09/05/2017

Five Graphics To Start A Conversation About Climate Change

Futurism - Christianna Reedy
shutterstock
Climate Communication
In Brief
While there has long been scientific consensus that humanity is influencing our environment for the worse, public consensus has yet to be attained. When it comes communicating climate change, sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words.
As we continue to see temperatures rise to record-breaking levels, climate change remains at the forefront of research, policy discussions, and private enterprises. However, discussions on the best solutions for climate change remain hampered by lingering debate over whether humanity's influence on climate is fact or fiction.
While there has long been scientific consensus that humanity is influencing our environment for the worse, especially through the increased emissions of greenhouse gases, public consensus has yet to be attained. In fact, a 2014 Gallup Poll revealed that about one in four Americans are solidly skeptical of climate change, believing that claims about it are exaggerated.
For those who are convinced by the science behind climate change, the questions persists: what is the best way to communicate the science in a clear way so that skeptics can draw conclusions based on the best data? Some believe that the simplest way to accomplish this is through the use of visual aids. And, fortunately or not, there are many figures to choose from.

Tracking Temperatures
Let's start with the elephant in the room: global temperatures. Scientists have observed an increase in global temperatures since the beginning of the 20th century. These increased temperatures are not in dispute. But what evidence is there that people are causing this warming?
Credit: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report
CO2 Sources
One indicator that the increasing temperature is linked to human activity is its correlation with our greenhouse gas emissions. While there are a number of greenhouse gases, perhaps the most famous is CO2, of the "carbon footprint" fame. Researchers have tracked CO2 emissions over time, and they, like the earth's temperature, have experienced a dramatic increase after 1900. The majority of the emissions originate from our use of fossil fuels.
Credit: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report
And where do these emissions go? In fact, CO2 "partitions" into several places — the land, the ocean, and the atmosphere. While CO2's greenhouse effect in the atmosphere is its most well known effect, the gas also changes the chemistry of the water it enters.

Water Woes
CO2 reacts with water molecules to generate carbonic acid. Not only does this acidify the ocean, negatively impacting many aquatic species, but this process also lowers the overall amount of carbonate ions in the water. This threatens shelled marine animals that require calcium carbonate, like coral. So, if the CO2 we are producing is harming our world today, is there evidence it will continue impacting the environment in the future?
Credit: The Climate Commission
Enduring Effects
For quite a long time, actually. Once a large amount of CO2 is dumped, or "pulsed," into the atmosphere, about 70 percent of it is still present after 100 years, and 40 percent remains even after 1,000 years. This is one reason why so many climate scientists urge immediate action. Researchers have made projections of what Earth will look like if we do not take action — and it's not pretty.
Credit: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report
Future Fallout
Then, in 100 years or so, our world may be unrecognizable.
Credit: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report
Changing the Conversation
Let's face facts, and, overwhelmingly, they support the reality of climate change. But that's not to say that there can't be legitimate discussion on how to combat it. New environmental regulations on the federal level often get pushback, but could we incentivize development of green technology in the private sector? Could we implement stronger environmental initiatives locally? There are even some out-of-the-box solutions we could consider.
Rather than denying that there is a problem, we should be focusing our energy on determining the best solution. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake here. Are we really willing to risk it on a hunch that 97 percent of climate scientists are wrong?

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08/05/2017

Can Art Put Us In Touch With Our Feelings About Climate Change?

The Conversation -  | 

James Gleeson’s Delenda est Carthago offers a striking visualisation of a collapsing civilisation.
What does climate change look like in Australia? Are we already seeing our landscapes shift before our eyes without even realising it?
Perhaps thought-provoking art can help us come to terms with our changing world, by finding new ways to engage, inform and hopefully inspire action. For hasn’t art always been the bridge between the head and the heart?
With that aim, the ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 festival, organised by CLIMARTE, features 30 specially curated exhibitions running from April 19 to May 14 in galleries across Melbourne and regional Victoria, following on from their previous award-winning festival in 2015.

