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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.
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.
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...
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.
EU's emissions are going down, actually.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
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
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.