August 2007
The Daily Toll of Global Warming
Global warming, environmental devastation, human and economic catastrophes; we are all well aware of the dangers facing us. However, in spite of the recent spate of floods in the UK and abroad, it’s hard to correlate the tangible negative global impact to people. The Stern report has given us the costs of future inaction, and recent disasters have shown us the current human suffering caused by global warming; however, what is the current price being exacted on us, as people, at this very moment?
After a little digging, the author (with some help from World Health Organisation records) can reveal that the daily global toll struck by our warming climate is 17 deaths an hour and just under 10 illnesses per minute.
Scientists and health professionals from the University of Wisconsin, who are at the forefront of efforts to measure the effect on health of global warming, stated that the WHO data shows worrying results.
Moreover, it is poorer countries in the Southern hemisphere that are disproportionately experiencing these effects. Professor Jonathan Patz of the university’s institute for environmental sciences noted "those most vulnerable to climate change are not the ones responsible for causing it. Our energy-consumptive lifestyles are having lethal impacts on other people around the world, especially the poor."
The journal Nature reported the regions at highest risk to include those coastlines along the Pacific and Indian oceans, and sub-Saharan Africa. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum of the WHO elucidated some of the main issues facing these poorer countries:
"Many of the most important diseases in poor countries, from malaria to diarrhoea and malnutrition, are highly sensitive to climate… the health sector is already struggling to control these diseases and climate change threatens to undermine these efforts."
For example, in warmer temperatures the parasite that spreads malaria via mosquitoes develops more quickly. A study in 2000 conducted in Peru found that when the periodic El Ninõ phenomenon boosted temperatures there, hospital admissions of children with diarrhoea increased exponentially.
Also suffering are large cities already afflicted by urban "heat island" effects (i.e. metropolitan areas that are significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas). Urbanites are likely to suffer from poor air quality, respiratory diseases and in less economically developed countries, a lack of access to water.
Accordingly, herein lies an enormous global ethical challenge.
"Wealth is the number one factor in determining vulnerability or adaptability of a country to any of the threats out there," states John R. Christy, a climatologist who directs the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Christy, who lived in Kenya in the mid-1970s, added, "Thugocracies and other non-democratically accountable governments . . . have no real incentive to create a healthy populace with free markets and therefore free people."
Thus it is not solely over consumption by a select few countries in the west that is the problem. Indeed, they too have already felt some of the effects themselves. Patrick L. Kinney, a professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, was the co-author of a study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives that predicted global warming alone could prompt the rise of smog-related deaths in the New York City region by 4.5 percent by the middle of this century, compared with the 1990s. With such recent extreme climatic events underscoring risks to our health and wellbeing in a scarily quantitative term of bodies, our mistakes have become all too tangible. The time has come to do something about it.
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