The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation’s effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term healing.

The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: “Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.”

That message is the silver lining contained in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal, which explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.

“It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.” — Prof. Peng Gong, Tsinghua University

The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report—titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health—declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world’s most impressive health gains over the last half century. What’s more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made made worse.

“Climate change,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, “has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades – not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change we can also benefit health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come.”

The four key findings of the report include:

1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.

2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.

3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question – it is now a political one.

4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’ politicians everywhere should listen.” —Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth“Climate Change is a medical emergency,” said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. “It thus demands an emergency response.”

With rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate actions should be taken. “Under such circumstances,” he said, “no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding.”

In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the larger argument regarding climate change:

When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.

Responding to the findings and warnings contained in the report, Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world’s foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical action is urgently required” to avoid further climate catastrophe.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’,” Childs said, “politicians everywhere should listen.”

Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report—who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS—argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands—as a matter of “medical necessity”—the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.

“The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past,” said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.”

The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. “Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” said Dr. Costello. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”

A video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:

As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, “Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations.”

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Not ‘If’ But ‘How’: New Study Shows Why All Extreme Weather Is Climate Related

From an Article by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

New research explains why people debating whether or not specific events are caused by climate change have it all wrong

The debate over climate change has long focused on determining attribution—whether rising greenhouse gases and global warming caused a particular storm, drought, flood, or blizzard. Now, a new study in Nature Climate Change published Monday seeks to shift the underlying question from “if” to “how.”

“The climate is changing,” wrote National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo and University of Reading physicist Theodore Shepherd in their study, Attribution of Climate Extreme Events. “The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same.”

Facts to Ponder about Climate Change

By Paul Brown, Morgantown, WV, April 20, 2013

Definitions: Climate is not weather. Weather consists of specific meteorological events, like combinations of precipitation, wind, and temperature that are described as pleasant sunny days, nor’easters, hurricanes, etc. They are short-term, local, described by numbers. Climate is a statistical description of weather over larger time periods or geographical regions, such as tropical climate, El Niño, or droughts. It’s described by averages, trends, and degrees of fluctuation.

Meteorologists (weathermen, forecasters) are not climate scientists, and have little to no training in climate science. Some of them, and people who profit from maintaining the status quo, are the most vehement deniers of climate change.

Climate change is a trend in climate over long periods such as decades, centuries or longer, such as glaciation or global warming. Some glacial-interglacial transitions have occurred very fast, in less than a human lifetime. This has been clearly established by analysis of ice cores going back tens of thousands of years. These very rapid transitions are probably caused by feedbacks, where a change causes more change, going faster and faster to a new stable condition.

Global warming is an increase in surface temperature of our whole planet. It has been thoroughly documented over seasons, years, decades, even millennia. It has occurred in the past, always associated with an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps some of the heat that is radiated by the planet. In the past, global warming has caused CO₂ release, starting a feedback process where CO₂ causes warming, which causes more CO₂. Today, man-made CO₂ release was the initial process, leading to warming, and feedback once again. Another feedback is due to decreasing capacity of oceans and forests to absorb CO2 and recycle it to plant mass and oxygen through photosynthesis.

The current global warming is caused predominantly by human combustion of fossil fuels, aggravated by changes in land use, deforestation, particulate pollution, and other human degradations of the environment. There is a near-perfect correlation between rising CO2 and global temperature since before the industrial revolution. Other factors which could influence global temperature, such as amount of sunlight, are not significant in comparison. This is definitely not a normal fluctuation.

Global warming is causing climate change, which can be different in different parts of the world, including longer and more frequent heat waves, droughts, shifts of wind patterns, and even local cooling. It also brings with it more variable weather, with wider swings of temperature, wind, and precipitation, causing more incidents of violent weather and related damage. The United States is one of the most seriously affected countries.

We once had the opportunity to act upon scientific recommendations, beginning in the 1980s, to reverse global warming. Scientists are now in agreement that very serious global warming is unavoidable due to lack of action to prevent it, such as the elimination of carbon combustion, improvement of CO₂ removal and heat reflection from the Earth, and the social and political changes needed to bring these about. Many scientists now agree that feedbacks will cause global warming to increase regardless of what we do, although it may still be possible to limit the extent.

Changes in weather are causing ice to melt all over the world, except for part of Antarctica, drying up water sources for regions that depend on mountain snow and ice melt for water – including the Rocky Mountain states. Another feedback is resulting from the loss of reflective ice, meaning less sunlight is reflected into space and more is retained as heat. The cold, fresh water from melting ice is changing ocean and air currents and contributing to global sea level rise, which is also due to expansion of warming ocean water. Sea level rise is already affecting many coastal communities in the US.

