Climate change is bad for your health

It's certainly bad for my health - reading endless scaremongering stories about how climate change causes everything from hurricanes to ingrowing toenails (actually, I think ingrowing toenails are one of the few things left on earth not attributed to climate change). The Australian runs an article by David Shearman and Michael Kidd, both from "Doctors for the Environment Australia", who inform us that "wherever you live, climate change threatens your health":

Climate change will bring to Australia an increased burden of heat stress, injury from fire and storm, social disruption and mental illness; in the developing world it will bring famine, water shortage and dislocation of populations with calls to Australia to assist resettlement. The coming disruption of ecological services that provide humanity's life-support system is likely to have far-reaching health impacts on food and water resources and on the spread of infective disease.

And then they praise the "health benefits" of renewable energy:

It is non-polluting and reduces reliance on fossil fuels, which emit carbon dioxide and many other pollutants responsible for much cardio-respiratory disease. Renewable energy is decreasing in cost and creates many more jobs per equivalent amount of power than does fossil fuel. It can be used as a distributed energy source, a positive for social welfare and health as it distributes employment opportunities to regional and rural centres where the burden of stress, depression and suicide is increasingly prevalent.

Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant, and I have never heard any evidence that it causes cardio-respiratory disease. And stating that renewable energy "creates many more jobs" is the same as saying that it is hopelessly expensive and inefficient. And the article concludes with the usual cri de coeur:

We must act now, for in the words of the French philosopher, Paul Valery, "the future, like everything else, is not what it used to be".

Read it here.