Changing landscapes
One of the festival’s exhibitions is Land, Rain and Sun, featuring more than 100 landscapes dating from the 19th century to today, curated by gallery owner Charles Nodrum and captioned by us to offer a climate scientist’s perspective on the works. We also collaborated with CLIMARTE directors Guy Abrahams and Bronwyn Johnson to bring the idea to life.
The exhibition, featuring Australian artists including Sidney Nolan, James Gleeson, Eugene Von Guerard, Louis Buvelot, Russell Drysdale, Fred Williams, Michael Shannon and Ray Crooke, is designed to help start a conversation about what climate change might look like in Australia.
Curating an exhibition of artworks as seen through the eyes of a climate scientist poses a challenge: how can we help make the invisible visible, and the unimaginable real?
As we sifted through scores of artistic treasures, there were a few works that confronted us in unexpected ways. The first was Cross Country Skiers, painted in 1939 by renowned South Australian artist John S. Loxton. It depicts the Victorian High Country heavily blanketed in snow, as two skiers make their way through the beautiful wintery landscape.
John S. Loxton, Cross Country Skiers, Victorian High Country, c. 1935. Watercolour on paper. Charles Nodrum Gallery, Author provided
When we saw this image, we realised that in decades to come this work might be considered a historical record, serving as a terrible reminder of a landscape that vanished before our eyes.
Average snow depth and cover in Australia have declined since the 1950s as temperatures have risen rapidly. Under high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, climate models show severe reductions, with snow becoming rare by late in the century except on the highest peaks.
The Australian ski season could shorten by up to 80 days a year by 2050 under worst-case predictions, with the biggest impacts likely to be felt at lower-elevation sites such as Mt Baw Baw and Lake Mountain in Victoria.
As temperatures continue to rise, our alpine plants and animal communities are in real danger of being pushed off mountain tops, having nowhere to migrate to and no way of moving from or between alpine “islands”.
James Gleeson’s surreal apocalyptic painting Delenda est Carthago is a provocative work that got us thinking about a future marred by unmitigated climate change. The title refers to Rome’s annihilation of Carthage in 149 BC. According to the ancient historian Polybius, the conquering Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus, famously wept as he likened the event to the mythical destruction of Troy and to the eventual end he could foresee for Rome.

ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 Festival Trailer

As climate scientists, we are disturbingly aware of the threats to society not only here in Australia, but all over the world. Unmitigated human-induced climate change could potentially see the planet warm by more than 4℃ by the end of the century.
In Australia, inland regions of the country could warm by more than 5℃ on average by 2090. In Melbourne, the number of days over 40℃ could quadruple by the end of the century, causing extreme heat stress to humans, wildlife, plants and infrastructure, especially in urban areas.
Warming of this rate and magnitude is a genuine threat to our civilisation. Gleeson’s artwork made us consider that the unimaginable may happen, as it has in the past.
On a more optimistic note, Imants Tillers’ work New Litany highlights the importance of communities taking a stand for environmental protection. Over our history Australians have fought against logging of native forests, nuclear power, whaling, and for the restoration of dammed river systems like the Snowy.
Imants Tillers, New Litany, 1999. Synthetic polymer paint and gouche on canvas. Charles Nodrum Gallery, Author provided
Public concern in Australia about climate change reached a peak in 2006, largely in response to Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers. Yet the decade since then has brought political turmoil, and national greenhouse emissions continue to rise.
The recent March for Science is a reminder that the stakes are now higher than ever before, and that many people really do care about the future.
The science is telling us that our climate is changing, often faster than we imagined. The range of CSIRO’s latest climate change projections reminds us that the future is still in our hands. We can avoid the worst aspects of climate change by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, but we need to act now.
Art has always been a powerful portal to understanding how we feel about our world. Let’s hope it helps safeguard our climatic future.

