Category: News

Around 2,000 people surrounded Parliament House in Canberra last weekend wearing red and carrying banners emblazoned with the slogan Climate Emergency.

It was the first day’s sitting of Parliament for 2009 and the protestors had travelled to Canberra to let the Australian government know how angy they are about Rudd’s lack of action on climate change.

The vast majority of the 1.500 people who attended a Climate Summit at the Australian National University over the weekend were ordinary voters, not members of political groups or funded non-government organisations.

The protest went largely unreported in the press, despite stark evidence of global warming in the worst heat-wave in history, major flooding across northern Australia and significant shifts in climate policy in the United States.

 

From Money Management

Climate change is both a threat and an opportunity.

Most people realise the link between general insurance claims and climate change. The more extreme the weather, the more likely property damage will increase, and the more likely the threat of claims. The opportunity results from more research being conducted in this area, and thus more accurate risk assessment is possible.

However, there has been far less analysis on how extreme climate change could affect the life insurance industry. Between 1980 and 2004, more than 600,000 deaths occurred because of flood, storm, or other weather-related conditions.

As the climate changes, different types of conditions will affect the health and wellbeing of the population.

Climate change may also cause natural disasters that affect water supplies and spread water-borne diseases.

As the temperature rises, and precipitation changes, the most likely initial risk will be vector prone diseases. These diseases thrive in warm, wet weather, and are often transmitted by mosquitoes or flies. The diseases include malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis and schistosomiasis.

Malaria causes over 2.7 million deaths each year. Dengue causes severe fevers and reduces a person’s immune system. Encephalitis causes inflammation of the brain. Schistosomiasis is the second most common tropical disease (after malaria).

These diseases are already prevalent in neighbouring countries like Indonesia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. It is suggested that within the next 15 years, the Australian climate will be ideal for the spread of these diseases. And while these diseases are prevalent in third world countries, developed nations are ill-prepared.

With changes in climate come changes in animal populations. Since 1980, there have been 17 mice plagues in Australia (seven in Queensland, three in New South Wales, three in South Australia, and four in Victoria).

While mice cause significant destruction to crops, the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome is far more worrisome.

This deadly lung infection has a mortality rate of 50 per cent, and no known vaccine. This disease is contracted when people breathe in dust that is contaminated with saliva, urine, or excreta from infected rodents. In the 1800s this was commonly known as the ‘Black Death’.

The CSIRO believes the next mice plague will hit Australia by 2011.

As we have recently witnessed in Queensland, changes in weather patterns can result in rains that cause flooding. In severe cases, this may contaminate water supplies with such diseases as pfiesteria, cryptosporidium or toxoplasmosis.

Pfiesteria is a toxic infection that can result in severe health problems. Cryptosporidium is a small parasitic organism that infects the small intestine, resulting in diarrhoea, vomiting, stomach cramps and fever. Toxoplasmosis affects more than 60 million people globally and is caused by water supplies contaminated by animal faeces (such as livestock manure).

On the other hand, extreme heat without rain may result in excessively dry conditions that promote the growth of algae in lakes and riverbeds.

These are the perfect conditions for the growth of vibrio cholera in water supplies. With human infection comes severe diarrhoea, vomiting, leg cramps and rapid loss of body fluids. Without treatment, death can occur within hours.

Unseasonably high temperatures cause heat stress to individuals. Those who experience breathing problems such as asthma, bronchitis or emphysema will have more difficulty as temperatures continue to increase.

It is anticipated that an increase of three degrees in average temperature will increase the annual death toll by more than 10 per cent.

What does this mean to your clients?

The risks that average Australians face are constantly changing and while mortality/morbidity rates have improved with enhancements in medical diagnosis and treatment, there are many new and long recurring risks lurking in the background.

Without sounding alarmist, some of these risks – particularly flood, bushfires and some emerging sicknesses – strike without warning.

Give your clients peace of mind and ensure they have adequate cover in place for term, trauma, total and permanent disablement (TPD) and income protection.

Jeffrey Scott

Jeffrey Scott is executive manager, Business Growth Services, CommInsure.

From the UK Guardian

Unless there is timely action on climate change, California’s agricultural bounty could be reduced to a dust bowl and its cities disappear, Barack Obama’s energy secretary said yesterday.

The apocalyptic scenario sketched out by Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate appointed as energy secretary, was the clearest sign to date of the greening of America’s political class under the new president.

In blunt language, Chu said Americans had yet to fully understand the urgency of dealing with climate change. “I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he told the Los Angeles Times in his first interview since taking the post. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

Chu’s doomsday descriptions were seen yesterday as further evidence that, after eight years of denial under George Bush, the Obama White House recognises the severity of climate change.

Chu is not a climate scientist, and won his Nobel for his work on lasers. But he was well-known at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for his outspoken concern about climate change and his commitment to developing clean energy long before Obama appointed him.

The language he used yesterday, though stark, was in step with a co-ordinated effort by Obama’s officials and Democrats in Congress to project an image of consensus among policy makers in Washington on the need to move America away from fossil fuels and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

In the interview, Chu said raising public awareness was crucial to that transformation. “I’m hoping that the American people will wake up.”

He blamed warmer temperatures for the acceleration in California’s cycle of droughts. Global warming had caused a decline and evaporation of the Sierra mountains snow-pack, which had served as a natural storage system for the spring run-off that helped irrigate California’s valleys and provided water to its cities.

Chu said up to 90% of the Sierra snow-pack could disappear, eliminating those sources of water.

Scientists have long cited the declining spring run-off as a contributing cause of California’s wildfires. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has blamed climate change for making forest fires a year-round threat.

California’s department of water resources said last week that the state’s snow-pack was at 61% of normal levels. The reduction is especially worrying because of the severely dry spring of 2008, leaving the state with little water in reserve. Two dozen local water agencies have already imposed rationing.

There are heightened concerns about water shortages in the west and upper midwest as well. Earlier this year, the journal Science warned of worldwide crop shortages because of rising temperatures.

Obama ran a presidential campaign pledging to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the middle of the century. He made his first move to redeeming that promise last week when he ordered the environmental protection agency to reconsider its refusal, when Bush was president, to allow California and 13 other states regulate car exhaust emissions.

He also directed the car industry to produce cars that can achieve 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

In the two weeks since Obama’s inauguration, there have been almost daily meetings and conferences on the environment on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. After the Bush era, when science and concern about the environment took a back seat to business interests, administration officials have taken it almost as their mantra that they put science first in dealing with climate change.

They also say they will press hard to retain green measures in the economic rescue package now before Congress, and for legislation regulating greenhouse gas emissions this year.

Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, said on Tuesday she hoped to produce a draft bill reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the end of this year. Henry Waxman, her counterpart in the House of Representatives, has set an even more ambitious target, saying he aims to have a draft out of the committee by the end of May.

But the extent of public support is less clear, and a number of leading Republicans remain implacably opposed to the idea that global warming exists. Recent opinion polls suggest that the economic recession has eclipsed concern about the environment.

Democrats insist that the downturn should not prevent action on greenhouse gas emissions. “If you want to fight this recession, do it by mobilising to become energy independent with clean energy and really save this planet,” said Boxer.

But America’s credit crisis appears to have stopped the growth of the wind and solar power industries in their tracks. Factories building components for wind turbines and solar panels have been letting staff go.