Solar Storms Affirmative – 4 Week Lab [1/3]
Download 0.93 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Impact – Disease
Impact – HurricanesGlobal Warming causes hurricanes China View, 7-14-08, “Study: hurricane season longer, big storms sooner” http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/14/content_8543160.htm BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhuanet) -- Hurricane seasons are arriving early and hanging around longer during the past century, and the big storms are forming earlier, some climate scientists say. Plus, the area of warm water able to support hurricanes is growing larger over time. The Atlantic Ocean is becoming more hurricane friendly, scientists say, and the shift is likely due to global warming. "There has been an increase in the seasonal length over the last century," Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told LiveScience. "It's pretty striking." A study Gulledge co-authored with other climate scientists found a five-day increase in season length per decade since 1915. Hurricane season officially starts June 1, but the first named storm of the 2008 season, Tropical Storm Albert, formed on May 31. The first hurricane of the season, Hurricane Bertha, formed on July 1, reaching hurricane strength on July 7, relatively early in the season for a major storm. In the last decade, more strong storms have been forming earlier in the season, said hurricane researcher Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Impact – DiseaseWarming exacerbates disease spread Epstein, 5- Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (Paul, “Climate Change and Human Health,” New England Journal of Medicine, 10/6/06, http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/353/14/1433) Meanwhile, in the past three decades, widening social inequities and changes in biodiversity — which alter the balance among predators, competitors, and prey that help keep pests and pathogens in check — have apparently contributed to the resurgence of infectious diseases. Global warming and wider fluctuations in weather help to spread these diseases: temperature constrains the range of microbes and vectors, and weather affects the timing and intensity of disease outbreaks.4 Disease-bearing ticks in Sweden are moving northward as winters become warmer, and models project a similar shift in the United States and Canada. The encroachment of human housing on wilderness and reductions in the populations of predators of deer and competitors of mice are largely responsible for the current spread of Lyme disease. Mosquitoes, which can carry many diseases, are very sensitive to temperature changes. Warming of their environment — within their viable range — boosts their rates of reproduction and the number of blood meals they take, prolongs their breeding season, and shortens the maturation period for the microbes they disperse. In highland regions, as permafrost thaws and glaciers retreat, mosquitoes and plant communities are migrating to higher ground.5 The increased weather variability that accompanies climate instability contributed to the emergence of both the hantavirus pulmonary syndrome and West Nile virus in the United States. Six years of drought in the Southwest apparently reduced the populations of predators, and early heavy rainfall in 1993 produced a bounty of piñon nuts and grasshoppers for rodents to eat. The resulting legions of white-footed mice heralded the appearance of hantavirus in the Americas. The origin of the 1999 outbreak of West Nile virus in New York City remains a mystery, but city-dwelling, bird-biting Culex pipiens mosquitoes thrive in shallow pools of foul water that remain in drains during droughts. When dry springs yield to sweltering summers, viral development accelerates and, with it, the cycle of mosquito-to-bird transmission. During the hot, arid summer of 2002, West Nile virus traveled across the country, infecting 230 species of animals, including 138 species of birds, along the way. Many of the affected birds of prey normally help to rein in rodent populations that can spread hantaviruses, arenaviruses, and yersinia and leptospira bacteria, as well as ticks infected with Borrelia burgdorferi. Extremely wet weather may bring its own share of ills. Floods are frequently followed by disease clusters: downpours can drive rodents from burrows, deposit mosquito-breeding sites, foster fungus growth in houses, and flush pathogens, nutrients, and chemicals into waterways. Milwaukee's cryptosporidium outbreak, for instance, accompanied the 1993 floods of the Mississippi River, and norovirus and toxins spread in Katrina's wake. Major coastal storms can also trigger harmful algal blooms ("red tides"), which can be toxic, help to create hypoxic "dead zones" in gulfs and bays, and harbor pathogens. Prolonged droughts, for their part, can weaken trees' defenses against infestations and promote wildfires, which can cause injuries, burns, respiratory illness, and deaths. Shifting weather patterns are jeopardizing water quality and quantity in many countries, where groundwater systems are already being overdrawn and underfed. Most montane ice fields are predicted to disappear during this century — removing a primary source of water for humans, livestock, and agriculture in some parts of the world. A still greater threat to human health comes from illnesses affecting wildlife, livestock, crops, forests, and marine organisms. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 revealed that 60 percent of the resources and life-support systems examined — from fisheries to fresh water — are already in decline or are being used in unsustainable ways. The resulting biologic impoverishment may have important consequences for our air, food, and water. Crops are being confronted with more volatile weather, vanishing pollinators, and the proliferation of pests and pathogens. One fungal disease, soybean rust, is thought to have been ushered into the United States by Hurricane Ivan last fall. Warmth and moisture will favor its propagation. Warming changes weather patterns making disease spread inevitable Epstein, 2000- Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (Paul, “Is Global Warming Harmful to Health,” August 2000, http://chge.med.harvard.edu/publications/journals/documents/sciam.pdf) Global warming can also threaten human well-being profoundly, if somewhat less directly, by revising weather patterns—particularly by pumping up the frequency and intensity of floods and droughts and by causing rapid swings in the weather. As the atmosphere has warmed over the past century, droughts in arid areas have persisted longer, and massive bursts of precipitation have become more common. Aside from causing death by drowning or starvation, these disasters promote by various means the emergence, resurgence and spread of infectious disease. That prospect is deeply troubling, because infectious illness is a genie that can be very hard to put back into its bottle. It may kill fewer people in one fell swoop