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The Crazy Scale of Human Carbon Emission

Scientific American - Caleb A. Scharf

Credit: Reid Wiseman NASA
A major question in astrobiology is how we'll measure and interpret the atmospheric composition of any Earth-analog worlds we find out among the exoplanets. We pretty much know the technical requirements: big telescopes, excellent spectroscopic instruments, the right nearby planetary targets, and a whole lot of patience. But the interpretation piece is largely unexplored country.
We can certainly model the heck out of hypothetical atmospheric chemistries - with climate simulation, photochemistry, and even abstract models of biospheres. The trick is disentangling all of that three-dimensional, diurnal, seasonal, and chemical variation. Sometimes there is significant 'degeneracy', where similar, astronomically derived data (like a spectrum of starlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere) would present itself in quite different physical circumstances. Oxygen for example can be produced by life, but it can also be produced by non-biological atmospheric chemistry.
Carbon dioxide is another tricky compound. A planet can fill its atmosphere with CO2 from volcanoes, for example. It can also show strong seasonal variation in this gas. Both Earth and Mars do this, but for very different reasons. On Earth it's the biosphere that drives an annual oscillation in CO2 concentration. On Mars it's the thawing and freezing of CO2 at polar regions that causes its atmospheric density to vary over a year.
But Earth has also been increasing its greenhouse gas concentration pretty steadily over the past couple of hundred years. This is almost entirely attributable to the burning of fossil fuels (we can tell because of the isotopic mix of carbon in those fuels).
We've all read the reports, or seen the media discussion. Except it can be a little hard to grasp the sheer magnitude of what our species has accomplished. Dire warnings that we've crossed 400 parts-per-million of atmospheric CO2 (a level last seen tens of millions of years ago) may sound pretty bad, but it takes a little intellectual imagination to really grasp what's going on.
Let's give that a shot.
Current data (from direct measurements of the atmosphere to historical records of industry) tells us that between 1751 and 1987 fossil fuels put about 737 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Between just 1987 and 2014 it was about the same mass: 743 billion tons. Total CO2 from industrialized humans in the past 263 years: 1,480 billion tons.
Now, let's relate that to something a bit easier to visualize. A coniferous forest fire can release about 4.81 tons of carbon per acre. At the low end, about 80% of that carbon comes out as CO2. In other words, to release an equivalent CO2 mass to the past 263 years of human activity would require about 1.5 billion acres of forest to burn every year during that time.
That's 6 million square kilometers of burning forest every year for more than two centuries. That's a square patch about 2,450 by 2,450 kilometers, or about 1,500 by 1,500 miles. Here's what that'd look like:
Equivalent area of burning forest to produce annually averaged carbon dioxide output. Credit: C. Scharf
Except that is for an average output, spread across 263 years. Estimates of today's CO2 production go as high as about 40 billion tons per year. That'd take something like ten billion acres of forest burning each year, which is about 42 million square kilometers. The entire continent of Africa is a mere 30 million square kilometers. So this, plus another third, on fire, each year:
Credit: C. Scharf
Now here's the thing. If that was actually happening, if a continental forest area 30% larger than Africa burnt to a crisp each and every year, we might be a bit concerned. Yes, a raging fire of 42 million square kilometers has some additional, immediate hazards above and beyond what comes out of a car exhaust or a power plant. And yes, the total mass of emitted CO2 does not reflect the total amount of absorbed CO2 in a year or the net increase. But wouldn't we all be a little concerned about the impact on the global system?
Let's also, for a moment, do another thought experiment. You're a long-lived, budding astrobiologist on the planet Proxima Centauri b. You've just spent several hundred Proxima b years using that world's largest space telescope to take a spectrum of the light from an intriguing planet about 4 light years away. Some unknown process on this planet seems to be persistently adding carbon dioxide to its atmosphere. Seasons come and go, but the composition of the planet is changing during your own lifetime.
Your conclusion? If there's life on that world, something potentially catastrophic is happening to it.

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The Great Climate Silence: We Are On The Edge Of The Abyss But We Ignore It

