Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just don't care!
standard stuff
Has already hurt us in the last 7 years.
Your Florida will turn into the sea.
How is this an argument against global warming?
is what I think they meant to call climate change. Sounds like a lawyer made it sound nice and someone else's fault. Greedy lying fucks.
"global warming" is "described as one of the gravest threats to the nation"
It always amuses me that to a typical American, everything seems to only be about America.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
Malarial swamps will creep northward, along with a whole host of other tropical diseases.
That's the kind of thing that happens when the planet warms up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No, I'm angry because an AC is inventing a lie to try to discredit a branch of science that doesn't tell him what he wants to hear.
The universe doesn't owe us a fucking thing. It doesn't modify the effects of CO2 to protect your stock portfolio or keep the price of gas cheap. It doesn't give one flying fuck about any economic system. CO2 has the effects it has because that's the way it fucking is, and it is irrelevant how it makes you are the moron who made the original post feel. The universe does not care about cheap energy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
"Hot air" is a code word for bullshit which is the only thing WDC politicos know. They have no idea about what is valid and not in climate. They are on a mega-govenment control-all, tax all mode to empower themselves regardless if it is right or not.
They vote in the ACA and it is a blundering disaster, but it makes no difference as they now can use the IRS even more effectively to control the citizens and extract more taxes, fees and licenses.
Malaria was present in Canada in the 19th century. http://www.mysteriesofcanada.c...
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.
"It's snowing."
Not here
and theres no snow on the ground
typically there woulr be in early april
There was a record early 'ice=out' on the lake in the middle of town
Lat: 46.3N
EU's emissions are going down, actually.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I've been reading, and one article is saying that at this point, the production of electricity via terrestrial wind (as opposed to off-shore wind) is the cheapest form of power generation.
Another article says that the 2020's will be the decade that the electric car comes into its own as battery prices become good enough that everyone can afford them.
Still another article is seriously proposing a world-wide grid of high-voltage power distribution, so that we can get power from, say, from Spain if the wind stops blowing and the solar is plagued with clouds or night.
The beauty of it is that charging automotive batteries is not the sort of urgent power requirement that, say, operating your iron lung is. If your wind turbine isn't working for a lack of wind, you can just wait to charge your car battery until the wind _is_ blowing.
This is strongly resembling energy independence as well as a dramatically lower effective energy cost for transportation as we substitute electricity that is used at about 90% efficiency for gasoline that is used at about 20% efficiency.
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.
I'm not going to respond to your strawman, to humor it would only help derail the actual conversation that most people try to have.
Destabilized climates can increase the strain on local and regional economies and make it easier for the scum of humanity to get a nice grip on desperate or angry populations. Climate change can only help spread the influence of terrorists and other evil organizations.
Rising temperatures will cause certain plants and animals to either move closer to the poles or die off. This may not seem like a big deal, and at a reasonable time scale it isn't really, ecosystems can adapt over long periods of time. Especially for people way up north. However, the speed at which the temperature could shoot up will not offer that window of transition for all life. This will also effect marine life. For every migration, there will be ecosystems that no longer match up correctly and species reaching dead ends they can't get around. Then you factor in the changing rain patterns... Droughts in places that aren't used to it, flooding in others. Human beings are NOT going to enjoy these changes, as crops will stop being as predictable and large regions may find themselves without cash crops they used to enjoy And those who hunt for food might not have much luck in that area anymore if their normal food start to move away en masse or die off. Granted, your family will likely have the money to import all the food they might need for a while, but for the poorest humans on the planet, this can be a pretty grim look forward.
I could get into ocean acidification (which is definitely NOT good, considering how much of our planet depend on small marine life to hold up the food chain and absorb CO2 from the air), rising sea levels that will devastate poor people and nations that can't afford big expensive walls to keep the sea at bay, all the mass migrations that will make Syria look like a fucking cakewalk, the occasional more powerful hurricane/typhoons, the slowing down of ocean currents that drag warm water into Europe, and the massive feedback loops from natural gas melting out of the permafrost and shrinking ice caps reflecting less sunlight etc (which is when things would REALLY get interesting)... but I don't know where you set your threshold for 'alarmist'. These things aren't just the ramblings of fear mongers, these are real and possible dangers based on pretty solid science that NEED to be brought forward. The reason why they may look like warnings is because, frankly, they should be. For a rough analogy, when there's a pretty good chance of hurricane hitting my area I damn well want to hear about it. Even if the chances that It'll kill me are very low and it's a week or so away, the threat is definitely worth getting a little worked up over.
