| CHANGING PLANET, CHANGING HEALTH How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It Paul R. Epstein, MD Dan Ferber Jeffrey Sachs (Fwd.) Berkeley: University of California Press, April 2011 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-520-26909-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-520-26909-8 | 355pp. | HC | $27.95? | |
"This book is about how climate change harms health now, how it could devastate public health by midcentury, and how we must transform the way we power society and organize our economy to preserve a livable planet. But it is also about the incredible opportunities that will arise once we do." – Page 3 |
Here I've summarized some of the likely impacts of climate change. You really have to read the book to get the complete picture of how things are expected to change. But it's possible, and reasonably accurate, to put it all into one sound-bite sentence: We'll get more people, more pests, more weeds, more storms, more heat waves, less food, less water, and less health. Another thing that's likely to increase: conflict. Is this the world you want?
The temperature is very important in Mosquito World. The Anopheles gambiae mosquito that is best at spreading malaria in sub-Saharan Africa cannot breed below 16°C; the two other species of Anopheles are barren below 18°C. But these mosquitoes do better as the temperature climbs — up to 40°C, which, like Black Flag™, kills them dead.
Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite, is also helped by warming temperatures. At 18°C, it needs 56 days to mature inside the mosquito. Raise that to 22°C and it needs just 19 days; at 30°C, just 8 days. But the female A. gambiae lives only 2 to 3 weeks. Therefore, at 18°C (64°F), the parasite is unlikely to mature before its host dies. This is the reason the highlands of East Africa were free of malaria — until 1994, when the mean temperature surpassed 18°C.
Okay, that's (some of) the bad news. The good news is that we can change things. We have the technology. All we need is the will.
"Spend enough time pondering climate change, and the magnitude of the challenge can begin to overwhelm anyone. There's a daunting array of numbers and trends, choices and consequences. Much of what we do as modern humans contributes to the problem, little by little by little. Our appetite for high-carbon energy has unquestionably put the world and its inhabitants at risk, and we appear to be hurtling toward a very unsettling conclusion. But we must not lose sight of a very simple and reassuring fact: we have already invented virtually everything we need to get us out of this crisis. The job won't be easy, and we could certainly use a few more clever tools. But we can build a low-carbon society. Indeed, it's already happening." – Page 223 |
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