The Conversation - 


After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink in.
Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in the face of these facts we carry on as usual.
Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking; and some influential voices declare that nothing at all is happening, that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet the evidence tells us that so powerful have humans become that we have entered this new and dangerous geological epoch, which is defined by the fact that the human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.
This bizarre situation, in which we have become potent enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves, contradicts every modern belief about the kind of creature the human being is. So for some it is absurd to suggest that humankind could break out of the boundaries of history and inscribe itself as a geological force in deep time. Humans are too puny to change the climate, they insist, so it is outlandish to suggest we could change the geological time scale. Others assign the Earth and its evolution to the divine realm, so that it is not merely impertinence to suggest that humans can overrule the almighty, but blasphemy.
Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please.
The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence. It is true that grasping the scale of what is happening requires not only breaking the bubble but also making the cognitive leap to “Earth system thinking” – that is, conceiving of the Earth as a single, complex, dynamic system. It is one thing to accept that human influence has spread across the landscape, the oceans and the atmosphere, but quite another to make the jump to understanding that human activities are disrupting the functioning of the Earth as a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality comprised of myriad interlocking processes.
But consider this astounding fact: with knowledge of the cycles that govern Earth’s rotation, including its tilt and wobble, paleo-climatologists are able to predict with reasonable certainty that the next ice age is due in 50,000 years’ time. Yet because carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for millennia, global warming from human activity in the 20th and 21st centuries is expected to suppress that ice age and quite possibly the following one, expected in 130,000 years.
If human activity occurring over a century or two can irreversibly transform the global climate for tens of thousands of years, we are prompted to rethink history and social analysis as a purely intra-human affair.
How should we understand the disquieting fact that a mass of scientific evidence about the Anthropocene, an unfolding event of colossal proportions, has been insufficient to induce a reasoned and fitting response?
For many, the accumulation of facts about ecological disruption seems to have a narcotising effect, all too apparent in popular attitudes to the crisis of the Earth system, and especially among opinion-makers and political leaders. A few have opened themselves to the full meaning of the Anthropocene, crossing a threshold by way of a gradual but ever-more disturbing process of evidence assimilation or, in some cases, after a realisation that breaks over them suddenly and with great force in response to an event or piece of information in itself quite small.
Beyond the science, the few alert to the plight of the Earth sense that something unfathomably great is taking place, conscious that we face a struggle between ruin and the possibility of some kind of salvation.
So today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy. The indifference of most to the Earth system’s disturbance may be attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss.
How can we understand the miserable failure of contemporary thinking to come to grips with what now confronts us? A few years after the second atomic bomb was dropped, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a novel about the people of Nagasaki, a novel in which the bomb is never mentioned yet whose shadow falls over everyone. The Anthropocene’s shadow too falls over all of us.
Yet the bookshops are regularly replenished with tomes about world futures from our leading intellectuals of left and right in which the ecological crisis is barely mentioned. They write about the rise of China, clashing civilizations and machines that take over the world, composed and put forward as if climate scientists do not exist. They prognosticate about a future from which the dominant facts have been expunged, futurologists trapped in an obsolete past. It is the great silence.
I heard of a dinner party during which one of Europe’s most eminent psychoanalysts held forth ardently on every topic but fell mute when climate change was raised. He had nothing to say. For most of the intelligentsia, it is as if the projections of Earth scientists are so preposterous they can safely be ignored.
Perhaps the intellectual surrender is so complete because the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilised place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth paving the way to its destruction. The powers we most trusted have betrayed us; that which we believed would save us now threatens to devour us.
For some, the tension is resolved by rejecting the evidence, which is to say, by discarding the Enlightenment. For others, the response is to denigrate calls to heed the danger as a loss of faith in humanity, as if anguish for the Earth were a romantic illusion or superstitious regression.
Yet the Earth scientists continue to haunt us, following us around like wailing apparitions while we hurry on with our lives, turning around occasionally with irritation to hold up the crucifix of Progress.

