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Climate change and human Health: issues for teacher and classroom

Anthony J McMichael and Ulisses Confalonieri

in Teaching Epidemiology: A guide for teachers in epidemiology, public health and clinical medicine

Global climate change, caused by human actions, is a recent, remarkable and distinctive source of risks to human health. Because of its newness, complexity and scale, it poses important challenges to ... More

Global climate change, caused by human actions, is a recent, remarkable and distinctive source of risks to human health. Because of its newness, complexity and scale, it poses important challenges to epidemiologists. These include some ‘boundary’ issues in relation to the scope, responsibility, and capacity of epidemiological research. That in turn presents a further challenge to the ongoing evolution of epidemiological research methods, historically driven by the ever-changing agenda of public health problems, social concerns and prevailing theories. This chapter presents an approach to teaching climate change to students of epidemiology, covering teaching objectives, teaching contents, and assessing students' achievements.Less

Climate Variability in the Context of Climate Change: El Niño and Other Oscillations

Cynthia Rosenzweig and Daniel Hillel

in Climate Variability and the Global Harvest: Impacts of El Niño and Other Oscillations on Agro-Ecosystems

The climate system envelops our planet, with swirling fluxes of mass, momentum, and energy through air, water, and land. Its processes are partly regular and partly ... More

The climate system envelops our planet, with swirling fluxes of mass, momentum, and energy through air, water, and land. Its processes are partly regular and partly chaotic. The regularity of diurnal and seasonal fluctuations in these processes is well understood. Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding some of the mechanisms that induce deviations from that regularity in many parts of the globe. These mechanisms include a set of combined oceanic–atmospheric phenomena with quasi-regular manifestations. The largest of these is centered in the Pacific Ocean and is known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The term “oscillation” refers to a shifting pattern of atmospheric pressure gradients that has distinct manifestations in its alternating phases. In the Arctic and North Atlantic regions, the occurrence of somewhat analogous but less regular interactions known as the Arctic Oscillation and its offshoot, the North Atlantic Oscillation, are also being studied. These and other major oscillations influence climate patterns in many parts of the globe. Examples of other large-scale interactive ocean–atmosphere– land processes are the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, the Pacific/North American pattern, the Tropical Atlantic Variability, the West Pacific pattern, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, and the Indian Ocean Dipole. In this chapter we review the earth’s climate system in general, define climate variability, and describe the processes related to ENSO and the other major systems and their interactions. We then consider the possible connections of the major climate variability systems to anthropogenic global climate change. The climate system consists of a series of fluxes and transformations of energy (radiation, sensible and latent heat, and momentum), as well as transports and changes in the state of matter (air, water, solid matter, and biota) as conveyed and influenced by the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land masses. Acting like a giant engine, this dynamic system is driven by the infusion, transformation, and redistribution of energy. Less

Climate, Society, and Sustainable Development: Assessing Vulnerability, Building Adaptive Capacity

Cynthia Rosenzweig and Daniel Hillel

in Climate Variability and the Global Harvest: Impacts of El Niño and Other Oscillations on Agro-Ecosystems

Agriculture and food security, water resources, ecosystems, natural disasters, and human health are all affected significantly by short-term fluctuations of weather ... More

Agriculture and food security, water resources, ecosystems, natural disasters, and human health are all affected significantly by short-term fluctuations of weather and by longer-term changes of climate. Such effects can be severe enough to disrupt national and regional economies, particularly in developing countries, thus exacerbating poverty and thwarting sustainable development in both the short and long term. Developed and developing countries differ in their vulnerability to the effects of climate and in their capacity to recover from them. Developing countries are expected to be more vulnerable than developed countries to long-term climate change caused by the anthropogenic build-up of greenhouse gases. The challenge is to integrate climate adaptability into sustainable development effectively, so that detrimental effects are minimized and positive effects are enhanced. In this chapter we address the questions of how climate generally and El Niño specifically can affect sustainable development, consider the related concepts of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and evaluate policies and programs designed to incorporate improved responses to climate variability and change into society. Sustainable development, a term brought to the attention of the world by the Bruntland Report, Our Common Future (United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), is a broad, often normative term used to describe a process by which developing countries are able to achieve economic growth comparable to the more developed countries without compromising environmental health and social equity. The report defines development as sustainable when it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Another simpler working definition that has been put forward is “development that lasts” (Magalhães, 2000, p. 4). Sustainable development is often characterized asmultidimensional, having economic, social, environmental, and political aspects (Magalhães, 2000). Economic sustainability is defined as the ability of programs to exist without long-term government incentives. Social sustainability relates to progress toward amelioration of poverty, income equality, and inclusiveness; whereas political sustainability involves shared participation in decision making and in stable institutions. Environmental sustainability involves the use of natural resources in a way that preserves or enhances their productivity, even while conserving habitats, biodiversity, and landscape. Less

Control + Alt + Retreat

Orrin H. Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C. Pilkey

in Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change

A summary of what's to come in the book.

Between Heaven and Earth: Did Christianity Cause Global Warming?

Bruce V. Foltz

in The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible

Heidegger argues that modern technology’s view of nature as stock or inventory is the outcome of Western metaphysics as “onto-theology,” in which Christianity played a central role. Lynn White offers ... More

Heidegger argues that modern technology’s view of nature as stock or inventory is the outcome of Western metaphysics as “onto-theology,” in which Christianity played a central role. Lynn White offers a historiographical variant, claiming that our environmental problems, of which global climate change is perhaps most manifest today, derive from the putative Christian view of nature as subject to human dominance. This chapter argues that ancient Christianity, especially as articulated in the Orthodox East, has a far different view, from which we could learn today. Here nature is seen as manifesting divine energies (energeiai) that the purified mind (nous) can contemplate noetically, even though the divine essence (ousia) remains transcendent and mysterious. Western Christianity ignores this distinction. Beginning with Augustine (and culminating in Ockham) God becomes increasingly remote from creation. The analogia entis is a last, unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the divine immanence that has endured in the Christian East.Less