PRODUCER/CHAIR: Deborah Smith
SPEAKERS: Tony McMichael, Alistair Woodward
SESSION REPORT: Climate change has far-reaching ramifications
by Piyaporn Wongruang
Former U.S. vice president Al Gore climbed over an elevator in one of the scenes featured in his recent Oscar Award documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” to demonstrate how high the carbon dioxide greenhouse gas would rise in the sky, if the current emission course remained unchanged.
The elevator lifted him up to about three stories.
“An Inconvenient Truth” generated unprecedented discussion about climate issues worldwide. But some scientific reports about the subject are still very difficult to promote.
While people worldwide have been awed by the scenes of fierce storms, and such, the impact of climate change on people’s health apparently still lies in scientific reports, which are still in the hands of the scientists.
Dr. Tony McMichael, review editor for the Human Health chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group II said, the climate change focus is still very much on political and economic aspects.
“But we also know that public health is at risk,” he said.
An example of this was the heat waves in Europe during 2003, when death tolls increased to 900 when the temperature rose above the normal average daily temperature by about 12 degree Celsius.
Secondary impacts on people’s health, include increased injuries from extreme events, and the rise of infectious diseases and malnutrition, especially among the world’s
poor, Dr McMichael added.
Dr. Neville Nicholls, a lead author about climate change, said although reports could establish initial relationships between climate change and public
health, more knowledge is needed to help people better address these impacts and come up with adaptation measures.
He said people could start to act now. Take the case of Australia, which has attempted to mitigate impacts of heat-waves, which could become problematic to its senior citizens.
“We already know that people died because of them, and even though it may have not been from climate change, it’s still good to develop adaptation measures,” said Dr Nicholls, adding that adaptation could go in hand with mitigation.
Dr. Mongkol Na Songkla, Thailand’s Public Health Minister, said Thailand monitors the changing trends of some tropical diseases as a pro-active measure against climate change.
Recently, the ministry detected a surge in Malaria in the western part of the country, although its relation has not yet been linked to the change in weather patterns.
Apart from tropical diseases, Thais have also been encountering hotter and wetter weather, he said.
“The most significant thing for us to do is to equip our
people with adequate knowledge about climate change so that they can adapt themselves to the changing climate. Apart from this, our ministry will try to closely watch changes in disease trends, which may be related to the changing weather,” said Dr. Mongkol.
Health benefits will also help compensate the cost of mitigating climate change in the future.
Global concentration of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activity since 1750, and now far exceed pre-industrial values.
The increase of carbon dioxide is due primarily to fossil fuel use and land use change, while that of methane is primarily due to agriculture.
These have caused the total global temperature to increase up to 0.76 Celcius.
Eastern parts of North and South American northern Europe and northern and central Asia during 1900 to 2005 observed increased precipitation, while the Sahel, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and parts of southern Asia observed drying condition.
More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since 1970s, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.
Both past and future human carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
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