By Thomas Hawk
Bill Gates
Bill Gates was the keynote speaker for Seattle-based Climate Solutions‘ annual fund-raising breakfast today.
The gist of Gates’ message: The best way to fight climate change is to create forms of energy production that significantly reduce carbon emissions and are cheap enough to be of value to poor people worldwide.
“We need a breakthrough,” said the Microsoft co-founder and world’s leading philanthropist.
Researchers at McGill University have mapped out the longer-term impact of climate change on human health and well-being.
If populations continue to increase at the expected rates, the McGill researchers report, those who are likely to be the most vulnerable to climate change are the people living in low-latitude, hot regions of the world, places like central South America, the Arabian Peninsula and much of Africa.
In these areas, a relatively small increase in temperature will have serious consequences on a region’s ability to sustain a growing population. Here’s a direct link to the map (below is screen grab):
McGill University
Human vulnerability to climate change
On a related note, here’s a recent post from my NPR colleague Heather Goldstone at Climatide providing “Two reasons why climate change could be bad for your health.”
One of the reasons is that it could increase bacterial outbreaks, as Heather notes appears to be happening with cholera worldwide. As I’ve noted before, there are some (though a minority) of scientists who believe Haiti’s cholera outbreak was fueled by climate change. The medical community is not trained to think of environmental contributors to human disease, but climate change may require a more interdisciplinary approach.
With Egypt and much of the Arab world in turmoil, it’s important to consider all of the dynamics and driving forces at work here.
The uprising is not (never is) just about freedom and democracy. It’s not (despite those who keep saying it is) an Islamist revolution akin to what happened in Iran. It’s both more basic and complex than that.
Al Jazeera
Taking a break, Cairo
Flickr, Lida Rose
Focus on food, grasshopper
Now here’s an interesting suggestion, and perhaps not as bizarre as it might sound at first glance.
In SciDev.net, Benjamin Kolb reports on the push to farm insects instead of cows and other large mammals as an alternative source of protein-rich food that could help mitigate hunger in poor countries while also fighting climate change.
Kolb cites Dutch researchers who say:
Compared to cattle, weight for weight, insects emitted 80 times less methane — a gas with 25 times more impact on global temperature levels than carbon dioxide.
And crickets produced 8–12 times less ammonia than pigs.
According to the study’s lead author, Dennis Oonincx, an entomologist from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, 80 per cent of the world’s population eats insects, particularly in the developing world.
And for those put off by the idea that we should consider incorporating into our diets more beetles, locusts and crickets, consider the lobster. It’s really just an extra large, and very tasty, insect.
The common refrain that climate change will bring malaria to U.S. shores again turns out to be cause for heated debate in scientific circles, according to Arthur Allen in the Washington Post:
The room where 10,000 Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes hatch each week is hot and humid and smells like the tropics – an appropriate surrogate for a warming world. The Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Baltimore, where the insects are raised, was created with a billionaire’s anonymous donation a decade ago, after a map printed in Scientific American suggested that by 2020 malaria could be breaking out in Baltimore, and across the eastern United States and Europe.
The idea that climate change will bring malaria and other tropical killers to our door turns out to be an extremely controversial one among ecologists, climatologists and biologists such as Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, who runs the “insectary” at Johns Hopkins. “It’s a very complicated story,” says Jacobs-Lorena.
Allen reviews the evidence, and broad consensus, supporting the claim that climate change is expected to expand the range of the mosquitoes that carry malaria. But he quotes some experts who cite other factors causing the spread of disease, such as increased urbanization and poor insect control.
None of this is to say climate change never plays a role in disease. To emphasize the difficulty in establishing cause and effect in disease outbreaks, Allen notes that some high-profile scientists contend Haiti’s cholera outbreak is likely environmental in origin rather than due to human-to-human transmission. I’ve written about this hypothesis a few times on Humanosphere.
The gist of Allen’s article is that whatever climate change may be doing to patterns of disease spread, we don’t have to be helpless victims:
“Whether or not human engineering got us into this mess,” Allen writes, “perhaps it can get us out.”
WHO
A recent poll by Pew (which, given the findings smells like the right name for it …) found that nearly half of all Americans mistakenly believe there is no scientific consensus on the evidence for climate change.
Oddly, the pollsters also found that as the evidence has mounted over the years, convincing more skeptical scientists, fewer Americans seem to believe the evidence (which could, of course, be explained by some other factor at work, such as the cognitive effect of reality TV or maybe mass dumping of lead in the water).
Maybe the public would gain a better appreciation of the threats to humanity posed by climate change, aka global warming, if experts instead focused on describing in detail what it poses for our health and well-being — as a great global sickening, climate-changing environmental carnage or the brave new world of less food, less water, more heat, more disease, pollution, floods, droughts and a lot more chance for human conflict over the resources of a diminished and even more brutal world.
Or, well, maybe we should just stop being so negative and go for a bicycle ride.
Those were basically the two points made by Dr. Jonathan Patz, lead author of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which, with Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), at a Tuesday evening forum at the University of Washington sponsored by the Washington Global Health Alliance. Continue reading
A recent UN report on biodiversity says we’re doing a lot lately to simplify life on Earth — which is actually a bad thing. Life has evolved to be complex, rich and diverse. The current massive decline in biodiversity is expected to make the planet as a whole ecosystem a bit weaker, more fragile.
Now, scientists say loss of species diversity also raises the risk of human disease. But first, a quick look at what we mean by “biodiversity” by Mr. Christopher’s 7th period biology class:
