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Global warming will bring more disease to CEE |
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Written by Attila Leitner
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Friday, 09 October 2009 |
A study by the UK Meteorological Office suggests
that the continued and unchecked rise in greenhouse
gas emissions is likely to lead to global
warming exceeding four degrees Celsius by the end of
the century. By way of comparison, despite all the talk
about its enormous effects, the temperature increase
over the last hundred years was not even close to 1C.
Jumping for joy that you can hit the beach in
October? Depending on where you live, sunbathing will
likely be the least of your concerns should the forecast
of this and various other reports come true.
Uneven changes to heat, rain
Dr. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met
Office Hadley Centre noted that “four degrees of
warming, averaged over the globe, translates into even
greater warming in many regions, along with major
changes in rainfall”. In fact warming in some areas
could be significantly higher than the average projection
of four degrees, even at 10C or more.
According to the study carried out on the behalf of
the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the
Arctic could warm by up to 15.2C in a high-emissions
scenario, the western and southern regions of Africa
are expected to experience both large warming (up to
10C) and drying. In various parts of the world rainfall
could decrease by 20 per cent or more while all
computer models predict less rainfall over western and
southern Africa, Central America, the Mediterranean
and parts of coastal Australia. At the same time other
areas, such as India, could experience 20 per cent
more rain, greatly increasing flooding.
Droughts in Europe
Though the study suggests that Africa and parts of
Asia will be among the areas receiving the worst of
global warming, coastal European countries could
begin to worry about rising sea levels (this, however,
being one of the most debated effects of global
warming) and extensive droughts are likely to have a
serious effect on the agriculture of the old continent.
While an increase in heat-related deaths in Europe may be in the cards (the European heat wave of 2003 killed 22,000-35,000), according to a study in the British Medical Journal any increases in mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger short term declines in cold-related mortalities. The study also notes that “populations in Europe have adjusted successfully to mean summer temperatures” and thus are expected to adjust “with little sustained increase in heat-related mortality”.
More chance for disease
A more worrisome aspect of temperature increase for the CEE region is the extension of favourable zones for infectious diseases such as dengue fever, the West Nile virus and malaria. The World Health Organisation says global warming could lead to a major increase in insect-borne diseases in Britain and Europe, as northern Europe becomes warmer, ticks and sand flies carrying encephalitis and lyme disease are likely to move in.
“Together these impacts will have very large consequences for food security, water availability and health”, said Betts adding that it was possible to avoid these dangerous levels of temperature rise by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. „If global emissions peak within the next decade and then decrease rapidly it may be possible to avoid at least half of the four degrees of warming”, the scientist said.
Uncertainty
The authors of the report communicated the new findings as the first to consider the global consequences of climate change beyond 2C, but this is not entirely true. Numerous models have been released in the recent past projecting an increase in average global temperature between 3.3 and 4.7C. Indeed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific intergovernmental body of the United Nations predicts global temperature change of 1.4-5.8C due to global warming from 1990-2100. Much of the uncertainty results from disagreement among climate models, though additional doubt comes from different emissions scenarios. The most pessimistic model was released in a joint study of the Japanese governmental agency National Institute for Environmental Studies and the Centre for Climate System Research of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and predicts an average temperature increase of 4.7C (7.0C for land and 3.8C for oceans) before the end of the century.
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