Indeed, some people do choose to cry about the falling sky and employ hyperbole either for dramatic effect or just to further some stupid agenda. But if you're only going to concentrate on the loudmouths and overly comfortable politicians, it means you ignore the scientists, citizens, and other government workers who actually want to do something useful despite being held back by people with vested interests in keeping us on oil and coal. We don't need to be intentionally alarming to get the point across, but if we don't state the urgency now, eventually there might actually be cause for sirens going off and there won't be much anyone can do about it.
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
Al Gore
DRINK!
When I see Obama cancel even one of his tropical vacations with his entire staff because Air Force One uses more fuel in one trip that I will use my whole life, then I will take those worthless "White House Warnings" about climate change a little more seriously.
No, you won't.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
They are lawyers and politicians. Who among them are scientists for their warnings to have any credibility?
Funny, how the write-up said will, but the actual warning contains only the non-committal "could". Yeah, right, "15 minute call could save you 15% on car insurance". Sure.
The "could be" part makes the statement non-falsifiable and therefor unscientific. Nothing to see here, folks. Lawyers and politicians are mongering fears to the populace.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Women and Children Hit Hardest!
The trope that keeps on giving.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
And the highly trained scientists investigating the issue have never thought of any of that because random nitwit on slashdot is smarter AND hipper than any of THEM.
Yep! Just like the ACA is a poverty tax with 1000's of pages of language to bury and obfuscate that, so are the "solutions" to climate change like carbon credits. Regulatory action and carbon taxation act like regressive tax levies since the costs must passed down to the consumer (people with a child's understanding of the business world like Bernie Sanders like argue that point, but it is reality). A poor person with a $100 electricity bill and $10 carbon surcharge pays a much higher share of their income than a middle class person with the same $100 electricity bill and $10 carbon surcharge.
Bottom line, the left needs money for expanding government programs. Sure, taxing the rich sounds great on paper, but they have accountants and of course they will find the loopholes the politicians put in place for their own benefit.
To get real money you have to tax the poor! But an overt poor tax would make the left's base rebel, so they have to wrap it in some kind of candy coating to make it palatable. "Affordable Healthcare". "Save the Planet". Etc, etc. Which has worked quite well, we've got millions of self-professed intellectuals not asking but demanding a regressive tax increase on themselves and haven't the slightest clue about it.
The real path to male liberation
Sadly for you, winning PR war won't protect you from the facts.
I'll give you a true verifiable fact, killing babies and selling their body parts are a greater danger to people and society than this drivel. Yet how driven to tears and hysteria are you by that fact?
Oh right you are a liberal, you rejoice in it. The stench of hypocrisy rises to the point of being stinking blind.
Wrong...see you have this thing called deflation. If currency is concentrated in a few hands that do not let it go, than the economy acts like it doesn't exist and you get deflation. The effect of one person becoming enormously wealthy in a short period of time is only temporary.
Taxes do not create prosperity, they simply transfer power from corporations to government. We've never had progressive taxation...the rich have never paid their prescribed share, ever...tax evasion and offshore accounts have been around as long as there have been taxes.
The real problem is trade and currency imbalances. Politicians are perfectly OK trading our prosperity for power while countries and corporations have been conspiring to create, expand, and game these imbalances for profit, resulting in an enormous transfer of wealth and prosperity overseas, particularly to a certain communist dictatorship.
JFK was wise to place an embargo on Cuba, and should have done the same to other communist regimes.
Meanwhile for the last 35 years (thanks Ted Kennedy!) we've been letting in more poorly educated unskilled labor than we've needed with no leverage to ask for a raise, slowly driving down wages, as manufacturing lifts its skirt and runs overseas. We're at the point now where the average american must work two jobs to keep pace...the prosperous one income household has been gone since the 90's (thanks for NAFTA, George H.W. Bush!).
The real path to male liberation