by PATRICK LEJTENYI

As the UN Climate Change Conference, with its thousands of delegates, reporters, scientists and observers, descends on Montreal next week, it’s high time we take stock of the planet’s overall health. Like a chronic smoker, the Earth is not in good physical shape. Too much carbon dioxide hovers over our atmosphere, trapping heat and causing grave, often catastrophic natural disasters. Almost every planetary scientist in the world recognizes the dangers, even if they can’t agree on some of the finer details.

As the world governments prepare to draft a post-Kyoto Accord resolution, the Mirror spoke to several leading experts about the host of ailments currently afflicting the Earth and its human inhabitants courtesy of global warming.

Disease

Symptoms: According to the World Health Organization, global warming could lead to the deaths of up to 150,000 people and five million illnesses a year. In another 25 years, those figures could double. In the scientific journal Nature, lead author Jonathan Patz, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, argues that global warming is driving up rates of malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea and flooding. Most of those affected live in the developing world.

Diagnosis: “As warmer air holds more moisture, we’re experiencing heavier rainfall and run-offs, which creates a problem regarding water-born contaminants,” says Patz. “Looking at data from the past 50 years, we see that two-thirds of outbreaks of water-borne diseases were preceded by very heavy rainfall.”

Patz says the WHO estimates are “very conservative,” and do not take into consideration heat-related deaths. The heat wave that swamped Europe in 2003, for example, is now estimated to have taken 45,000 lives. “Even if 40 to 50 per cent of the people who died during the heat wave would have died that summer anyway because they were extremely old, that still leaves a very significant number of deaths,” says Patz. “Statistically speaking, the heat wave was so outside the norm that maybe it is an indication of a new climate regime.”

Recommended treatment: “We need to start looking at climate change as a public health problem,” says Patz. “Most diseases afflict children, so health interventions need to take many levels.”

Drought

Symptoms: As snow fields and glaciers in the Rockies disappear, and winter snows are replaced by rain over the Prairies, farmers are seeing their crops wither and die. Temperatures in the Prairies are already three to four degrees warmer than they usually are, and some glaciers have shrunk by 25 to 37 per cent, says professor David Schindler, of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta.

Diagnosis: “We’re seeing more precipitation falling as rain, instead of accumulating in snow packs,” Schindler says. “So it seeps away all winter with periodic melts. There’s also an increase in evaporation.” Schindler also points out that, according to recent studies, the 20th century was an abnormally wet one, without several mega-droughts that affected previous centuries. “The chances we can escape another century without at least one mega-drought are pretty remote.”

Recommended treatment: “Water conservation could go a long way,” he says. Schindler recommends rewarding conservation leaders in water-heavy industries like livestock, using more untreated water for indoor plumbing and irrigation, and enforcing existing water policies and management principles. If we don’t, he says, and another mega-drought comes along, “The Prairies, and especially Alberta, are going to find out what water scarcity is all about.”

Schindler will speak more about this problem next Wednesday, Nov. 30 at UQÀM (200 Sherbrooke W., SH-2800, 7 p.m., free).

Flooding

Symptoms: Despite a lack of consistent, reliable, observational data, climatologists have noticed an increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall. Ongoing research involving climate models, some with high levels of carbon dioxide to others with less, does indicate that global warming may lead to heavier rainfalls and more flooding, says professor Charles Lin, director of the Global and Environmental Climate Change Centre at McGill.

Diagnosis: “What concerns governments and the public is how flooding will affect the economy, human well-being and human life,” says Lin. Society is increasingly vulnerable to extreme events, in particular how they affect transportation, power distribution and communication. Ice storms similar to the one that covered Montreal in 1998 occurred in the past, but the effects weren’t nearly as severe because there were no roads that had to be closed, power grids that collapsed or heating systems that couldn’t be turned on. “As societies become more vulnerable, human suffering is likely to increase regardless of climate change.”

Recommended treatment: “If the emphasis is to save lives, better warning systems would obviously help,” says Lin. “But saving property is more difficult. We could build more dams and more dykes, but that isn’t too popular these days because of the effects they have on other ecosystems.”

Forest fires

Symptoms: Since the mid-1970s, the average area of forest burned has gone from around one million hectares to 2.6 million. “That’s about half the size of Nova Scotia,” says Mike Flannigan, a research scientist at the federal Canadian Forest Service in Sault Ste. Marie. “That’s a fair chunk of real estate.” Forest fires also contribute to global warming: Flannigan says that for every kilogram of wood burned, half of it winds up in the atmosphere as carbon. A bad forest fire year can release an equal amount of carbon emissions as the worldwide burning of fossil fuels.

Diagnosis: “Fuel needs to be dry to burn,” says Flannigan. “You need about a week of hot, dry weather for forest fires to start, regardless of how much rainfall you had previously. And wind is very important.”

Flannigan says that lightning is responsible for about 35 per cent of Canada’s forest fires, but that those are responsible for about 85 per cent of the area burned, mostly because they tend to start in the hinterland, far from human settlements. But thunderstorms are caused by atmospheric conditions, which are affected by human activity.

Recommended treatment: There isn’t much that countries like Canada can do that they aren’t doing already, says Flannigan. “We have a very modern and efficient fire management service, one of the best in the world,” he says. “Most fires are reported rapidly, and 97 to 99 per cent of them are put out rapidly. But that one to three per cent that get out of control are the ones responsible for 97 per cent of area burned, so it’s like the tail wagging the dog.”

Indifference and denial

Symptoms: The biggest polluter in the world, the United States, said it would not comply with the Kyoto protocol, which calls for industrialized nations to cut their emissions by 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. But environmental groups have criticized Canada for having done little to meet its own Kyoto requirements, which became legally binding in February 2005. Part of the problem is the division of powers to the province, with Alberta the most reluctant to comply. But earlier this week, four Quebec environmental groups—Greenpeace, Équiterre, Environnement Jeunesse and Nature Québec—announced that they no longer trust the Charest government to do the right environmental thing.

Diagnosis: The four groups cited the “inertia and lack of will on the part of [Quebec Environment Minister Thomas] Mulcair regarding several environmental projects, as well as a recent series of incoherent decisions.” In particular, the groups deride the lack of a Kyoto action plan for Quebec, the decision to extend Highway 25 and the lack of a new financing plan for public transportation.

“Kyoto is just the beginning,” says Greenpeace Quebec director Steven Guilbeault. “We need to reduce our emissions by 60 to 80 per cent for global temperatures to reach a new level of equilibrium. We are now putting twice as much carbon in the atmosphere as the planet can recuperate.”

Recommended treatment: “Obviously we need to stop subsidizing polluters,” says Guilbeault. “For every dollar we put aside to meet our Kyoto targets, Canada invests $2 in subsidies to the oil and gas industries. We need to massively invest renewable energy and energy efficiency, we need massive investment in public transit, and we need to stop increasing the number of cars on the road.”