The human ecology of climate change - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 395

Finally, both the IPCC and WHO emphasise that the people most vulnerable to health
impacts arising from climate change will be the poor: those in the less wealthy nations
and the poor in wealthier nations.
But it is not just climate changes' impacts that have health consequences; there are
positive health benefits to policies that promote climate change mitigation. In 2010
in a joint editorial, published simultaneously by the British Medical Journal , The
Lancet and Finnish Medical Journal , Ian Roberts and Robin Stott urged clinicians,
and those in professions allied to medicine, to put health at the heart of climate change
negotiations. They argued that moving to a low-fossil economy 'could be the next
great public health advance'. For example, a low-fossil economy would mean less
pollution and a need for more physical activity. A low-fossil diet (especially eating
less meat) that relies on less fossil energy in the provision of food, and taking more
exercise will mean less cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and even depression.
Further, a reduction in car use and meat consumption would also cut world food prices.
The question of how the developed and less-developed nations may respond to
climate change will be explored in the next chapter, which will review climate change
and sustainability policies.
7.3.1 Healthandweatherextremes
Weather extremes affect health in a number of ways. Besides affecting crops and
facilitating outbreaks of disease, even the annual seasonal cycle of weather change
outside of the tropics affects health. Human physiology can handle most variation
in weather, but only within certain limits. Marked short-term fluctuations in weather
that take the human body beyond these limits can cause adverse health effects that
lead to a greater number of hospital admissions (so straining health services) and
even to increased death rates. Depending on location, hence climate and the nature
of typical weather extremes, regional mortality can deviate from the annual average
(particularly in winter and summer, the ends of the annual temperature cycle outside
of the tropics), and in particular during extreme weather events.
An analysis of the Central England Temperature record (see Chapter 5) between
1665 and 1834 (when the British population was far less independent from the
climate) shows that mortality increased above the annual average in warm summers
and cold winters. The main mortality effect of extreme winter cold was immediate
but in the summer the effect of excessive heat was delayed by a month or two. This is
because in the winter the elderly died of influenza and bronchitis but in the summer
a broader section of the population died from food poisoning, which took longer to
have an effect. Broadly, in England in the 17th to 19th centuries, a 1 ◦ C warming
in winter reduced annual mortality by about 2%. Conversely, a 1 ◦ C cooling in the
summer reduced mortality by around 4%. There was also a synergistic correlation
with the economy and prices, which suggests that poverty was a supplementary factor
(Burroughs, 1997). However, care needs to be taken when correlating extreme weather
events and mortality. An extreme event occurring once a decade among normal years
will show a clear correlation, but a run of, say, three severe winters shows the
greatest excess in mortality in the first year but there may even be no excess in the
third consecutively bad winter (as happened in Britain in 1940-2). The correlation