Climate Change Affects Our Health Too!

Now doctors too have entered the fray against climate change. Rising temperatures on a global scale is said to play havoc with human health, so the doctors say. Existing patterns of infection will change for the worse, so we are warned. Dengue and malaria will be on the increase.
Added to these will be heat waves and they will recur more often than now, not to mention cyclones, hurricanes and storms that cause floods and the resultant calamities.
Richard Horton, editor of the prestigious medical journal Lancet stated that doctors have totally ignored this issue until now. The ultimate sufferers will be our future generations.
To make matters worse, there will be shortages of water and food. The former alone has caused a lot of armed conflicts in the past according to Prof Hugh Montgomery of the University College, London.
As it often happens, poor people will have to bear the brunt of all these. This does not mean that rich countries like the USA and UK are exempt from this process. Floods, forest fires and the like are almost daily fare for new agencies these days.
A report commissioned by the University College, London says that all the external manifestations of climate change like emission of green house gases, melting of ice sheets, temperature and sea-level rises, ocean acidification and extreme climatic conditions suggest that the forecasts hitherto made my government agencies are conservative to a high degree.
To overcome this negative factor, Prof Costello wants to kill two birds with a single stone. If folk walked or bicycled more and motored less, it would considerably reduce stress, obesity, lung and heart disease and release less carbon into the already dying atmosphere.
A blessing in disguise?

Thumbs Up To President Obama

Hail to The Chief

Mammoth automobiles guzzling gas like nobody’s business rule the roost on American expressways. Shortsighted politicians who can’t see beyond their noses help the process along all the way.
Now, all that is going to change with the advent of the brand new President Obama. As soon as he appeared on the automobile horizon he looked around and said ‘enough is enough’.
Ideally, politicians, especially those in power, should be the watchdogs of all that is good in society. But by and large they close to their eyes to unimportant things like carbon emissions and global warming, in the name of progress and development. Some even protect the interests of the auto makers who are intent only on profits and let the environment with everything in it go to hell. Some even line their cozy pockets with the loot got from the avaricious industrialists. These politicians do not have the guts to face the automakers and order them to make their products fuel efficient or else.
Now a politician of a different ilk has made the scene, a person who is gritty enough to tell the automakers the buck stops here. Now those fellows in Detroit crowding the gates of the White House with their begging bowls have to comply with the new order of things whether they like it or not.
This unique president informs us now that the changes that he has prescribed will bring about a sea change in climatic conditions. And when his edicts come into force, it is like shutting down of 194 coal burning plants or taking away 58 million autos off the roads for a year.
At long last, the USA, the worst polluter of this God’s green globe is trying hard to reverse the process it has started in the first place, thereby creating a precedent for the evil offenders like China and India with their coal-fired, black-smoke-belching plants that advance commerce only to harm the human beings. Let us hope that these offending countries will realize their mistake and close down such plants that benefit none.
The environmentalists can make a little sigh of relief for the dark clouds give way and a small silver lining is visible in the near horizon.
Long live President Obama who has the courage of his convictions, something a politician sorely lacks.