than a raging flood or an extended drought, but once it takes root in a community, it often defies eradication and can invade other areas. The control issue looms largest in the developing world, where resources for prevention and treatment can be scarce. But the technologically advanced nations, too, can fall victim to surprise attacks—as happened last year when the West Nile virus broke out for the first time in North America, killing seven New Yorkers. In these days of international commerce and travel, an infectious disorder that appears in one part of the world can quickly become a problem continents away if the disease-causing agent, or pathogen, finds itself in a hospitable environment. Warming spreads malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and other diseases Ecobridge, 10-5-06, “Evidence of Global Warming” http://www.ecobridge.org/content/g_dgr.htm A recent study by New Zealand doctors, researchers at the Wellington School of Medicine's public health department said outbreaks of dengue fever in South Pacific islands are directly related to global warming. According to a report from World Wildlife Fund, dengue, or breakbone fever has now resurged in the Americas infecting over 200,000 people in 1995. In a San Francisco Chronicle article (September 28, 1996) Paul Epstein of Harvard's School of Public Health noted during a conference on Climate Change and Human Health in the Asian Pacific, that insects are bringing illnesses like malaria and dengue to higher altitudes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It was also reported at this conference that continued global warming will cause the spread of these diseases and also encephalitis and yellow fever to higher latitudes. "Many of the most important diseases in poor countries, from malaria to diarrhoea and malnutrition are highly sensitive to climate," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, of the World Health Organization (WHO), and a co-author of a report published in the science journal Nature on November 17, 2005. The report says that climate change is the driving force behind an increase in debilitating illnesses such as malaria, malnutrition and diarrhea. "Those least able to cope and least responsible for the greenhouse gases that cause global warming are most affected," says lead author Jonathan Patz, a professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison's Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. "Herein lies an enormous global ethical challenge."...."Our energy-consumptive lifestyles are having lethal impacts on other people around the world, especially the poor."says Dr. Patz. The parts of the globe most vulnerable are the Asian and South American Pacific coasts, the Indian Ocean coast and sub-Saharan Africa. Patz and his colleagues point to the moral responsibility of the industrial countries, such as the United States to take a leadership role in curbing emissions. Warming spreads infectious diseases that destroy biodiversity OSB , Ocean Studies Board, 2002, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=11 Yet another area of potential concern is health—both of humans, of domesticated plants and animals, and of wildlife (National Research Council, 1999a). There is widespread appreciation of the potential for unwelcome invasions of new or exotic diseases in the human population, particularly of vector-borne diseases such as malaria. Similar concerns may arise for pests and diseases that attack livestock or agriculture. Another concern is diseases of wildlife. Scenarios based on climate models for greenhouse warming indicate that changes will occur in the geographic distribution of a number of water- borne diseases (e.g., cholera, schistosomiasis) and vector-borne diseases (e.g., malaria, yellow fever, dengue, leishmaniasis) if not countered by changes in adaptation, public health, or treatment availability. These changes will be driven largely by increases in precipitation leading to favorable habitat availability for vectors, intermediate and reservoir hosts, and/ or warming that leads to expansion of ranges in low latitudes, oceans, or montane regions. The host-parasite dynamics for abrupt climate change have not been targeted specifically as yet, but Daszak et al. (2001) suggested three phenomena that indicate abrupt climate change may have had heightened impacts on key human diseases: There appears to be a strong link between El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and outbreaks of Rift Valley fever, cholera, hantavirus, and a range of emergent diseases (Colwell, 1996; Bouma and Dye, 1997; Linthicum et al., 1999), and if ENSO cycles become more intense, these events may become more extensive and have greater impact; Malaria has reemerged in a number of upland tropical regions (Epstein, 1998) (although this is debated by Reiter, 1998); and Recent extreme weather events have precipitated a number of disease outbreaks (Epstein, 1998). Criteria that define emerging infectious diseases of humans were recently used to also identify a range of emerging infectious diseases that affect wildlife (Daszak et al., 2000). They include a fungal disease that is responsible for mass mortality of amphibians on a global scale and linked to species extinctions (Berger et al., 1998), canine distemper virus in African wild dogs, American ferrets and a series of marine mammals, and brucellosis in bison as well as others. An ongoing reduction in biodiversity and increased threats of disease emergence in humans and livestock make the impacts of these changes potentially very large. Emerging diseases are affected by anthropogenic environmental changes that increase transmission rates to certain populations and select for pathogens adapted to these new conditions. Daszak (2001) points to abrupt climate change as pushing environmental conditions past thresholds that allow diseases to become established following their introduction. For example, African horse sickness (a vector-borne disease of horses, dogs, and zebras) is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Although it usually dies out within 2 to 3 years of introduction to Europe, the latest event involving imported zebras to Spain resulted in a 5-year persistence, probably because recent climate changes have allowed the biting midge vector to persist in the region (Mellor and Boorman, 1995). Introduced diseases are costly—a single case of domestic rabies in New Hampshire led to treatment of over 150 people at a cost of $1.1 million. The cost of introduced diseases to humans, livestock, and crop plant health is estimated today at over $41 billion per year (Daszak et al., 2000). Abrupt climate change-driven disease emergence will significantly increase this burden. Furthermore, the economic implications of biodiversity loss due to abrupt climate change-related disease events may be severe, as wildlife supports many areas (fisheries, recreation, wild crops) very significant to our well-being. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|