Six million climate refugees already and we aren’t warm enough yet. But it isn’t just the refugees who are leaving the equatorial belts. Because the tragic event isn’t just the people being displaced — but far worse for us — are the other organisms who seek other climes, now suitable for their ilk.
And anyone in contagious public health at the WHO, the UN health project, or the Environmental Parliament will tell you that a warming climate will surely impact public health like no other emergency ever has.
It’s not only that a warmer planet carries disease farther and farther afield, but it means the people are becoming less and less resilient or able to cope with the climate related challenges…
It also means that mosquitoes will be able to fly in a wider range North and away from the equator — than they can now — and therefore, they’ll bring illness to many hundreds of millions more people in the developed world. People who were never before exposed to malaria and all other mosquito born illness are now fair game. And because of their lack of experience and lack of antibodies they are easy prey to the major killers…
The malaria mosquitos and other bugs are reaching Canada, the Scandinavian countries and Siberia — always moving North in their own quest for greater globalization and world domination.
Same goes for all microbes and viruses and strains of bacteria previously restricted to the humid valleys of the Congo and equatorial Guinea. Nasty viruses and terrible bacteria have been unleashed in an unseen wave of migration carried on the back of a warming planet and a vivid ecosystem.
And some people recognize this and have sounded the alarm bell. Because now a growing chorus of advocates, consultants and organizations — including some toiling in areas likely to be hardest hit by global warming — are now arguing that such health issues have to be addressed and serious measures need to be taken. This is, after all, what the business of health ministries is all about — reacting to catastrophic change and protecting the people. A good country prepares for, reacts to and even takes advantage of change for the benefit of its people. A not so good country, doesn’t. The difference is one of the gradient of preparedness. And the true leaders understand that this is an orthogonal problem and needs to be addressed as such. Because the equation of climate change and energy production is simple. CO2 from fossil fuel produced energy is causing the global warming. And renewable energy production is the key to having energy and also addressing climate change. But the playing field isn’t level.
Competition for the energy profits isn’t fair…
In other words, while high-profile investments in technologies and policies aimed at curbing global warming have grown significantly over the last decade with total global investment in clean energy topped $240 billion in 2010, a new high and more than four times the $51 billion invested in 2004, such efforts, no matter how successful, won’t be enough to halt changes that are likely already underway.
That doesn’t mean investments and policies aimed at curbing emissions, transitioning to cleaner fuels and implementing efficiency programs ought to be abandoned. It simply means that they need to be intensified and good Public Policies ought to be initiated to combat the rising heat.
So obviously the people need to understand, that the cooperation between Energy Ministries, Finance and Health Ministries begin in earnest. Many leaders simply do not see this and soon all of our efforts need to be intensified in order to reach them and provide a consensus public health response in order to protect people from the worst disease effects of climate change and a warming climate.
West Nile Virus disease — borne from mosquitos — has been found aplenty in Seattle, Washington DC and in London… All places previously unthinkable for the West Nile virus.
And this – unlike malaria – is a certain killer of human beings.
Many other maladies, insect born, and plenty of ordinary viruses are moving in your direction regardless of your geography being way North of the vivid, hot and humid equatorial belt.
Yours,
Pano
We need to address these changes head on.
Our existential crisis is incoming and we can sort it with enough advance preparedness.
Al Gore, argued in an essay published in Rolling Stone magazine, that far greater progress on that front could have been made. Except that it has been relentlessly sabotaged by “Polluters and Ideologues” who are are “trampling all over the ‘rules’ of democratic discourse.”
Because the well organized climate skeptics are financed by the oil companies who are financing pseudo-scientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is true and what is false.
Gore continued, “buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the politicians themselves have made ‘legal’ and can now be made in secret; spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the US Senate and House of Representatives.
That’s the price of Democracy.
Yet we win on every turn when the stakes are high enough.
Because people matter.
