming to well under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit), and helping poor nations cope with its impacts.
A crescendo of scientific studies paints an alarming picture of the human suffering in store due to disrupted weather patterns, rising seas, droughts and climate-enhanced superstorms.

Tropical disease vectors -- for malaria, dengue and zika, to name a few -- are expanding as the insects that carry them spread following warming climes.
Extreme heat waves set to occur every decade rather than once a century will claims more lives, especially the ill and the elderly.
The WHO estimated in 2005 that killer hot spells claim 150,000 lives annually. More than 45,000 died in Europe alone due to a heatwave in the summer of 2003.
Most worrying of all, perhaps, is the threat to global food supplies.
"Can we feed so many people" -- nine billion by mid-century, according to UN projections -- "when the climate that supports us is changing so adversely?", Letizia Ortiz, the Queen of Spain and a special ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization, asked the plenary.
Many staple foods, especially in the developing world, cannot adapt quickly enough to changing weather, resulting in lower yields.

French Environment Minister Segolene Royal (L) and Spain's Queen Letizia walk during the opening of the 2nd Global Conference on Health and Climate on July 7, 2016 in Paris

Fish -- a key source of protein for billions -- have not only been depleted by industrial harvesting but are migrating as oceans warm and coral reefs die.
Sometimes it is the sources, rather than the impacts, of manmade climate change that damage health.
The WHO estimates that seven million people die each year from air pollution, which also contributes to global warming as a greenhouse gas.
"The health sector has been under-represented in this discussion when you think about the millions of lives that will be affected, and even ended," said Richard Kinley, the interim head of the UN climate forum.
"The world is already committed to important levels of climate disruption," he added.
"The health sector will have to deal with the consequences."
The Second Global Conference on Health and Climate will end Friday with a proposed "action agenda" for national governments.

Links

• Hundreds of deaths in two cities in 2003 heatwave due to man-made climate change: study
• First 6 months of 2016 hottest ever recorded in New Zealand
• Coal dust kills 23,000 per year in EU: report
• UN's Ban says time to scale up action on climate change

This Election Year, We Can't Lose Sight Of The Perils Of Climate Change

The Guardian - Ralph Nader

Candidates running for Congress and the presidency aren't offering real solutions, despite growing scientific alarm. That is not acceptable

'It is time for citizens to organize town meetings and rallies on climate change.' Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

Every election year, candidates for office engage in a perverse form of theater. Some flatter voters or try to scare them, others offer promises of a better future. Unfortunately, few candidates feel an obligation to follow through on campaign pledges or grapple with serious problems confronting our country and planet.
Take Barack Obama. He has done far less on climate than his supporters might have expected. Despite claiming COP21 as a victory, Obama's legacy will tell the story of the US surpassing all other nations in oil and gas production. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, has called the US "a global warming machine", adding: "At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine."
Today, that lack of leadership on climate change continues. Candidates running for Congress and the presidency aren't offering real solutions, despite growing scientific alarm.
Small wonder that the Guardian's readers, when surveyed, resoundingly proclaimed that climate change is one of the most pressing issues that are consistently neglected by our presidential candidates. The fact that many Americans feel this way speaks volumes about the fundamental rift between elected officials and their constituencies.
How many casualties, destroyed communities, flooded coastlands, diminished snow packs feeding key Asian rivers, drought-ridden agricultural belts and new disease vectors, will it take to move a more organized American public to demand a transformation of US energy policy? People care about this issue, so why don't our elected officials seem to reflect that concern?
Special interest lobbying has a lot to answer for. Tiffany Germain, in an article for ThinkProgress.org, notes: "170 elected representatives in the 114th Congress have taken over $63.8m from the fossil fuel industry that's driving the carbon emissions which cause climate change." Many of those representatives deny climate change is man-made.
John Passacantando, former executive director of Greenpeace in the US, once reportedly told big-oil and gas executives: "You're going to wish you were the tobacco companies once this stuff hits and people realize you were the ones who blocked [action]." His warning may eventually be proven correct if it turns out their industry lobby is to blame.
But that day might be far off. That's why, in this election year, we cannot afford to let candidates for federal, state and local office lose sight of the perils of climate change.
There are many policies our presidential candidates could get behind now. We could outlaw the creation of new fossil-fueled electric power plants, provide federal loans for the construction of renewable energy power plants or enforce green requirements on new homes and buildings – just to list some ideas floated by S David Freeman, an energy expert, in a recent book.
All of these are reasonable, possible and necessary steps that our elected officials could be implementing right now, were it not for the corruption that has prevailed in our politics over the last several decades.
This election, voters need to push candidates to support measures that will address the problems associated with climate change – and reporters need to cover this momentous story rigorously. It is time for citizens to organize town meetings and rallies on climate change. It is time for action.

