16/11/2019

Health Impacts Of Climate Change On Children Don't Need Exaggerating

New Scientist

Children are increasingly protesting about their future. Stefan Boness/Panos Pictures
A child born today faces far-reaching health impacts from living through a world 4°C warmer than humans have ever experienced, according to a major assessment released today. But the research doesn’t support claims by some climate activists that children may not grow up at all.
The 2019 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, put together by doctors and researchers, warns that children are particularly vulnerable to climate change, because a warming world exposes them to more infectious diseases, malnutrition and stunted growth, and dirty air that hinders the development of their lungs.
A major concern is Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that leads to diarrhoeal disease, the world’s number two killer of children under the age of 5. People are most susceptible in certain coastal areas, and the percentage of these at-risk regions has already grown almost a third in the Baltic and north-east US since the 1980s as warming changes sea surface temperatures.
Elizabeth Robinson at the University of Reading, UK, one of the report’s authors, says children’s diets are also at risk, with under nutrition and malnutrition set to rise as climate change causes food production to fall. “We are a little concerned with a triple negative,” she says.
Heat is already causing yields of crops to fall in some places – such as wheat in Australia – and many of the yield declines are expected in countries that are food insecure, and the productivity of farms will be hit as labourers struggle with heat. All of this means that children face a poorer diet.
In some places, higher temperatures will trap more air pollution in cities, says another report author, Nicholas Watts, a medical doctor at University College London. This will have a particular impact on children. “It has lifelong effects on your lungs as they are trying to develop,” he says.
Watts says the current trajectory of global carbon emissions means that we are on track for more warming than the worst case scenario – of a 2.8-4.6°C rise by between 2080 and 2100 – so 4°C is a conservative estimate of what a person born today might experience. That assumes a global average life expectancy of 71.
The report follows recent claims that rising temperatures mean children may not grow up at all. “People probably sometimes ask you: what are you going to be when you grow up? But we’ve reached a point in human history where the question also has to be asked: what are you going to do if you grow up?” Rupert Read, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, told children in July.
Air pollution is a major contributor to health issues in children [File: Adnan Abidi/Reuters]
His remarks were condemned last month by climate scientists for straying beyond what science says. Read tells New Scientist his comments stem not just the risk to children from individual issues such as infectious diseases and malnutrition but “potential societal collapse”, and the need to err on the side of precaution.
The health impacts of climate change don’t need exaggerating: the Lancet Countdown report lays out dire impacts for well-being if emissions go unchecked. On the positive side, the report makes clear that acting on climate change could actually improve health compared with conditions today.
Watts points out that a child born in the UK today will, by the age of 6 years old, live in a country without coal power stations. By 21, they will be unable to buy a petrol car – a date that politicians have hinted may come much earlier. When 31, they will live in a society that should have hit net-zero emissions, with cycling and walking much more prevalent.
“By the time you reach net zero, you have cleaner air, healthier diets, more liveable cities, you have stronger, more resilient health systems,” says Watts. Which one of those two pathways we pick is entirely a political question, he adds. “It’s now entirely a question of implementation, of getting on with it.”

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(AU) Coalition Inaction On Climate Change And Health Is Risking Australian Lives, Global Report Finds

