“There are many other factors that affect crime, ranging from the economy to culture to changes in socioeconomic factors,” Ranson told the media in interviews, adding that a warmer world would still be a force playing in the background. “There has been a strong historical relationship between temperature and crime, and that is likely to continue in the future. Climate change is going to affect our lives in a variety of ways. It is going to affect the social fabric of the places where we live.”
The broader context, he said, is that climate change could influence our lives in a number of ways beyond how much water we can spare for farming and such. “Now, there is reason to believe it will also impact social connections in our neighborhoods, the amount of time we allow our children to spend outside, and how much we are willing to spend on law enforcement.”
THE FUTURE
Scientists increasingly believe that rising temperatures are contributing to a wide variety of diseases that are spreading and becoming common across different parts of the world. In 2009, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a report that stated, in part, “Global warming threatens to further exacerbate the spread of many infectious diseases because increases in heat, precipitation, and humidity can foster better conditions for tropical and subtropical insects to survive and thrive in places previously inhospitable to those diseases.”
Dengue fever, it said, was on top among those diseases. Also known as breakbone fever, dengue fever has had an alarming rise in recent years, particularly in hot and humid countries like Brazil and India. It claims thousands of lives each year and is treated like an epidemic. Once considered a disease exclusive to the tropics, dengue fever has increased by thirtyfold in the last five decades and has spread to wider regions, including 28 states in the U.S.
“Warmer temperatures boost the speed of development of adult mosquitoes, increasing their numbers,” the report said. “Female mosquitoes bite more frequently in hotter temperatures, and warmer winters enable mosquitoes to survive in areas that were formerly too cold. Higher temperatures also shorten the time it takes for the virus inside the mosquito to develop and become infective.” While dengue fever may be the biggest of our worries, it’s not the only one.
Another unpleasant creature that thrives in warmer waters and has been spotted more frequently in recent years is the Naegleria fowleri, or N. fowleri, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is “a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it thrives. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.” N. fowleri is particularly nasty. Lurking in water and inhaled during a swim on a hot summer’s day, it travels through the nasal passage of the victim and into the brain, where it feeds on cerebral fluid and gray matter, eventually leading to the victim’s death.
Then there’s valley fever, which infects more than 150,000 people per year. It was historically found only in the dry regions of the Southwest but has now been spotted in eastern Washington as well. Tick season seems to last longer too, starting earlier and ending later.
In fact, there are a number of organisms that are exhibiting changed behaviors as a result of climate change that could affect human health in the years to come. Global warming is responsible for doubling bark-beetle mating, which leads to an increase in tree attacks as much as 60 fold. It results in other huge environmental impacts, such as a decline in shelled creatures that could trigger an explosion in jellyfish populations.
Recently, scientists at Harvard have been worried about how climate change will make invasive plant species even more dominant in the landscape. Charles C. Davis, researcher and assistant professor at Harvard’s Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology said, “Invasive species can be intensely destructive to biodiversity, ecosystem function, agriculture, and human health.” According to him, “In the United States alone, the estimated annual cost of invasive species exceeds $120 billion. Our results could help in developing predictive models to assess the threat of future invasive species, which may become greatly exacerbated in the face of continued climate change.”
This article was originally published in the Summer 2014 issue of Brain World Magazine.
