Today, mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are major health problems in the developing world. But by the end of the century, over half of the world’s population might be at risk from these diseases, according to a 2008 report by the Lowy Institute. Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard says one reason is the current climate instability.
Paul Epstein: We have to focus on stabilizing the climate. It’s the instability that is most disturbing to the pests – the mosquitoes – or the most favorable to them.
Epstein is associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard. He researches the health impacts of climate change. He told EarthSky that our warming climate is allowing mosquitoes to expand their range – along with the diseases they carry.
Paul Epstein: So as we see warming, we’re seeing malaria, and dengue fever and its vectors move into mountainous areas in Asia, Latin America, Africa. And at the same time we see floods that leave a cluster of problems like water-borne disease, mosquito-borne disease, and even rodent-borne disease.
At the root of all these issues, he said, is the climate instability caused by warming temperatures.
According to a Lowy Institute report, malaria prevalence could be 1.8 to 4.8 times greater in 2050 than 1990. The share of the world’s population living in malaria-endemic zones could also grow from 45 percent to 60 percent by the end of the century. By 2085, an estimated 52 percent of the world’s population, or about 5.2 billion people, will be living in areas at risk of dengue fever.
Our thanks to Paul Epstein.
Paul Epstein is Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“So as we see warming”…… There is no warming folks. The earth is now cooling, and rather rapidly. As for malaria, check your history books. Rochester, NY was a hotbed of malaria in the 1700’s and 1800’s. That is why all of the swamps in the area were filled in. To stop the horrible disease. And that was during a very cool period. The best cure for malaria is DDT. It is an excellent control method for mosquitos. However, an irrational reaction to a silly little book a few years back doomed millions of folks in Africa to death. By the way, it had been proved that an avian virus was responsible for the thinning egg shells blamed on DDT.
The buzz word has changed from global warming to “climate change” because of the inconvenient truth. Human activity is not causing any warming of our earth. There is no warming. Period.
Be very afraid of government cure for this non existent problem. Carbon Cap and Trade will result in increased production costs for food and energy. The bottom of the economic ladder will be the worst hurt by this. Developing ( I love that euphemism, they are third world dumps destroyed by socialist dictators and are not developing at all) countries will experience starvation and famine. Disease will be rampant, not because of global warming, but because of malnutrition and a total lack of medical supplies. If we persist in this foolishness, we will import starvation and misery here to the land of the free and the home of the brave. We will succumb to socialist misery as well.
And the powers that be, Gore and his buddies will lord it over the common folk and protest that they were right all along. They will change the story to fit the condition.
Orwell was prescient.
What puzzles me is why the documented global cooling has made politicians change the phrase “global warming” to “global climate change” and yet we still are talking about the warming globe. If indeed the documentation is out there that the global temperature is cooling, then why are we worried about mosquitoes?
Please explain…
Eric — if you look at the variability in earth’s temperatures over millenia, you’ll see that the overall trend line inclines upward, although there are mini-cycles within the trend line that oscillate between warming and cooling. If you zero in on just one of these mini-cycles, it could appear that the earth was cooling as Benjamin Napier states. However, you have to examine the overall trend, over geologic time; and when you do, it is inarguable that the earth’s temperatures are warming.
As for the nomenclature of global warming versus global climate change… it is my understanding that it is not only politicians, but also environmental groups that favor this name because hand-in-hand with global warming we will see (and are seeing) extreme weather events that encompass more than simple warming: for example, extreme flooding; extreme monsoons; extreme desertification; extreme cooling. As a general rule of thumb, you can guess that whatever type of weather and climate a region is known for (arid, humid, cold, or warm), then it will get more extreme.
Benjamen and Eric,
The interjection of the term ‘climate change’ into the dialog was one crafted by the right-wing ‘think tanks’ in order to convince people that there is not real problem. This rhetoric attract (and many others used here against EarthSky articles) is consistent with the right-wing talking points originally used to delay rational actions on a wide range to topics from tobacco-cancer link to stratospheric ozone depletion. This rhetoric has four arguments a) Science is uncertain, b) Concerns were exaggerated, c) technology will solve any potential problem, and d) any government interference in free market is bad. It was not the left which politicized the scientific discussion concerning climate, it was the radical right.
For an excellent overview of the history of the right-wing attack on Science see ‘The American Denial of Global Warming’ (2007) by historian Naomi Oreskes (UC San Diego) http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.asp?showID=13459
For real, rational discussions of the Scientific Consensus of global climate see: RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org/
Slim
If we wish to use “geologic time” as a reference for a regression line, then let us go back to the “Big Bang”. It was real hot then. By definition, the earth has been cooling since then. For sure.
Our latest maajor warming trend has been out of the last ice age. Somewhere between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, the earth has warmed. No SUV’s or power plants to blame. Just nature.
I remember very well the screams of the impending ice age in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. That was because of capitalism and the evil human. When the ice age failed to materialize, the socialists went in search of another boogeyman. The climate warmed for a decade or so. Voila”!!!! We have global warming. Quick, invent some bogus “climate models” and talk with assurance. That will do it!
