Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
procedural adaptation. Future historians (if any) may look back and wonder why
we acted in such myopic and reactive-only fashion, unable or unwilling to see the
likely long-term consequences for life on earth if world temperatures continued
to rise, initially by 4°C and then more.
The first readily observable impacts will be the continuing upturn in health
damage due to escalating extremes of heat and more extreme and frequent
weather disasters - especially floods, fires, storms and sea-surges. Their adverse
impacts on physical safety, respiratory diseases, infectious diseases (direct
unhygienic exposures and altered ecological conditions for mosquitoes etc.) and
post-traumatic depression would all be much greater than those that have been
more conventionally anticipated and modelled in relation to lesser scenarios of
warming. Meanwhile, other less-obvious changes will be gathering momentum.
Despair and mental health disorders (including suicide rates) will rise in
vulnerable farming communities as local conditions get warmer, evaporation accel-
erates, local rainfall systems weaken or shift, and extremes of weather and weather
disasters impair or destroy agricultural output. Falling food yields will cause escalating
prices and nutrition and health will suffer, particularly in low-income families and
in poorer and remote communities. The patterns of infectious diseases and their
underlying ecological and physical contexts will begin to change (including readier
movements of infectious agents across national borders in the greater South East
Asian region), and in disrupted and impoverished social and environmental circum-
stances epidemics will occur more readily.
The great threat to human health from a Four Degree World later this century
underscores just how reliant is the biological wellbeing, health and survival of
human populations on climatic and wider environmental conditions. From an
anthropocentric
perspective, our concern over the future health-and-survival
impacts of climate change recognizes is well justified. However, for moral reasons
alone, we must also recognise the serious risks posed by climate change to the
non-human world (including biodiversity and the viability of ecosystems).
Besides, these natural assets too have impacts on farm yields, water supplies
and the quality of air, water and soil. These endangered natural systems are key
parts of our health-and-life-support system. Earth's overall life-support system is
already facing serious threats and stresses as the apparent safe limits, or 'planetary
boundaries', of various component systems are reached and breached (Rockström
et al., 2009). Inevitably, those various components will be much more threatened
this volume).
The very great risks that a Four Degree World poses to human health
in Australia and elsewhere, while somewhat unknowable in advance, surely
provide a compelling reason for taking immediate and radical actions on behalf
of long-term
primary prevention
and not just tinkering with electorally timid
adaptive policies and actions. The two oncoming generations will live part of
their lives in the late 21st century. Subsequent generations may find themselves
in a radically self-rearranging natural world, increasingly unsuitable as a liveable
habitat for humans.
