Reports on Climate Change, Reports on Climate Change and Health, Reports on Climate Change

Al Gore's recent speech of July 17, reproduced below, invokes the spirit of landing a man on the moon to indicate that a similar massive effort could change US energy needs from fossil to renewable.  Evoking the the moon landing program which was delivered in 10 years, Gore maintains that the energy program could could also be delivered in 10 years. Gore's costing is between $1.5 and $3 trillion. "It's almost as much as the cost of the Iraq War. And it's almost as much as we would have to pay to go out and build new coal plants and new oil-drilling rigs"

The issue of national leadership to enact such a program is important as the US Presidental election looms. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in a podcast interview talks about Roosevelt’s leadership in mobilising the American nation the day after Pearl Harbour. He called in the CEOs of Ford, GM and Chrysler and told them to shift direction to war production; when they hesitated, he famously said, “I forgot to tell you, I have just banned the sale of motor cars”. Within a year, fighter aircraft, not even conceived at the beginning of the year, were delivered to the battlefield. Brown concludes that the capacity of humanity to work collectively to overcome a threat should never be underestimated.

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, today warned Western nations such as Australia to populate or perish.This warning became a headline in the northern hemisphere, where I am at the moment--Editor

The day before, July 13, in the Wall Street Journal there was detail of the mechanisms being used by rich Western countries (and China) to secure their food supplies by buying up productive land in poor countries. Surely a sign that the wheelers and dealers believe there is a significant crisis? Below are two articles, the first a government perspective on the food crisis as seen by the European Community and the other a summary of the situation as seen by Tony McMichael (presented at the AMSA Global Health Conference, July Melbourne).

From material compiled by David Shearman

For some time now, together with colleagues, I have been analysing why liberal democracy does not have the capacity to tackle climate change. There are several possible reasons for this. Some may be found in the democratic electoral need to satisfy the maximum number of voters on most possible occasions, and in the  fusion of liberal democracy with market needs. These issues are explained in recent texts listed below (1,2) Complexity theory explains the impotence of democracy in making major decisions and this applies both to elected representatives who cannot grasp complex problems and to the bureaucracies of governments which fail to deliver. (3)

We thank the Independent.co.uk and the author,  Steve Connor, Science Editor, for permission to publish this article which appeared in the Independent newspaper on Monday, 26 May 2008. We publish this article because it illustrates the potential fast moving spread of infectious diseases in reponse to climate change and the consequental movement of vectors. (Editor)

Mosquito invasion brings disease risk to UK by Steve Connor

An Asian mosquito species is poised to arrive in Britain, bringing with it the risk of a potentially lethal disease that the insect can pass from one person to another.

Dengue is reported to be the fastest growing vector-borne disease in the world. In recent years, dengue has spread extensively in North and South America and in Mexico it increased 600 percent between 2001 and 2007. The disease has spread to Hawaii and along the border in Texas. The disease is expected to increase in northern Australia with climate change (see Climate Change Health Check on this page)

Dengue fever is caused by an RNA flavivirus spread by the bites of mosquitoes particularly in the urban areas of the tropics. Symptoms include fever, headache, rash, severe pains in the muscles and joints, and pain behind the eye. The fever form of the disease is rarely fatal, while the related dengue haemorrhagic fever is a severe disease with death in approximately 5 percent of cases. Dengue hemorrhagic fever occurs most often in children younger than 15 years old. It also occurs most often in individuals who were previously infected with simple dengue fever.