Links

• Climate change: the missing issue of the 2016 campaign
• Australia's vast kelp forests devastated by marine heatwave, study reveals
• Arctic sea ice crashes to record low for June
• June swoon: US breaks another monthly temperature record
• Christiana Figueres nominated for post of UN secretary general
• Climate scientists are under attack from frivolous lawsuits
• Fracking 'will break UK climate targets unless rules are made stricter'
• Climate change plagues Madagascar's poor: 'The water rose so fast'
• A girl's view of the 17 sustainable development goals - in pictures
• The great tide: is Britain really equipped to cope with global warming?
• Antony Gormley: Humans are building 'a vast termites' nest' of greed

It’s Too Late for Expensive Carbon Capture Technology to Help the Climate

New York Times - Allison Kole*

Despite decades of effort, carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power plants has yet to come close to offsetting the damage caused by coal and has created new hazards of its own. The term “clean coal” has always seemed like an oxymoron, and so it is no wonder that carbon capture, a technology touted by industry, has done little to clean up coal.

We cannot afford further investment in a pipe dream that distracts us from developing real solutions and technologies for climate change.

Yet policymakers, prodded by the coal industry, continue to invest money and precious time to try to develop carbon capture for coal-fired plants. The Department of Energy began developing carbon capture in 1997, and since 2008, Congress has allocated $7 billion for carbon capture programs. Still, no commercial-scale carbon capture power plant has gone online in the United States, and the long list of abandoned projects in the United States and abroad grows.
Carbon capture is an expensive technology requiring expansive new infrastructure. This includes potentially thousands of miles of pipeline for transporting captured carbon dioxide and maintenance and monitoring of storage sites to prevent leakage. Assuming such obstacles can be overcome, it is likely too late for carbon capture to be scaled up as needed to be an effective tool for combating climate change. To achieve meaningful carbon dioxide reductions, approximately 100 carbon capture projects must be online by 2020 and 3,000 by 2050. No carbon capture project has been able to capture the quantities of carbon dioxide promised.
Also, carbon capture investment is not a smart strategy for reducing carbon emissions. To recoup costs, some carbon capture power plant operators plan to sell carbon dioxide to oil companies to help them extract more oil. Also, because carbon capture reduces a coal plant’s efficiency, using carbon capture actually requires the use of more coal to produce the same amount of energy than a plant without carbon capture.
Putting costs, infrastructure issues and efficiency problems aside, the use of carbon capture to reduce carbon emissions ignores the harmful effects of coal on the environment and communities. Regardless of any reduction in carbon achieved, plants with carbon capture still release harmful air pollutants and produce polluting coal ash ponds. With or without carbon capture, the burning, storage and extraction of coal disproportionately affects poor communities and communities of color.
We cannot afford further investment in the carbon capture pipe dream that distracts the nation from developing real solutions and adaptive technologies for climate change. Our energy and environmental future should not be dictated by the narrow vision of the fading coal industry.

*Allison Kole is a senior legal fellow with the Climate Investigations Center.

Links

• Can Citizens Sue Over Climate Change?
• What's Holding Back Renewable Energy?
• Clean Coal, or a Dirty Shame?
• Technically Feasible, and It Can Be Financially Feasible