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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.
I assume this warning is a call to action, so let's act. I hear a lot of talking heads that claim we need an "all of the above" approach to solve this problem but they don't include nuclear power. Then I'd hear nuclear waste, blah blah, Chernobyl, blah blah, Fukushima, blah blah. I thought global warming was the greatest threat we have, so is it?
If these government officials will tell me that global warming is such a threat that drastic measures are needed then I'd think that using nuclear power is a drastic measure. That's assuming all the fear mongering of China Syndrome melt downs are even true, which they are not.
I say put the US Navy in charge of our energy production, they seem to know how to operate nuclear reactors safely. Use the nuclear reactor design from one of those big submarines and build a million of them. Perhaps that's too much, a thousand then. Put a few dozen in every state and hook them to the electric grid. Problem solved, right?
Oh, where do we get the fuel? I seem to recall that the federal government has a whole pile of nuclear warheads that they aren't using, crack them open and take out the cores. That should keep us going until we can dig up some more.
Any complaints about nuclear power should be moot now, we have a real problem of global warming to handle. Any problems that come up from using nuclear power should be trivial by comparison. Again, if nuclear power is not part of the all-of-the-above then I have to wonder just how much of a threat global warming really poses.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Of all the things that we need to be warned about, the White House is effectively stating the dangers we would have... by simply living in the tropics.
Essentially, they have basically said that having flowers and green plants for longer during the year is a problem. Hell, that's why I moved south to begin with. If I can have tropical weather by the time I'm retirement age, I won't have to migrate to Florida when I have blue hair!
Well, are you equipped to deal with living in the tropics? Perhaps you are, but many people are not - and when it comes to diseases, the richer countries in the world are going to receive a large number of climate refugees, whether they like it or not, as I'm sure you are aware. With a larger influx of people from poor, tropical nations, the risk of importing nasty diseases rises, and believe, there are many to choose from; I don't think the American healthcare model is geared to cope, certainly not if good healthcare is only really available to those who can afford to have good insurances.
Another, major factor is that a warmer climate will probably make drought a more prominent feature in America's heartlands - as well as making aquifers run dry - so less food will be produced. And so on - each of these challenges can be addressed, but it all adds up, and the most vulnerable will be hit hardest. Nothing new in that, but if you are getting to your retirement age, then you are probably getting closer to the category of "most vulnerable" and would benefit from taking the issue serious.
This likely isn't about being a big threat to the nation. It is more likely the camel's nose under the tent. They are looking for ways to force remediation efforts onto the U.S. and so far have found resistance and impotence. Now that the federal government is deeply involved in your healthcare, if they can show a strong enough correlation, they can shoehorn the global warming agenda in under the guise of healthcare. This likely can happen without congress acting on it too because of some of the administrative powers of the PPACA or Obamacare.