This is not an imaginary future dystopia. It’s a scientific projection of Australia under 3°C of global warming – a future we must both strenuously try to avoid, but also prepare for.
Heat waves can kill via dehydration caused by heavy sweating. Breathing or heartbeat may suddenly stop. Prolonged overheating can also create widespread inflammation.
Do you have a question about climate change? This collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre gives you the chance to ask – and we’ll provide expert answers.
As organs go, lungs do not receive a lot of attention, and diseases associated with them, such as lung cancer, historically have been underfunded. Here’s a look at how your amazing lungs function.
Garth Heutel, Georgia State University; David Molitor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Nolan Miller, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Many parts of the US have experienced extreme heat or extreme cold in the past year. Recent research projects that climate change will increase deaths from both types of weather, especially cold spells.
Sydneysiders cool off in heatwave conditions gripping eastern Australia in January 2017.
AAP Image/Joel Carrett
The unanticipated public health consequences of unsustainable development reminds the world that the issues are not in the distant future, but instead face us now.
Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, in a meeting last year with Obama, called climate change ‘a new kind of threat we are facing.’
Gary Cameron/Reuters
Academics are studying whether talking about climate change as a health risk, rather than an environmental or economic issue, will dispel Americans’ general indifference to global warming.
Cutting emissions will limit health damages and bring about important health improvements.
Pedro Ribeiro Simões/Flickr
Tackling climate change is the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century, a team of 60 international experts today declared in a special report for the medical journal The Lancet.
Is Bill Gates’ desire to help tackle the world’s problems compatible with his foundation’s huge fossil fuel investments?
EPA/Cole Burston
The Gates Foundation is being urged to dump its sizeable fossil fuel assets. Bill Gates cares deeply about world health and development, both of which are affected by climate, but will his charity divest?
Blame poverty, not the climate.
Otis Historical Archives
Climate change will cause all sorts of problems for humans in the future. It could cause mass migration and conflict as people flee flooded homes or arid farmland, and fight over ever more scarce resources…
A primary carrier of the Chikungunya virus, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) could easily hop to mainland Australia from Torres Strait islands.
Camponotus Vagus
Chikungunya is a virus transmitted to people by mosquitoes; it usually causes a non-fatal but debilitating illness. Despite thousands of people being infected each year in Africa, Asia and Melanesia, chikungunya…
This is not Naegleria fowleri, but it’ll do to put the horrors of climate change on your mind.
Andrés Monroy-Hernández/Flickr
An influential US blog about climate change recently featured the story of a “brain-eating” infectious parasite that has caused 31 deaths in that country in the past decade. “Brain-eating” is just one…
Professor - Environment, Climate and Global Health at Melbourne Climate Futures and Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, The University of Melbourne