Climate change to worsen urban air quality, lifting death toll

Days of severe pollution in Australia's biggest cities will worsen in coming decades as a warming climate triggers more intense temperature inversion events, exacerbating health issues, according to new research.

Fog and smog across the Sydney Basin on the coldest morning of the year so far.

With more than 3000 premature deaths a year in Australia already linked to urban air pollution, worsening low-level air quality could increase the toll, said Jason Evans, a professor at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and a co-author of the report published recently in the Climate Dynamics journal.

Read the story from The Age by Peter Hannam - “Climate change to worsen urban air quality, lifting death toll.”

The Irma Diaries: Hurricane Irma Survivor Stories Should Be a Climate Change Wake-Up Call

There’s a popular quote often attributed to Mark Twain that was used in a radio ad in the Virgin Islands many years ago: “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it….”

A man walks on a street covered in debris after Hurricane
Irma passed on the French island of Saint-Martin, on September 8, 2017. 

It always seemed strangely inappropriate in a place where people seldom talk about the weather, and where blue skies produce picture postcard days and temperatures seldom vary from the mid-80s. In the islands, the saying goes, as in much of the Caribbean, the weather is pretty predictable.

But really, it is not.

Rising sea levels, longer dry spells and erosion of precious beaches are affecting people’s lives and livelihoods. And in her new book, The Irma Diaries: Compelling Survivor Stories from The Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands author Angela Burnett warns that unless there’s some real movement to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, the series of deadly hurricanes that churned their way through the Caribbean in September 2017 could be a glimpse into a future of unprecedented weather.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by Lornet Turnbull - “The Irma Diaries: Hurricane Irma Survivor Stories Should Be a Climate Change Wake-Up Call.”