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07/05/2017

Sea Level Rise Is On The Rise

Anthropocene - 

One prediction of where rising sea levels will end up at Cottesloe Beach, Perth Western Australia. Credit: go_greener_oz via Flickr
Global sea level is rising faster now than it was in the 1990s, according to a mammoth analysis of 26 different data sets, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters.
The study uses a ‘sea level budget’ approach, which places the mass of the oceans in the context of the entire hydrological cycle. The amount of water on Earth is constant, so the sum of changes in all forms of water—chiefly oceans, glaciers, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, terrestrial liquid water such as lakes and rivers, atmospheric water vapor, and snowpack—should be zero.
To track those changes, the researchers drew on multiple sources of data for each element of the hydrological cycle, integrating the work of various research groups and government and international initiatives spanning multiple continents. This yields a more accurate picture than any single data set, they found, because random sources of error tend to average out.
They focused on the sea level budget from January 1993 to December 2015. This is because a major impetus of the study was to correct for inaccuracies in recordings of sea level during the early- to mid-1990s. Since late 1992, researchers have been measuring sea level by satellite altimetry, a method that involves timing how long it takes a radar pulse to travel between an orbiting satellite and a beacon on the ocean surface.
At first, that beacon was an altimeter known as TOPEX A. But it was old, and its measurements were known to be off by just a hair, so it was retired in early 1999. Two recent studies have attempted to quantify the impact of this instrument glitch, but with fairly divergent results. The sea level budget approach offers a more robust, reliable methodology to do this, the researchers say.
According to their calculations, correcting for the TOPEX A inaccuracies reveals that global mean sea level rose 3.0 millimeters per year between 1993 and 2015. That’s slightly lower than generally accepted estimates of about 3.3 millimeters per year.
But finer-grained analysis reveals a more complex picture, and a disheartening one. Sea level rose 2.7 millimeters per year from 1993 to 2004. And it accelerated to 3.5 millimeters per year during 2004 to 2015—an increase of about 25 percent.
Previous studies had suggested a slowdown of sea level rise during the 2000s due to shorter-term climate cycles known as La Niña events. “Here we show that in spite of the several temporary sea level drops caused by La Niña events, the [global mean sea level] rise has increased during the last decade,” the researchers write.
The accelerated sea level rise is primarily due to increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, they found. (And that’s before taking into account the latest dire projections about Arctic sea ice melt.)
Even without the issue of correcting for past measurement errors, the new study would represent an impressively comprehensive analysis. Yet there’s something poignant about the story of TOPEX A, a lone beacon out there riding the waves. Is it a metaphor for humanity trying to understand our collective predicament with limited powers of perception?
Or maybe the lesson is a more straightforward and practical one, about the vulnerability of our understanding when we have limited sources of data to rely on. That, in turn, implies a need for multiple monitoring efforts using a diversity of approaches.
To paraphrase an old saying: Measure twice—six times, even. You only get to save the climate system once.

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The Impact Of Climate Change On The Great Barrier Reef

The Economist

The corals of the reef have been bleached white for a second year in a row
THE Great Barrier Reef stretches some 2,300 km down Australia's north-east coast, covering an area the size of Italy. It is home to about 600 types of coral and 1,625 species of fish. UNESCO calls it a "site of remarkable variety and beauty". That may not last. For the second consecutive year, expanses of coral have lost the vivid colours that draw thousands of annual sightseers. Instead, they have bleached a deathly white. Worse, this year the bleaching has extended further south than in 2016. Bleachings were also reported in 1998 and 2002. But for it to happen two years running is unprecedented. Why are the corals turning white?
In the 36 years since the reef was declared a World Heritage Area, mounting stresses from human activity have left it struggling. One factor is the nutrients and pesticides flowing into the ocean from coastal farms and cities in the north-eastern state of Queensland, which have polluted its waters. But experts agree that the biggest culprit is warmer ocean temperatures linked to climate change. Corals are marine animals that get their colour and most of their food from the algae that live within them. The higher temperatures stress algae, causing the rich hues to disappear. Some marine scientists liken this to the impact of a prolonged heatwave or drought on a forest. The Climate Council, an Australian research body, says the reef's surface sea temperatures in early 2016 were the hottest since records began in 1900.
Under prolonged stress corals can expel algae, causing them to starve and die. About a fifth of the reef's corals died from the 2016 bleaching. In the northern region, where bleaching was most intense, the coral mortality figure was alarming: about two-thirds. Depending on different coral species' capacity to resist stress, and the distribution of heat patterns through waters, reefs can revive over several years. The difference this time, say experts, is that back-to-back bleaching from two successive seasons of extreme heat have given the reef no time to recover, and have lowered its corals' stress tolerance. It is too early to measure coral deaths from the 2017 bleaching, but the Climate Council predicts "high mortality rates".
Two years ago UNESCO was concerned enough about the reef's health to consider adding it to the short list of world heritage sites in danger. The Australian and Queensland state governments responded with a plan aimed at improving the local marine environment. Yet both governments simultaneously support a plan by Adani, an Indian energy company, to open one of Australia's biggest coal mines in the Queensland outback, and to ship coal to India from Abbot Point, on the Queensland coast, through the reef's waters. Critics charge that burning this fossil fuel will only boost the global warming that seems to be killing parts of the reef. Russell Reichelt, head of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, says there are signs that such happenings will become more frequent due to rising ocean temperatures: "If they do, it will change the whole character of the coral community." The reef looks set to become Australia's next environmental battleground.

