Current Events > How global warming will impact public health in US

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https://bit.ly/2EfiHfD

Efforts to assess the exact human costs of climate change, however, have provided new tools for understanding the ways in which those lives will be impacted. A major report published November 28 in the public-health journal The Lancet provides predictions of how climate change is degrading human health, and how it will alter health-care systems in the future. The findings are reliably grim. But in focusing on the health-care implications and the potential damage done to people and their descendants, the report provides a firm backing to the call to climate action. The experts behind the report hope to marry the urgency of climate science with the muscle of Americas most successful and most trusted policy experimentits public-health system.

The report, sponsored by 27 academic institutions, a collection of intergovernmental agencies, and the United Nations, features an American Public Health Association-sponsored supplement dedicated to the specific effects of climate change on America. Authors Renee Salas, Paige Knappenberger, and Jeremy Hess examine what they propose are the three main ways in which a warming world will affect the health of Americans. For one, the heat itself and the increased intensity and duration of heat waves will make people sick, along with exacerbating existing conditions and reducing the productivity of workers. Second, as has been demonstrated in recent disasters, the rising severity and frequency of extreme weather events will elevate threats to health, as well as threats to health systems. Last, warmer seasons and warmer water means that the range for illnesses carried by ticks and mosquitoes will spread, putting more Americans in the crosshairs of diseases such as Vibrio, Lyme disease, and West Nile.

The actual warming of global warming is an issue that is often curiously overlooked in terms of its direct effects on human lives. But, as The Lancets report shows, its the most predictable component of a changing climate, and also the one with measurable effects already. The report points to evidence already indicating links between hotter temperatures and mental-health and cognitive issues. It also points to increased kidney diseases, increases in preterm births, heat exhaustion, increased respiratory diseases, and the advance of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. One estimate cited in the report finds that over 3,000 additional people across the country will die prematurely because of higher temperatures by 2050.

Released just days after the catastrophic fires that burned Paradise, California were contained, The Lancets paper also studies the effects of extreme weather events on health. Since 1980, there has been a steady rise in billion-dollar weather and climate disaster in the U.S., the authors write, citing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But that finding doesnt quite capture how much more common extreme events have become, or how much their magnitude has increased in a short time. In 1984 there were two weather events that exceeded $1 billion of damage in todays dollars, with a five-year average of about $40 billion a year in costs from extreme events. In 2017, there were 16 such events, with a five-year average north of $200 billion in annual costs. With each of those comes both direct risks to human lives and the indirect risks associated with the collapse of health-care services and the spread of infectious diseasesconsequences that were already highlighted in the deaths of thousands of people in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017.

Perhaps one of the most startling facts is that we truly have climate refugees within the United States, said Salas in a conference call before the briefs release. I think that this is something that a lot of individuals within the U.S. think is a distant effect, but its truly something that were seeing here today."
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I'll just leave this here:
Mosquitoes.

A major industry in the state Im living will likely be seriously affected by climate change in the next 5-10 years and its going to be really weird to see what happens. I honestly dont know how the state will adapt.

Released just days after the catastrophic fires that burned Paradise, California were contained, The Lancets paper also studies the effects of extreme weather events on health. Since 1980, there has been a steady rise in billion-dollar weather and climate disaster in the U.S., the authors write, citing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But that finding doesnt quite capture how much more common extreme events have become, or how much their magnitude has increased in a short time. In 1984 there were two weather events that exceeded $1 billion of damage in todays dollars, with a five-year average of about $40 billion a year in costs from extreme events. In 2017, there were 16 such events, with a five-year average north of $200 billion in annual costs. With each of those comes both direct risks to human lives and the indirect risks associated with the collapse of health-care services and the spread of infectious diseasesconsequences that were already highlighted in the deaths of thousands of people in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017.

I would like to mention that isnt a fairly large chunk of that increase in damage due to increasing population/increasing population in areas prone to certain disasters?

Also Climate refugees have existed for basically all of human history. Its not at all surprising that a massive country in size, population and climate variance has some.

Doesnt negate what the article is saying but yeah.
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It's so cold today, can anybody explain how global warming is happening when it feels colder than ever right now, makes no sense

FursonaNonGrata posted...

A major industry in the state Im living will likely be seriously affected by climate change in the next 5-10 years and its going to be really weird to see what happens. I honestly dont know how the state will adapt.

The policy direction really should be "adaptation", instead of chasing a "reversal" fantasy. Especially so as long as nuclear-phobia still exists and alternative energy is still terrible.