Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Lice-borne typhus caused most of the deaths during the 1840s Irish Great
Famine. The climatic extremes and the resulting Great Famine in the early
14th-century Europe caused various disease epidemics, impoverishment and
social disruption (Jordan, 1996; Behringer, 2010a), and may have rendered much
of the population vulnerable to severe infections and death from the Black Death
in the 1340s. Perhaps the greatest excesses of deaths from starvation and infec-
tious diseases in Europe occurred during the seventeenth century temperature
trough of the Little Ice Age, particularly in Central Europe (Behringer, 2010b).
Although Europe's populations were increasing during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, nutrition and stature among the struggling rural population
were declining and crowding in villages and towns made for more unhygienic
conditions. After the climatically more congenial Middle
Ages, average adult
heights fell by six to seven centimetres during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries (Steckel, 2004). Nutrition and stature in England, the frontrunner in
the early industrial revolution, did not improve in the first half of the less-cold
nineteenth century. The privation, crowding, hunger and factory working condi-
tions that were emerging throughout industrializing Europe fostered intensified,
often lethal, infectious diseases (including smallpox, measles, typhus, diarrhoeal
diseases, cholera and tuberculosis: McMichael, 2009).
In modern Australia, and looking beyond food yields, prices and under-
nutrition in a much warmer world, there will be greatly heightened emotional
and economic stresses in affected rural regions. These would greatly amplify the
already-emerging and apparently climate-related upturn in various mental health
problems and disorders, and in the loss of rural community morale, particularly
in those with low resilience and inadequate social-capital resources (Berry et al.,
2011a; 2011b; McMichael, 2010).
Other more diffuse risks to health
The preceding example leads us into this open-ended category of other more
diffuse (tertiary) risks to health. One such example of likely great and increasing
importance to Australia is that, in the Asian and Pacific regions in a
1
4°C world,
the future flow of environmental migrants and refugees will inevitably increase,
perhaps dramatically. In the words of the Asian Development Bank: 'Asia and the
Pacific will be amongst the global regions most affected by the impacts of climate
change … As a result, it could experience population displacements of unprec-
edented scale in the coming decades' (Asian Development Bank, 2011: vi). This
outflow of people will be driven by a mix of major stresses, including those due
to population pressures, water shortage, climate change, soil exhaustion, food
insecurity and loss of coastal habitat, especially in many of the low-lying small
Pacific Island states (see Christoff and Eckersley, 2013,
Chapter 11
, this volume).
During the third to fifth centuries ad, the productive lands of the Western
Roman Empire were a magnet for the crowded, land-starved and underfed
Germanic tribes, massing on the north-eastern border as their regional climate
became cooler and farming more difficult. Pushing from behind were the Hunnic