The Guardian - 

Urgent national action is needed to prevent serious declines in public health from climate change, the multi-institutional Countdown study says
Bushfire smoke blankets the morning sky in Glen Innes, NSW, on 11 November. Respiratory illnesses are rising as a result of air pollution from this week’s fires, cardiologist Arnagretta Hunter says following the release of the latest Countdown report on climate change and health worldwide. Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
The federal government’s lack of engagement on health and climate change has left Australians at significant risk of illness through heat, fire and extreme weather events, and urgent national action is required to prevent harm and deaths, a global scientific collaboration has found.
On Thursday, international medical journal the Lancet published its Countdown report, a multi-institutional project led by University College in London that examines progress on climate change and health throughout the world.
Its first two assessments were published in 2017 and 2018, with annual assessments continuing until 2030, consistent with the near-term timeline of the Paris climate agreement. Findings relating to Australia were tracked and published by the Medical Journal of Australia.
Australia was assessed across 31 indicators divided into five broad sections: climate change impacts, exposures and vulnerability; adaptation, planning and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; finance and economics; and public and political engagement.
The report found that while there had been some progress at state and local government levels, “there continues to be no engagement on health and climate change in the Australian federal parliament, and Australia performs poorly across many of the indicators in comparison to other developed countries; for example, it is one of the world’s largest net exporters of coal and its electricity generation from low-carbon sources is low”.
“We also find significantly increasing exposure of Australians to heatwaves and, in most states and territories, continuing elevated suicide rates at higher temperatures,” wrote the authors, led by Associate Professor Paul Beggs of Macquarie University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
“As a direct result of this failure, we conclude that Australia remains at significant risk of declines in health due to climate change, and that substantial and sustained national action is urgently required in order to prevent this … This work is urgent.”
Spokeswoman for Doctors for the Environment Australia, Dr Arnagretta Hunter, agreed Australia was poorly prepared for the health challenge of climate change.
“Doctors around Australia are already seeing multiple health effects from climate change,” Hunter, a cardiologist, said.
“On the coast of NSW this week we know there are more respiratory illnesses, heart attacks and strokes as a consequence of the terrible air pollution from the fires. Doctors see the mental health effects of drought in rural communities. Patterns of infectious diseases are changing.
“Average summer temperatures in Australia have risen by 1.66C in the past 20 years, with the intensity of heatwaves rising by a third. And with the increasing temperatures over summer we know there has been increased hospital admissions with ill health. Mortality rates are also affected.”
In 2014, Melbourne experienced temperatures over 41C from 14 to 17 January, as well as 167 excess deaths and a new record set for the highest number of calls for ambulance services ever received in a day, she said. Hunter described Australia as the developed country with the most serious vulnerability to climate change through heat, fire, water shortages and extreme weather events.
“Doctors for the Environment Australia joins the loud chorus across Australia calling for the federal government to acknowledge the risk and act in proportion to the magnitude of the threat,” she said.
In 2019, the Australian Medical Association, Doctors for the Environment Australia and the World Medical Association recognised climate change as a health emergency.
Public Health Association of Australia senior policy officer Dr Ingrid Johnston said the priorities of the fossil fuel industry had been placed ahead of the health of Australians.
“No one can dispute that climate change poses significant immediate, medium-term and long-term risks to the health of Australians and communities around the world,” she told Guardian Australia. “And yet the government appears to believe that climate change is not a mainstream health issue. This is tragically wrong. The issues cannot be siloed.”
She called on the prime minister, Scott Morrison, to issue a statement unambiguously acknowledging the link between climate change and health.
Johnston said the activities of the federal government’s disaster and climate resilience reference group – a group of senior officials which considers the risks and opportunities arising from climate change and natural disasters – had not been transparent in its work.
“The public has a right to know what that working group is doing,” she said. “How much information is the government giving consideration to regarding climate impacts in national assessments of health?
“Australians are crying out for genuine, smart and empathetic national leadership. The above cannot happen without a well-resourced and national effort to reduce future threat levels from fires and drought.”
She said the Public Health Association of Australia wanted a Coag health and climate change forum consisting of ministers with responsibility for health, environment, energy and other portfolios.
“No area is untouched by climate change,” Johnston said. “This Coag working group would incorporate academic expertise on how to adapt the health system to a changing climate with more natural disasters, with adequate funding for proposals. The sniping politics has to stop so we can get on with working for health and the national interest.
“Finally, we call out the policy that does exist. It is a policy that places the fossil fuel industry above the health and wellbeing of all Australians. It backs subsidies for fossil fuels and subverts tough environmental planning for mines and gas projects.”
General practitioner Dr Peter Tait, who also has a master’s degree in climate change and is involved with health and environmental groups, said there was no mechanism in the national health system to collect information about climate-related illnesses other than in a random or anecdotal way.
“Even in emergency departments where the severe end of these conditions go, data collection is dependent on the treating doctor using a code to identify heat stress or natural disaster effects, and apart from the obvious ones, like burns, they don’t,” he said.
“We do know that the mental health toll from destructive fires and other natural disasters will be high. This is a supernatural disaster occasioned by decades of purposeful neglect by governments and as that dawns on people, anger and distress will rise.”

