I have the bizarre honor of introducing myself for the next talk, and probably not surprising that I think this is one of the major global health challenges facing humanity, climate change. My goal is simple, to educate you on the link between climate change and human health. I see this as the key to change in our collective risk assessment thereby changing our political will to effect change. We'll start by making the case for anthropogenic human induced changes to our planet. Hello, we're going to start today with what I think is the greatest challenge to global health in the coming decades, climate change. And by that I mean the link between climate change and human health. Global consensus on action has been elusive, and the different views between industrial and developing economies has precluded substantive collective action. Here in the United States, conversations have taken on a political tone with the science of climate change being a casualty of this debate. Therefore, that's where we'll start. In this two part lecture, we'll first look at the signs put forth by the best minds across the world and just what the best evidence supports on the changes happening to our planet. Then we'll explore what these changes mean for our collective health and how some global citizens will disproportionately bear the brunt of these consequences, and so the best signs. You can find it through the inter-governmental panel on climate change, the IPCC. It's a group working under the auspices of the United Nations. And since 1988 has put forth quadrennial reports on the most recent, scientific, technical and socio-economic information available world wide. It's extraordinarily difficult to get one's work sited in the IPCC. The standards are designed to withstand incredible scrutiny, and is therefore considered the gold standard on the best available climate science. In 2013, the fifth assessment reported the IPCC, the AR5 for shorthand, began to release its working group findings. The overall consensus on what is happening according to the scientific community is no longer up for debate. IPCC chair Bob Watson. Up until now, the criticism has been that climate science is like a house of cards, and if you pull out one or two sets of data, it all collapses. That narrative has been refuted. The AR5 shows that observational evidence for human-caused warming is overwhelming, compelling, and irrefutable. Atmosphere concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in the last 800,000 years. Carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions. The science done to determine is ingenious. Ice cores are drilled into the polar caps in Greenland and Antarctica. These cores present ife and, ice and snow deposited over eons, and within that are ice are trapped air bubbles. Pure atmospheric samples. We're therefore able to literally test the air for the last 800,000 years. The record is disturbing. You can see here that we're now falling off the charts. Even considering planetary fluctuation's in atmosphere, carbon dioxide and methane from the ice ages. We see exponential changes in the concentrations of the last 150 years, not seen in the previous 800 thousand. In 2013, we saw for the first time that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide exceed 400 parts per million measured at the Manoa observatory in Hawaii. Each of the last three decades have been excessively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the northern hemisphere, 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30 year period of the last 1,400 years. The global ocean will continue to warm during the 21st century heat will penetrate from the surface to the deep ocean and affect ocean circulation. It's very likely that the Arctic sea ice cover will continue to shrink and thin and that Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover will decrease during the 21st century. As polar ice melts, there is a double whammy effect, as land or water has less reflective properties than light colored snow. So the warming effect is compounded by what's called the Albedo refractive effect. Over the period from 1901 to 2010, global mean sea level rose by 19 centimeters and has accelerated between 1993 to 2010. At the current rate, the accelerated sea level rise could result in one meter, and in the worst case, 1.5 meter rise by the end of the century. As you can see here the more carbon dioxide that is absorbed by the oceans will shift the acidity of the water measured as pH. This changes the very chemical composition of the water affecting all marine life including major fisheries in the biodiverse coral reefs. Changes in the water cycle in response to the warming over the 21st century will not be uniform. The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will increase, although there may be some regional exceptions. These are very complex systems that we're talking about, and complex systems do not always respond in ways that are intuitive or predictable. For instance, here is the U.S.A., as global warming increases, we saw one of the coldest winters on record last year. And thus, the challenge of science communication in the face of seemingly contradictory data. Such confusion creates a vast psychological distance between understanding climate threats and initiating action. And when you combine this with the insidious, slow climate changes that are barely perceptible on a daily basis. Personal and policy decisions are undercut by a fear of commitment to any particular course of action, leaving inertia as the best rational choice. So we have to do better in communicating these risks to our friends, families, and our policymakers. I boil it down to this. Take a complex system, add energy, and you get unpredictability. Rather than thinking about global warming as purely as hotter planet, I explain it as adding energy to a complex system, and that's when things can go haywire. So, I decided to help explain this performing my own experiment. The most complex system I know is my three-year-old daughter. How would this complex system respond by adding raw energy into it? Our hypothesis was that more energy equates to a more energetic child. And that's indeed what we initially saw. Our predictions were further confirmed when we observed supra-physiologic energy levels. But then we quickly saw a paradoxical response of hyper somnolence. Followed by bizarre and irrational behavior never before observed, well beyond two standard deviations on both sides of the bell curve as outliers from our historical data. To summarize, the IPPC fifth assessment report is providing substantive and unambiguous data on the unprecedented changes to our ecosystems. Global warming means increased unpredictability and extremes, not just a warmer planet. In the next lecture, we'll carry on this conversation to see how these changes threaten our health, and how we might be able to reframe our global conversation on minimizing the threats from climate change.
