What are the Health and Environmental Effects of global climate change?

1. 54

   websclubsposted 11 years ago

   What are the Health and Environmental Effects of global climate change?
   
   What do you think or feel is the solution?
   where you live on planet earth? "global warming and climate change"
   Health, Agriculture and Food Supply, Forests, Ecosystems and Biodiversity, Coastal Zones and Sea Level Rise, Water Resources, Energy Production and Use, Public Lands and Recreation, U.S. Regions, Polar Regions, International, Extreme Events, Adaptation...
   
   

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2. 0

   Phoebe Pikeposted 11 years ago

   Maybe you should put this into a forum for open discussion... the solution would be to cut back on human developments that require things like fossil fuels so we can improve the health of our earth by being more natural.

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3. 69

   Larry Fieldsposted 11 years ago

   The global climate is always changing. And there's nothing 'unprecedented' about the moderate warming since the Little Ice Age ended around 1850.
   
   In general, climate change--in either direction--is disruptive. For example, farmers must adapt to the changed circumstances, by planting different crops, and there's always a learning curve associated with that. But global cooling is far worse than global warming.
   
   Our current Holocene Interglacial has almost run its course, and the next glacial advance--aka 'Ice Age'--on the major continents is almost due. The upshot: less arable land and less food. If the onset is too rapid, more people will starve to death, and people at low latitudes will shoot climate refugees from higher latitudes.
   
   I do think that there are feasible geo-engineering approaches for mitigating glacial advances. But I don't want to go into detail about that right now.

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4. 91

   Doc Snowposted 11 years ago

   I think the most important effects from a human perspective will be those affecting the global food supply.
   
   --Many basic food crops, such as rice and wheat, have shown to suffer reduced productivity at higher temperatures, and some are believed to be close to limits now in some places.
   
   --The subtropical arid zones are confidently expected to expand with increased warming due to expansion of the "Hadley cells."  This will hurt agriculture in these newly dry areas, which include some very important productive zones today.
   
   --In a seeming paradox, flooding will also be an increased problem due to increased water content in the atmosphere.  (This increase in absolute humidity is now an observed 20-year trend.)  This, too, is an agricultural stressor, as we have repeatedly seen (by coincidence or not) over the past couple of years.
   
   --Ecological disruptions due to warming may also be expected, but are hard to predict in useful detail due to the extreme complexity of the possible interactions.  But the timing of many biological life events and the geographic distribution of many plants and animals has been shifting very significantly.  Crop health and productivity can be affected via pollination, pest, or disease issues.
   
   --Agricultural troubles are likely both to cause, and to be exacerbated by, human conflicts.  (People "raid before they starve," and conflict can seriously interfere with farming, as we have seen again and again in history.)

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