Global warming

Like Phoebe, global warming freaks me out as well.  It is very scary to think about how current carbon dioxide levels are higher now than they have been in the last 700,000 years, and that this is going to cause the earth to warm another five degrees in the next century, causing drastic changes to the earth as a whole.  I cringe when I imagine normally cold places like the Adirondacks having completely different climates in one hundred years.

 In this week’s reading, I was very interested by the paragraph on the IPCC website that explained how global warming will affect the health of people living in developing countries.

“Throughout the 21st century, climate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions and especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change (high confidence). Examples include greater likelihood of injury, disease, and death due to more intense heat waves and fires (very high confidence); increased likelihood of under-nutrition resulting from diminished food production in poor regions (high confidence); risks from lost work capacity and reduced labor productivity in vulnerable populations; and increased risks from food- and water-borne diseases (very high confidence) and vector-borne diseases (medium confidence).” (IPCC, 19-20)

In the past when I’ve learned about global warming I’ve always learned about the snow caps melting or the large amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels, but I haven’t learned about how global warming will contribute to fires, heat waves, and under-nutrition that will directly impact the human population in developing countries.  Reading about this just makes me think about how unfair it is that wealthy nations are slowly but surely destroying the planet, while poorer nations, who have nothing to do with augmenting the temperature of the climate, will directly suffer the consequences first.