The pictures above and to the right are the most important conceptual diagram in the whole book. It shows the likely burden of disease from the primary, secondary and tertiary effects of climate change (y axis) and my guess of the year at which the effects are likely to be widely accepted as causally related by the general and even the scientific community.
Two major European heatwaves since 2000 (France and Russia) killed over 100,000 people, between them. Both extreme events are likely to have been contributed to by climate change. Secondary effects, such as changes to vector-borne diseases, probably have a lower burden of disease. There has been greater scientific resistance to their reality, but this is fading. Tertiary effects such as the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to the conflicts in Sudan and Syria are still regarded as speculative by most people, including many scientists. These events have the potential to cause a burden of disease at least of an order of magnitude higher than the others. Waiting for complete consensus is to wait too long. See also: Climate change and heath: primary, secondary and tertiary effects |