Climate change will have a huge impact on human health and bold environmental policy decisions are needed now to protect the world’s population, according to the author of an article published in the BMJ today.

The threat to human health is of a more fundamental kind than is the threat to the world’s economic system, says Professor McMichael, a Professor of public health from the Australian National University. “Climate change is beginning to damage our natural life-support system,” he says.

For full article, visit:

http://www.enn.com/health/article/30011

Thanks to Ned Lundquist for sending me the link to this report:

National Security and the Threat of Climate Change

http://securityandclimate.cna.org/

From the Earth Portal:

Presidential candidate representatives and one candidate himself debated their climate change plans recently at the National Council for Science and the Environment’s national conference. I thought you might want to check out written and video clips of the debate online on the Earth Forum (http://www.earthportal.org/forum/).

You can also join in or start discussion on these topics at the site.

Catch up with the ongoing debate on population and climate change on the website of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

http://www.thebulletin.org/roundtable/population-climate-change/

Thanks to Tim Black to this link to a brilliant peak oil presentation entitled, “Peak Oil and a New Game for Humanity.”

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Energy demand is expected to grow in coming decades. Jeroen van der Veer, 60, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive, recently offered his views on the energy challenge facing the world and the challenge posed by global warming. He spoke of the need for governments to set limits on carbon emissions. He also lifted the veil on Shell’s latest long-term energy scenarios, titled Scramble and Blueprints, which he will make public next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

For full article, visit:

http://www.inspiringgreenleadership.com/downloads/SunSpeechWithSlides.pdf

Thanks to Felix Kloman for this article.

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From the monthly newsletter of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado:

Climate Change May Lead to War

A new study finds that long-term climate change with its resulting food shortages, population shifts, and economic instability can lead to war and population decline.

The study, published November 19 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that as temperatures decreased centuries ago during a period called the Little Ice Age, the number of wars increased, famine occurred, and the population declined.

Peter Brecke, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study said that even though temperatures are increasing now, the same resulting conflicts may occur, as 80 percent of the world’s wars from 1400 to 1900 were triggered by ecological disasters, like food shortages and famine caused by extreme weather.

For full press release, visit:

www.gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/climate-war.htm.

Thanks to Earl Babbie for sending this video. It presents our choices rather starkly.

A great presentation about taking action at this time. Something each one of us can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDsIFspVzfI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwidget%2Ddb%2Eslide%2Ecom%2Fwidgets%2Fsf%2Eswf

Thanks to Fred Meyerson for the article below. He would welcome feedback (fmeyerson@uri.edu) on his lead-off article for the population and climate roundtable, which appears on the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The article was published on-line on Monday (Dec. 3), to coincide with the first day of the Bali climate talks (U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change).

The roundtable will continue among the four other “experts” and Fred for the next three months or so (for a few rounds), with about one new article published each week. Joe Chamie (former head of the UN Population Division) will be the next to publish in the roundtable - next week.

Here’s the roundtable introductory piece and the text of Fred’s lead-off article:

Population and climate change
In Progress: 3 December 2007

A larger global population means a larger demand for everything–most urgently, energy. And although Earth’s resources have apparently stretched further than Paul Ehrlich infamously predicted four decades ago in his book The Population Bomb, the mounting climate problem suggests that the consequences of overconsumption (namely of coal and other fossil fuels that produce heat-trapping greenhouse gases) may still be inevitable.

Joseph Chamie, former director of the U.N. Population Division and now director of research at the Center for Migration Studies; Martin Desvaux, a retired physicist and trustee of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT); John Guillebaud, former OPT co-chairman and emeritus professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at University College London; Elizabeth Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program and associate professor of Development Studies at Hampshire College; and Frederick A. B. Meyerson, an ecologist at the University of Rhode Island and board member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, discuss how population growth relates to our spiraling energy needs and whether addressing it can help provide a solution to the climate problem.

For full article, visit:

http://www.thebulletin.org/roundtable/population-climate-change/.

Washington — Risks to international public health from floods, heat waves and droughts arising from climate change are becoming the focus of global health organizations and officials around the world.

A range of health problems is expected to accompany rising temperatures worldwide, especially in developing countries, according to Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, part two of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth assessment report.

“The health of all individuals is influenced by the health of people, animals and the environment around us,” Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said October 23 in testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. “Many trends within this larger, interdependent ecologic system influence public health on a global scale, including climate change.”

For full article, visit:

http://www.ipcc.ch/

Thanks to Joyce Tarnow for this article.
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A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.”(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

For full article, visit:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/30/the-road-well-travelled/