Damage from violent storms has increased disastrously in the US and elsewhere, redefining flood plains and affecting insurance costs. Drought and desertification are increasing rapidly and crop and livestock yields are declining seriously around the world, including the US. With decline in usable runoff countries are using up ground water faster than it can be replenished. The Ogallala aquifer, the largest in the US, used to irrigate much of the western plains, will be dried up in a few years.

Contrary to speculation, increased temperatures and CO₂ will cause food production to decline, not increase.

It may still be possible to limit global warming to a tolerable level through the measures mentioned above and a drastic drop in per capita consumption and family sizes, but scientists agree these can only be achieved through honest scientific education, universal human rights, and democratic consensus on national and world economic and social policies that will result in sustainability – within the next few years. Instead, those changes which are occurring are almost all going in the wrong direction.

As food prices go up and water becomes scarcer, social unrest is increasing in many places, and giant corporations are gobbling up farmland and water sources in order to lock in enormous profits as these necessities for life become scarce. Western powers are monopolizing these resources, as they have done with oil, and the US military is using force and threats more and more to help corporations steal vital resources from weaker nations. Our country is now the most dangerous rogue nation in history.

At home, as our unsustainable economy dies, unrest increases, the police are now militarized, the military is acting against US citizens on US soil, and legislation has been enacted to enable our government to spy on us, deprive us of our constitutional rights, detain us without trial, and torture and kill us, with drones if necessary. As unrest grows, so does repression, causing more unrest, in another feedback. In a world of diminishing resources and worsening inequality, it is unlikely that civilization as we know it can continue.

Premature deaths due to global warming are approaching hundreds of thousand per year around the world, climate change refugees now exceed a million, and these numbers are expected to rise faster and faster as global warming accelerates.

The seas are dying, because of warming, overfishing, pollution, and loss of coral habitat. Increased CO₂ concentration is turning the oceans acidic, preventing normal development of the shells of many organisms. On land, air and sea, such factors are contributing to the fastest and potentially the most extensive mass extinction known to paleontologists. Humans depend on this complex ecosystem that is crashing, and the fate of our species is uncertain.

NOTE: Paul Brown is a retired professor at West Virginia University. He is author of Notes from a Dying Planet, 2004 – 2006, available from Amazon.com. Events and research findings related to the topics in this article can be found in articles cited by his free e-news daily listings, Esamizdat. Send emails to subscribe or unsubscribe to pbrown4348@comcast.net. His wife, Deborah Dupre, is a freelance human rights journalist whose articles appear in internet sites Before It’s News and Examiner. Her articles document the declining human rights situation around the globe, especially in the United States, many of which are related to the topics in this article.

Climate Central, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization was formed in 2008 with seed money from The Flora Family Foundation and development funds from 11th Hour Project. The founding board members were Jane Lubchenco, Professor of Marine Biology and Zoology at Oregon State University; Stephen Pacala, Professor of Biology and Director of Princeton’s Institute for the Environment; and Wendy Schmidt, founder of The 11th Hour Project. Headquarters is in Princeton, NJ and an office in Palo Alto, CA.

The climate crisis isn’t just some far-off threat, it’s a clear and present danger. Therefore, Climate Central has created a unique form of public outreach, informed by our own original research, targeted to local markets, and designed to make Americans feel the power of what’s really happening to the climate. The goal is not just to inform people, but to inspire them to support the actions needed to keep the crises from getting worse.

A report from Climate Central entitled “Surging Seas” as been prepared and is posted on-line.  This report can be summarized thusly:

Global warming has raised sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Scientists expect 20 to 80 more inches this century, a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky. This study makes mid-range projections of 1-8 inches by 2030, and 4-19 inches by 2050, depending upon location across the contiguous 48 states.

The increases are likely to cause an enormous amount of damage. At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed in this report, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.

This report and its associated materials, based on two just-published peer-reviewed studies, is the first major national analysis of sea level rise in 20 years, and the first one ever to include:

• Estimates of land, population and housing at risk;
• Evaluations of every low-lying coastal town, city, county and state in the contiguous U.S.;
• Localized timelines of storm surge threats integrating local sea level rise projections; and
• A freely available interactive map and data to download online (see SurgingSeas.org).

In order to avoid the worst impacts from sea rise, we all need to work to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases (mainly methane and carbon dioxide) and work to diminish the remaining danger by preparing for higher seas in coastal cities and counties everywhere.