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Risks To Human Health Will Accelerate As Climate Changes, White House Warns (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: More deaths from extreme heat. Longer allergy seasons. Increasingly polluted air and water. Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks spreading farther and faster. Those are among the health risks that could be exacerbated by global warming coming decades, the Obama administration warned in a new report Monday. The study, more than 300 pages long and several years in the making, focuses on what the White House has described as one of the gravest threats to the nation: major health problems associated with climate change. It details direct effects, such as the potential for worsening air quality to trigger thousands more premature deaths from respiratory problems or an uptick in annual deaths from crushing heat waves. While every American could be affected, administration officials said Monday, the brunt of the harm is most likely to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, children, the poor, the elderly, minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities.
Malaria was a common thing as far north as Washington DC up until 1850 when mass fumigation and swamp draining became a thing. Just a FYI.
Om, nomnomnom...
Malaria was present in Canada in the 19th century. http://www.mysteriesofcanada.c...
EU's emissions are going down, actually.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
than anything we've ever seen before
But you're correct in that it's warmer now compared to the end of the coldest part of this interglacial. That coincides with us starting to take detailed measurements.
(If you feel angered by any of the content I wrote above, I'm sorry. It's a correct representation of the known science)
it's in my head
I'm confused. Are you angry that "scientists, politicians, etc" AREN'T doing anything, or that they ARE "taking our money" in order to do things?
As someone involved in several renewable energy projects, I can confirm that we (scientists and engineers) ARE doing everything we can, limited only by the amount of money available. It's hard to design and build things that haven't been built before, and we're having to do it on the cheap so that we can compete per MW with coal. Government subsidy helps with this, but now that we've got most of the kinks worked out, subsidies are being massively reduced. At the same time, coal plants are getting extensions and exemptions to keep them in operation even though they blow already-generous pollution targets every year. In that environment, there just isn't enough profit to justify massive private investment without subsidy, and absolutely NO direct government investment in building new capacity, so we can only progress projects that are subsidised to the point that they'd make money.
The idea that we (scientists) are in it for the money is laughable. Most of my colleagues could easily get more lucrative jobs in other industries; I for one took a 70% pay cut to move from the oil industry to offshore wind. I did that because within my life time, I'm going to witness the effects of climate change. As a well-off westerner I'm probably only going to feel a moderate economic impact; as with any kind of change, the people who're going to get shafted are the poor and desperate, and I'd rather not have that on my conscience.
FWIW, the climate science community isn't the best - in my experience, they are cranky and paranoid, and could use more statistical rigour. However, they have been consistently professionally and personnally attacked and undermined by an insanely well-funded PR machine that hasn't been able to produce ANY evidence to dispute the fairly obvious hypothesis that messing with the inputs to a known-unstable chaotic system will produce unpredictable results. We KNOW climate changes over time. We KNOW that human-produced CO2 is significantly accumulating in the atmosphere. We KNOW that the atmosphere is an unstable chaotic system. We DON'T KNOW how the system will react to increasing CO2 concentrations (although we have some models which match observed readings). We KNOW that any change will be very bad in the short term, and possibly catastrophic in the medium term. So why take the risk? "Consensus" is not a valid argument in science, but at this stage the onus is on those who want to pump crap into the air, sea and land to present evidence that it won't cause harm.