Overcooked Insects
The Lancet medical journal declared in a May 2009 commentary that “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st-century.” As someone who has eaten more than my fair share of insects in China where they are treated and considered delicacies, I was fascinated to read how they actually are the carriers that spread human diseases because of climate change. Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. As it becomes hotter, the air can hold more moisture, helping certain disease-carriers, such as ticks that spread Lyme disease spread.
Pine bark beetles, which devour trees in western North America will be able to produce more generations each year, instead of subsiding during winter months. They leave standing dead timber, ideal fuel for wildfires from Arizona to Alaska, said Paul Epstein of the Center for health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. Having personally fought a forest wildfire when I lived in the former Will Rogers guest house near Will Rogers Park in the 1980s ─and being the father of a former U.S. Forest Firefighter who fought forest fires across the Western United States in the 1990s ─ I shudder at the thought.
History offers many lessons that we ignore and unfortunately, as a result, repeat in updated modern variations. One of my favorite, as a photographer and agricultural high school graduate ─ and of course English born writer ─ is what happened in England during the industrial revolution. Compare modern day photographs of colleges in the English university city of Oxford, with those taken as recently as 50 years ago, and one can’t help but notice the remarkable difference. Today the picturesque sandstone buildings are a near pristine golden yellow in colour. However, before the passage of the Clean Air Act in the United Kingdom in 1956, they were more or less uniformly black.
Years of chocking fumes from open fireplaces and filthy emissions from cars in a country that was the cradle of the industrial revolution using coal as the primary source of energy, came consequent damage, not only to buildings, but the environment and human health.
One of those consequences for a particular life form can be found in the history of the peppery moth, as taught in biology classes to children learning about Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Before the industrial revolution began in earnest, in the 18th century, most of these moths in Britain were a light color. However, some possessed mutated genes that made them much darker. These latter were fewer in number, it has been suggested, because it was easy for birds to spot and eat them. Then the environment changed and soot blackened the trees so that the lighter moths were more easily spotted and eaten while the darker moths blended better with the soot. The latter soon outnumbered the former.
This story illustrates the dilemma humanity faces with climate change, but especially China. No country has managed to boost its economic growth substantially without a consequential effect on the environment. America, like Britain before it and China today, have paid the same price and caused the same damage to the environment. Fortunately, today the world is aware of the price the planet and human health has paid and is prepared to tackle the issue to make sure there are no more innocent victims.
As the global mean temperature rises, expect more heat waves. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 25 percent more heat waves in Chicago by the year 2100; Los Angeles will likely have a four-to-eightfold increase in the number of heat-wave days by century’s end. These “direct temperature effects” will hit the most vulnerable people hardest, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, especially those with heart problems and asthma, the elderly, the very young and the homeless.
People who live within 97 kilometers of a shoreline, or about one-third of the world’s population, could be affected if sea levels rise as expected over the coming decades, possibly more than 1 meter by 2100. Flooded homes and crops could make environmental refugees of a billion people.
Pine bark beetles, which devour trees in western North America will be able to produce more generations each year, instead of subsiding during winter months. They leave standing dead timber, ideal fuel for wildfires from Arizona to Alaska, said Paul Epstein of the Center for health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. Having personally fought a forest wildfire when I lived in the former Will Rogers guest house near Will Rogers Park in the 1980s ─and being the father of a former U.S. Forest Firefighter who fought forest fires across the Western United States in the 1990s ─ I shudder at the thought.
History offers many lessons that we ignore and unfortunately, as a result, repeat in updated modern variations. One of my favorite, as a photographer and agricultural high school graduate ─ and of course English born writer ─ is what happened in England during the industrial revolution. Compare modern day photographs of colleges in the English university city of Oxford, with those taken as recently as 50 years ago, and one can’t help but notice the remarkable difference. Today the picturesque sandstone buildings are a near pristine golden yellow in colour. However, before the passage of the Clean Air Act in the United Kingdom in 1956, they were more or less uniformly black.
Years of chocking fumes from open fireplaces and filthy emissions from cars in a country that was the cradle of the industrial revolution using coal as the primary source of energy, came consequent damage, not only to buildings, but the environment and human health.
One of those consequences for a particular life form can be found in the history of the peppery moth, as taught in biology classes to children learning about Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Before the industrial revolution began in earnest, in the 18th century, most of these moths in Britain were a light color. However, some possessed mutated genes that made them much darker. These latter were fewer in number, it has been suggested, because it was easy for birds to spot and eat them. Then the environment changed and soot blackened the trees so that the lighter moths were more easily spotted and eaten while the darker moths blended better with the soot. The latter soon outnumbered the former.
This story illustrates the dilemma humanity faces with climate change, but especially China. No country has managed to boost its economic growth substantially without a consequential effect on the environment. America, like Britain before it and China today, have paid the same price and caused the same damage to the environment. Fortunately, today the world is aware of the price the planet and human health has paid and is prepared to tackle the issue to make sure there are no more innocent victims.
As the global mean temperature rises, expect more heat waves. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 25 percent more heat waves in Chicago by the year 2100; Los Angeles will likely have a four-to-eightfold increase in the number of heat-wave days by century’s end. These “direct temperature effects” will hit the most vulnerable people hardest, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, especially those with heart problems and asthma, the elderly, the very young and the homeless.
People who live within 97 kilometers of a shoreline, or about one-third of the world’s population, could be affected if sea levels rise as expected over the coming decades, possibly more than 1 meter by 2100. Flooded homes and crops could make environmental refugees of a billion people.
posted by Peter de Krassel's Custom Maid Politics at 11:40 PM
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