Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 25

Most significant among the ecological crises Earthlings now face is global warming. Earth’s temperature has risen by 1.4 °F over the last 100 years, and is predicted to rise to 11.5 °F in the next few decades. Despite various disagreements about regional and temporal variations in temperature, the vast majority of climate scientists recognize both that the planet is getting hotter and that fossil fuel technology is playing a fundamental role in this risky process. Today, the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere is the greatest it has been in 400 000 years, having jumped from about 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution to about 410 ppm today. In the final report of The Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change (Costello et al. 2009), the warming of Earth was labeled “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” a conclusion affirmed by the Commission in 2015 (Watts et al. 2015). The WHO (2018) estimates there will be approximately 250 000 additional deaths due to climate change per year between 2030 and 2050, due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. People living in coastal regions, megacities, island communities, and mountainous and polar regions are particularly vulnerable, especially children and elderly people. Notably, disproportionate morbidity and mortality rises due to climate change will affect the poorest and least powerful global citizens (Singer 2018).

The hottest year on record was 2016, with 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018 representing the next four hottest since the measurement of annual records began 139 years ago. As Climate Central (2018) points out “[w]ith the five warmest years occurring during the past five years—and the 20 warmest occurring over the past 22—a consistent warming trend couldn’t be clearer.” The trend continues. June of 2019 was the warmest June ever recorded. For climate scientists like Sarah Green, an environmental chemist at Michigan Technological University, “[a]t this point, the inexorable increase in global temperatures is entirely predictable” (quoted in Kaufman 2019).