It worked until, once again, the vagaries of reality set in. The climate cooled. Ooops!!! Now we will call it climate change instead of global warming. That way, no matter what happens we can blame the industrial revolution, and especially capitalism.
Folks, it is all bogus. I have yet to see a climate model that predicts global warming that will work when fed real historic data and asked to predict now. Don’t happen. They are mathematical constructs that depend on assumptions. Please remember what happens when we assume things. It is always the same. When we make decisions, based on unfounded assumptions, it always, ALWAYS, makes an ASS of U and Me. See, the real root of ASSUME!
Another thing: will someone please tell me what the perfect CO2 level should be? Would someone tell me what the global climate “should” be? If we the people are screwing the works up, then surely some smart person knows what the situation should be without our evil input! If we don’t know what “right” is, how can we be sure that what is now is wrong?
Don’t be led down the primrose path. Think, question, reason and make decisons based on sound science. The recent global warming/climate change hysteria is neither science nor is it rational. It is political and is about power.
I would like to add that the Black Plague occurred duing the little ice age. Folks were malnourished due to agricultural failures annd were huddling together for protection from the cold. Perfect conditions for an epidemic. Global cooling, folks.
Paul Reiter, Chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the famed Pasteur Institute, says “no major scientist with any long record in this field accepts Al Gore’s claim that global warming spreads mosquito-borne diseases.”
Ekalaka Slim,
Have you ever heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC? Now tell me they are a right wing “Think Tank.” I suppose they’re trying to convince us global warming isn’t real too? Climate change has been used by most organizations seriously concerned about global warming almost as long as global warming has been a concept.
“It was not the left which politicized the scientific discussion concerning climate, it was the radical right.” If I take your statement to it’s natural confusion, you’re saying that political concerns (governmental policy making) which bases on climate science discussion is a radical right conspiracy? All I can say is WHAT?
Dear Friends,
Wonderful discussion. The ideas generated here appear vital to me. While I agree with everyone who says no one can predict the future, I also believe we can likely agree that if the human community keep doing precisely what we are doing now, we will keep getting what we are getting now.
One indication of faulty reasoning and extreme foolishness, I suppose, would be for us to believe that we can keep overconsuming, overproducing and overpopulating as we are doing now and somehow achieve different results from the ones in existence now.
If, for example, by doing “more of the same business-as-usual activities” that we are doing now, we could be leading our children down a “primrose path” to a recognizably horrendous fate of some unknowable kind, would reason and common sense not suggest a change in behavior?
We have self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us who are recommending to the children that all of us can live large and long; that we can conspicuously consume limited resources, pollute the frangible environment, overpopulate the finite planet and ravage the Earth……just the way they are insisting all of us do now. These arrogant and avaricious leaders are living examples of patently unsustainable lives and, yes, they take pride in their gigantic ecological ‘footprints’ and lifestyles based upon excessive consumption and unbridled hoarding. If our children were to keep doing what my not-so-great generation of elders are adamantly advocating and doing now, what is likely to become of them?
My growing sense of frustration results from a realization that remarkably clear, intellectually honest and morally courageous reports from so many responsible and duty-bound scientists show us that the Masters of the Universe are determined to deny what could somehow be real and not to speak publicly about what they believe to be true regarding the predicament in which the family of humanity finds itself in these early years of Century XXI. Even worse, their minions with leadership responsibilities and duties in environmental organizations have collusively been enjoined from speaking about whatsoever they believe to be true. As a consequence, a conspiracy of silence has been established among all these leaders and the absurdly enriched talking heads in the mass media who eschew intellectual honesty and moral courage in favor of reporting repetitively about whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated.
The silence of so many leaders is deafening, while the duplicitous, disinformational chatter of the talking heads is morally outrageous. What is much worse, sad to say, is that the determination of these leaders and the talking heads to live large and long in such stupendously unsustainable ways — come what may for the children — is not only grossly irresponsible, it is a profound dereliction of their duty to warn, I believe.
Perhaps change is in the offing.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
I trust I am mistaken about the concern that besets me this morning: One day our children will look back in anger at those in my generation who had the chance at least to try and mitigate the fully expected damages of climate change but abjectly failed because we “played around the edges” and refused to take demonstrably responsible action. Sacrifices of ‘sacred cows’ often associated with making necessary changes were too damn hard for so soft, satisfied and selfish a generation of leading elders, I suppose.
Dear Friends,
Perhaps you can assist me. There must be something wrong with the “picture” I am about to draw, but no one with wealth, power, status, and privileges to conspicuously consume and endlessly hoard has said anything. Their bought-and-paid-for politicians and absurdly enriched minions in the mass media are also silent.
Picture this:
A remarkably tiny group of conniving, deceitful, ostentatiously greedy, patently fraudulent financial schemers on what is left of Wall Street in the remaining investment houses and the major {stress-tested} banks that are described as “too big to fail” are at one and the same time being given hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, racking up billions of dollars in profits, and paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses. All the while, millions of people are losing their livelihoods, homes, pensions, etc. The children of these less fortunate people are going hungry.
What is wrong with this picture?
Sincerely,
Steve