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Climate Explained: How Growth In Population And Consumption Drives Planetary Change

The Conversation - 

The growth of the human population over the last 70 years has exploded from 2 billion to nearly 8 billion, with a compounding net growth of over 30,000 per day. We all breathe out carbon dioxide with every breath. That equates to about 140 billion CO₂ breaths every minute. Isn’t it logical that atmospheric carbon will continue to increase with the birth rate regardless of what we do about fossil fuel reduction?
Rapid population growth and increased consumption are now seen as the main drivers of environmental changes. from www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND
This question touches on the core of our impact on planetary change. It highlights the exponential growth in the human population, but also homes in on the potential direct input of carbon dioxide from humans, through respiration.
As I explain in more detail below, our breathing does not contribute to the net accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But population growth, combined with an increase in consumption, is now seen as the main driver of change in the Earth system.

 Humans: a moment in geological time
Earth has been around for 4.56 billion years. The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilised mats of cyanobacteria that are about 3.7 billion years old.
From around 700 million years ago, and certainly from 540 million years ago, life exploded into its present myriad forms, from molluscs to lung fish, reptiles, insects, plants, fishes and mammals – culminating in hominids and finally Homo sapiens. Genetic studies suggest hominids evolved from primates around 6 million years ago, with the oldest hominid fossil dating from 4.4 million years ago in East Africa.
Our species appeared around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, a blink of an eye in geological terms. From Africa, Homo sapiens migrated through Europe and Asia and spread across the world, at lightning speeds.
Part of the question is about a putative link between human biological functions and climate. Homo sapiens is one of more than 28 million living species today, and some 35 billion species that have ever lived on Earth. There has always been a link between life and Earth’s atmosphere, and perhaps the clearest indicator is oxygen.

Life, carbon and climate
Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to master photosynthesis and began adding oxygen to Earth’s early atmosphere, producing levels of 2% by 1 billion years ago. Today oxygen levels are at 20%.
While people inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide (billions of tonnes each year), this does not represent new carbon in the atmosphere, but rather recycled carbon that had been taken up by the animals and plants we eat. Furthermore, the hard parts of human skeletons are potential carbon stores, if buried sufficiently deep.
There is a constant cycling of carbon between geological, oceanographic and biological processes. Homo sapiens is part of this carbon cycle that plays out at the Earth’s surface. Like all living organisms, we derive the carbon we need from our immediate environment and give it up again through breathing, living and dying.
Carbon is only added to the atmosphere if it is taken out of long-term geological stores such as carbon-rich sediments, oil, natural gas and coal.

 Planetary impact of humans
But the remarkable growth in human population is surely the critical issue. Ten thousand years ago, there were 1 million people on Earth. By 1800, there were 1 billion, 3 billion by 1960 and almost 8 billion today.
When these figures are plotted on a graph, the growth line looks almost vertical from the 1800s onwards. Population growth may eventually flatten out, but only at around 10-11 billion.
Alongside the unprecedented population growth of humans has been the loss of many non-human species (10,000 extinctions per million populations per year, or 60% of animal populations since 1970), the rapid loss of wilderness habitat and consequent growth in farmed land, over-fishing (with up to 87% of fisheries fully exploited), and a staggering growth in global car numbers (from zero in the 1920s to 1 billion in 2013 and a projected 2 billion by 2040).
The world production of copper is an instructive proxy for human global impacts. As with many commodity curves, the trend from 1900, and particularly from the 1950s, is exponential. In 1900 around half-a-million tonnes of copper was produced worldwide. Today it is 18 million tonnes per year, with no sign of lowering consumption rates. Copper is the feedstock for much of modern-day and future green technologies.
Most parts of the world now experience material consumption as never before. But serious inequality remains, with over 3 billion living on less than US$5.50 a day, and a tiny percentage who own so much.
Some argue that it is not the numbers of people on Earth that count, but rather the way we consume and share. Whatever the politics and economics, the gross consumption level of billions of humans is, surely, the main cause of planetary change, especially since 1950. Present-day atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are one of many symptoms of human impact.

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