‘Things we projected to occur in 2080 are happening in 2006’

May 5, 2006

[tag]Global warming[/tag] isn’t just about glaciers and ice caps.

Valere Rommelaere, 82, survived the D-Day invasion in Normandy, but not a mosquito bite. Six decades after the war, the hardy Saskatchewan farmer was bitten by a bug carrying a disease that has spread from the equator to Canada as temperatures have risen. Within weeks, he died from [tag]West Nile[/tag] virus.

Global warming — with an accompanying rise in floods and droughts — is fueling the spread of epidemics in areas unprepared for the diseases, say many health experts worldwide. Mosquitoes, ticks, mice and other carriers are surviving warmer winters and expanding their range, bringing health threats with them.

Malaria is climbing the mountains to reach populations in higher elevations in Africa and Latin America. Cholera is growing in warmer seas. Dengue fever and Lyme disease are moving north. West Nile virus, never seen on this continent until seven years ago, has infected more than 21,000 people in the United States and Canada and killed more than 800.

The World Health Organization has identified more than 30 new or resurgent diseases in the last three decades, the sort of explosion some experts say has not happened since the Industrial Revolution brought masses of people together in cities.

As the WaPo explained, scientists have long believed that [tag]climate change[/tag] would give [tag]disease[/tag]s a broader range, including oddities such as tropical diseases in Canada, but didn’t expect to see trends so soon. As Paul Epstein, a physician who worked in Africa and is now on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, said, “Things we projected to occur in 2080 are happening in 2006. What we didn’t get is how fast and how big it is, and the degree to which the biological systems would respond. Our mistake was in underestimation.”

I’m sure the [tag]Bush[/tag] administration will take all of this seriously, just as soon as the 21 reports from the federal Climate Change Science Program are completed — shortly before Bush leaves office.

Globalization and Global warming.

Two trends that go so well together 😉

It’s nice to see the bio-feedback mechanism that is Gaea is working to get rid of the human infection. We heat up the planet with our numbers, deseases start to spread around, they cut down our numbers (possibly to zero) and the planet cools down.

See, works fine.

Of course, we won’t be here to appreciate it.

  • It is important to keep in mind that human caused increases in CO2 have been occurring intensively for about 150 years, and to a lesser extent for the past 10,000 years. In other words, we didn’t get into this problem overnight and we aren’t going to get out of it overnight. As bad as the Bush administration is on this topic, in the big picture they are just a blip in time. People who think that the problem will go away if we elect a different administration, do a little conservation or even strictly follow the Kyoto Protocol, are in for rude awakening.

  • “People who think that the problem will go away if we elect a different administration, do a little conservation or even strictly follow the Kyoto Protocol, are in for rude awakening.” – NeilS

    Fair enough. The Earth is a huge buffered system. We have to do a lot to draw out the locked up resistance to warming. However, we are. The glacers are melting. That is soaking up a lot of the energy being poured into the system. But once they melt, not only will the sea rise, swamping coastal cities and wiping out whole countries along with a lot of wealth (your summer time share, for instance), but it will allow the energy to go directly into heating up the planet.

    We need to cut down CO2 production to a level the Earth can sustain. The CO2 in the atmosphere today used to be locked under ground as fossil fuels. Things became fossil fuels because they DIED. Think about it.

    The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere now is probably enough to keep the melting process going. And that is bad. And as NeilS says, just applying Kyoto won’t be enough to stop our overheating.

    Strangely enough, all we might need are mylar ballons, epoxy and silver paint. Fly them all up into orbit so that they cause a partial eclipse of the sun, inflate the ballons, spray them with epoxy to harden them, cut them in half, paint them silver and position them to cut down on the insolation (sunlight) that Earth receives. Easier to tune than the CO2 in the atmosphere.

  • “As bad as the Bush administration is on this topic, in the big picture they are just a blip in time. People who think that the problem will go away if we elect a different administration” Neil

    Neil, I get the point, but…to equate the opportunity cost of the Bush years at this critical juncture to any other time in the past 150 years just does not make a strong argument to me. It will take a very long time to turn this ship toward a sustainable shore and a lot of the effort will be in shaping a philosophical frame of thinking that fosters that turn. This would be something along the lines of Al Gore’s statement several years ago suggesting that the central organizing principle of mankind should be the environment. If there was one thing that I think that all peoples of the earth could rally around, it would be saving the planet. But Bush seems to be leading the stampede to maintain the corporate grasp on a global economic system destined to collapse.

    At this time, eight lost years can equate into a millenium of suffering. As history shows, we live and die from the mistakes our leaders have made long before we were born.

  • Gee…maybe if we have another environmental catastrophe this summer on the order of Hurricane Katrina, Bush won’t be able to attack Iran…

    “Look for the silver lining…”

  • Lance and Lou — I work in the area of climate change research and I like to damp down people’s angst over the pace of climate change. The 8 years of the Bush administration will represent lost opportunities, but they won’t result in a millenia of misery. What worries me is that if we have a few years of colder than normal weather (and we will), many people will think that the problem has taken care of itself.

    Without changing from fossil fuels to some other source of energy we will certianly significantly increase atmospheric CO2 over the next 100 years. Probably double or even quadruple it. So far we ahave only increased it by about 30-40%. This will have a significant impact on weather and seawater chemistry. And, as you say, the melting will continue. But what is that new energy source?

    If I had my druthers we would put a tax on oil/gas consumption that paid for research on finding this new source. We owe that to future generations, both those of the next century and of the next millenia.

    In many ways the Bush administration has done a lot to convince people that global warming is a reality. The administration has acted so suspiciously in their behavior towards climate scientists such as James Hansen that most Amreicans suspect that they (the administration) have something to hide. Bush has given skepticsm of climate change a bad name.

    Finally, the idea that there is a ‘crtitical juncture’ or ‘tipping point’ is a little misleading. This may exist in the political climate, but if it exists in the natural Earth system, no one knows what it is, when it is, or how we would know if we were there. The point is we need to plug away at this problem diligently and even the evil, money grubbing, truth-denying approach of Bush adminstration will have little impact on the long term state of the climate.

  • Climate change seems to be a deeply devisive issue. Rather than getting deep into the debate, I decided to do something about it. The CarbonFund.org has carbon offset programs that are really cost-effective compared to other programs out there. To make this even simpler, I am working with the CarbonFund to offset one ton of carbon for every link back to my blog – DeepMarket. Or visit the CarbonFund and make a donation yourself!

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