A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concludes there is a “small” (order of 5%) risk that global warming will render a large fraction of the planet uninhabitable – like, being outside for any length of time would result in death.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has conveniently posted a couple of maps from the paper (which would otherwise cost you $10 to get a peak at). First, today’s world.

Currently, the inland Amazon and northern India are pretty uncomfortable, with the eastern US, northern China, and much of Australia not far behind.

Right now, we are tracking above the worst case IPCC scenario (which, if you remember, does not include feedback loops such as the Arctic releasing methane).  If we don’t do anything about climate change, we could get to about two doublings by the end of the century (over pre-industrial levels of 280ppm of CO₂). With the caveat that there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding Earth’s climate sensitivity, what might that world look like ?

Most of the world’s major population centers will be uninhabitable outdoors – like, people would literally drop dead – during heat waves.

Of course, this says little about the Earth’s capability to support agriculture under such conditions. People would die of starvation long before they would be felled by heat stroke.

The difference between the two maps below is startling:

Caveat: note that the biggest difference is that states no longer have “no data”, so any data at all looks like a huge jump.

As Charles Hugh Smith points out, the explosion of obesity and related diseases has all occurred in the past 23 years since 1985. Eat junk, get sick.

We can’t successfully address “health care” without addressing the underlying cause. The “insurance reform” currently before congress will do nothing to address the crisis in health care or the financial crisis in paying for it.

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book explains why the future of farming in this country rests on reform of our health care system.

Simply put, young people can’t afford to go into farming because of the unavailability of health care.

If we want people to commit to growing our food, we’re going to have to figure out a way to provide decent health care to everybody. Instead of wasting trillions bailing out bankers, we should be investing in the future of our food production system.

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

An investigation by ProPublica found that the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may be threatening  the nation’s increasingly precious drinking water supply.

ProPublica studied Sublette County, Wyoming and six other contamination sites and found that water contamination in drilling areas around the country is far more prevalent than the EPA asserts. Tests on well water in Sublette County showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.

Hydraulic fracturing shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release natural gas. The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study (PDF) by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Today fracturing is used in nine out of 10 natural gas wells in the United States.

ProPublica’s investigation found that the 2004 EPA study was not as conclusive as it claimed to be. Close review showed that the body of the study contains damaging information that wasn’t mentioned in the conclusion. Rather, the study foreshadowed many of the problems now being reported across the country.

The contamination in Sublette County is significant because it is the first to be documented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But more than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The precise nature and concentrations of the chemicals used by industry are considered trade secrets. Not even the EPA knows exactly what’s in the drilling fluids. Of the 300-odd compounds that private researchers and the Bureau of Land Management suspect are being used, 65 are listed as hazardous by the federal government. Many of the rest are unstudied and unregulated.

A letter to the Big Look Task Force submitted by Oregon’s Office of Environmental Public Health drew the attention of The Energy Bulletin.

Strikingly and boldly, it calls for Health Impact Assessments, either singly or as part of an Environmental Impact Statement, Environmental Assessment or other environmental review, to be included as part of the review process for land use and zoning applications.

The entire text of the letter is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that a study by state and federal scientists finds “alarming,” elevated cancer risks along highway corridors caused by air pollution.

click to view image

Here’s a quote from the report:

“The risk is far higher . . . in South Seattle areas next to highways, the study found. Those places can be expected to produce as many as 3,600 cancer cases per million people exposed over a 70-year lifetime.

Eric de Place at The Daily Score points out how high this rate is . . .

“For context, when the risk exceeds 1 per million, environmental agencies have typically acted to reduce the risk. So 3,600 is a scary figure.”

. . . and notes that, while this particular study was just for south Seattle, the findings likely apply elsewhere as well.

The harm from air pollution isn’t limited to cancer. Pollution also causes outbreaks of asthma, bronchitis and other lung diseases and contributes to heart attacks and strokes.

A draft of the report is available here.

The Center for American progress has released an article on the health impacts of global warming titled The Human Side of Global Warming, by Daniel J. Weiss and Robin Pam.

They identify severe health effects linked to global warming to include the following:

• More illness and death resulting from heat waves.
• Worsening air pollution causes more respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
• Vector-borne disease infections will rise.
• Changing food production and security may cause hunger.
• More severe and frequent wildfires will threaten more people.
• Flooding linked to rising sea levels will displace millions.

A new Commonwealth Fund-supported study comparing preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries found that the United States placed last.

Oh, and by the way – the U.S. spends ‘way more per capita on health care than any other developed country – a disparity that is not explained by a higher disease burden. The research shows that the U.S. population is not significantly sicker than the other countries studied.

While the other nations improved dramatically between the two study periods—1997–98 and 2002–03—the U.S. improved only slightly on the measure.

In 1997–98, the U.S. ranked 15th out of the 19 countries on this measure—ahead of only Finland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Ireland—with a rate of 114.7 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2002–03, the U.S. fell to last place, with 109.7 per 100,000. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.

“Amenable mortality” is a measure of the rate of deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care. The concept of amenable mortality was developed in the 1970s to assess the quality and performance of health systems and to track changes over time.