Julian Drape in the Sydney Morning Herald via AAP: A leading Australian disease expert says prompt action on climate change is paramount to our survival on earth. Epidemiologist Tony McMichael has conducted an historical study that suggests natural climate change over thousands of years has destabilised civilisations via food shortages, disease and unrest."We haven't really grasped the fact that a change in climate presents a quite fundamental threat to the foundations of population health," Prof McMichael, from the Australian National University told AAP. "These things have happened before in response to fairly modest changes to climate. Let's be aware that we really must take early action if we are going to maintain this planet as a liveable habitat for humans."
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof McMichael argues the world faces extreme climate change "without precedent" over the past 10,000 years. "With the exception of a few downward spikes of acute cooling due to massive volcanic eruptions, most of the changes have been within a band of about plus or minus three-quarters of a degree centigrade," he said on Monday.
"Yet we are talking about the likelihood this century of going beyond two degrees centigrade and quite probably, on current trajectory, reaching a global average increase of three to four degrees." Prof McMichael's paper states that the greatest recurring health risk over past millennia has been from food shortages mostly caused by drying and drought.
Warming also leads to an increase in infectious diseases as a result of better growth conditions for bacteria and the proliferation of mosquitoes....
This 1921 Soviet poster by I.V. Simakov says, "Remember the starving!"
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