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

Global warming has been discussed often over the past two years in newspaper articles and opinion pieces, in the lead-up to the last election and as the Government has tried to introduce its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Is there a real scientific debate about climate change or is this just political manoeuvring?  If climate change is real, is it due to humans or is it natural? How bad will it get? How will it affect people, including human health?  These are some of the many questions that I am asked regularly, and below I try to provide some answers.

In 1988, due to growing concerns about climate change and its possible impacts, the governments of the world set up an independent agency, under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Program, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A Chinese intellectual visiting the US was heard to say that the Americans must be mad to buy all this rubbish; he was referring to the mountains of Chinese consumables. Here lies the problem in apportioning responsibility for green house emissions. China is now the largest emitter in the world and a new study shows that exports to the West are a major source of these emissions.
In summary, half of the increase in emissions is due to production of exported goods and services, 60 per cent of which are exported to the West. This means Western consumers are partially responsible for one third of increases in Chinese emissions. These exports tend to be electronic products, metals, chemicals and textile products.

Around the World, scientists are becoming very anxious about data that suggests an acceleration of climate change. Statements urging reductions in emissions are being made by Academies, Colleges, Journals and by individual scientists. The editorial in the April 30 edition of the Journal Nature says,

“Nations urgently need to cut their output of carbon dioxide. The difficulty of that task is manifest: emissions have continued to rise despite almost two decades of rhetoric, diplomacy and action on the matter. But that unhappy fact should not be taken as a licence for fatalism. Governments have a wide range of pollution-cutting tools at their command, most notably tradable permit regimes, taxes on fuels, regulations on power generation and energy efficiency, and subsidies for renewable energy and  improved technologies. These tools can work if applied seriously — so citizens around the world must demand that seriousness from their leaders, both within their individual nations and in the international framework that will be discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December”.

An article by Clement and Colleagues in the International Journal of Health Geographics teaches us that we should be vigilant for changes in the frequency of infectious diseases and that a disease reported from Belgium is likely to have counterparts in Australia as climate change takes hold.  In fact it may well come to be that the discerning general practitioner will play a role in epidemiology similar to that of the famous Dr.Will Pickles of Wensleydale England  who described "catarrhal jaundice" (now recognised as Hepatitis A) in his book "Epidemiology in Country Practice" in 1923

These reports were prepared by Peter Tait, DEA member, NT

Key Science Messages from the Climate Conference in Copenhagen

Scientists at the international congress in Copenhagen, held in March 2009, have prepared a summary statement of their findings for policy makers. The congress was conceived as an update of the science of global warming ahead of the UN summit in December.

 Ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in December this statement will go to officials and heads of state at the conference. The full conclusions from the 2,500 scientific delegates from 80 countries that have attended the three-day meeting this week will be published in full in June 2009.