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Medical Scientists Report On The Impact Climate Change Is Having On Health

The Guardian - 

A new report breaks down climate impacts on health by US region
A Russian woman wears a face mask to protect herself from acrid smoke while walking in central Moscow on August 9, 2010. Air pollution from a heatwave-fueled forest fire smog caused hundreds of extra deaths each day compared to a normal period. Photograph: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images
As a climate scientist, I spend time and energy studying how fast the Earth is warming and what is causing the warming. This knowledge helps us predict what the future will look like. But, what most people are interested in is, "how will it affect me?"
Some impacts we are pretty clear about, like the impacts related to sea level rise, increased storms and heavy precipitation, and increased drought and heat waves – particularly the impacts these events have on the economy. But climate change will affect us personally as well (by personally, I mean our physical person).
In fact, climate change is already affecting personal human health around the world. This subject was the focus of a summary report just published by the Medical Society Consortium. What I really liked about this report is that it breaks down some of the key impacts by region. Unfortunately, the report is limited in scope to the USA. However, the general conclusions and trends can be illuminating for people outside the USA as well.
What was also welcome is that this report was prepared by physicians (not climate scientists) of major medical societies and the conclusions are based on the best available and current information of both the climate and health fields.
So what did they find? Perhaps most importantly they find that climate change is already affecting our health. This isn't a future problem for the next generation. It is a problem that is present and growing. They also report that some populations are more susceptible to climate change effects. Among the most vulnerable groups are children, student athletes, pregnant women, elderly, people with chronic health conditions, and the impoverished. A third key takeaway is that the problems will get much worse as climate change continues.
The study reports that if you live on the West Coast, wildfires, extreme temperatures, poorer air quality, extreme weather events, and agricultural risks are occurring. On the East Coast, you can add vector-borne diseases as a risk area. The central USA region is also similarly being affected.
As you dig deeper into the report, you learn about how these various climate-related features are affecting health. Each factor is dealt with by three questions: 1) What is happening? 2) How does it harm our health? 3) Who is being harmed?
For instance, with respect to extreme weather, the report correctly notes that the frequency and severity of some weather events such as heavy downpours, floods, droughts, and major storms are increasing. This harms our health because these events can cause direct injury and death as well as displacement. Extreme weather can also harm vital infrastructure like communication systems, homes, and reduce the availability of clean water and food. Finally, extreme weather can lead to acute outbreaks of infectious disease while at the same time reducing access to health care.
Air pollution is another example area. Climate change is affecting air quality in many ways, including increasing chemical reactions in surface air (air we breathe), increasing pollen, and leading to more forest fires. Lower air quality obviously affects people with breathing problems (such as asthma and allergies). It can prolong the pollen seasons and worsen allergy symptoms. Less obvious effects like increased humidity and more heavy rainfalls can exacerbate air-quality problems indoors through mold growth for instance.
One issue I was not aware of was the threat of climate change to nutrition. Increases in carbon dioxide actually result in a lowered nutritional value of grown food such as wheat, rice, barley, and potatoes. This occurs because plants produce less protein and more sugars/starches in a carbon rich atmosphere. Plants also are less effective at taking in essential soil minerals. This is all in addition to the threats to our food system by droughts and extreme weather. We've certainly seen very severe droughts in the USA (2011 in Oklahoma and Texas, 2012 in Midwest USA, and 2012–2016 in California) that have caused severe problems in the agricultural industries.
This report was written in an easy-to-understand manner. It is accessible and authoritative. It also gets to the issue people are most concerned about – the impact of climate change in their lives. I encourage anyone who is interested to download and read this document at the link above.

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