Climate Change pt2 People

So, now that we have gone over the fact that the threat to plants and animals doesn't bother me we will move on to some people issues.

With the types of problems that should be happening with climate change a lot of people are going to die or be injured. I think that there is a fair amount of this that is needless. Most of the needless deaths will be those people who for reasons that I don't understand refuse to move out of harms way.

We have seen people in the news who won't move out of the way, and I don't just mean those who move away for good, because there is no place that is safe from every natural disaster (well, I heard of a study conducted once to find the safest place to live in the states when thinking about natural disasters and it was rural Vermont or New Hampshire.) The west coast has earthquakes, the west has drought and wildfires, the central states have drought then flooding then more drought, then there are the hurricanes, tornados, ice storms, and avalanches, for other areas. The point is that there are few if any places to truly get away for a long time, but there are things to do to mitigate risk. Like evacuating when asked (though not necessarily to where the government wants you to.) Having a plan to get out of the way when something is going to happen, or after it happens should save lots of lives.

Another thing to mitigate the destruction of natural disaster is to practice better stewardship of the land we are on. Development on islands that used to take the brunt of storms weakens entire area, so does the draining of swamps, or not allowing rivers to change course occasionally. Nature itself often creates systems to allow for a quick return to homeostasis, and if we work with those systems instead of creating our own we would be in much better shape.

But the big problem is those people who haven't the resources to plan, or remove themselves from disaster. I think of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world, where people die by the thousands every year in floods. With global climate change and rising sea levels that country will be loosing more land, leading to increased crowding, poorly made environments and compounding deaths due to natural disasters. 

In our own country there are more resources for providing for the poor, or enfeebled, opportunities available to get them out of harms way.

In the lecture I talked about in the preceding post one long term strategy was to create denser urban environments so that all people would contribute less to climate change, and so that goods and services would be more easily distributed after disasters.

My question was that wouldn't denser environments pose potentially greater threats to human health and well being, and also contribute to climate change?

When people are crowded together disease spreads more rapidly leading to greater illness and death. There is also the urban heat island effect where dense areas become a few degrees hotter then the surrounding area leading to severely localized micro-climates which have more intense weather, and weather related disaster. Also with heat islands the infirm die at greater rates (remember continental europe a few years ago?), as well as children.

I say this not because I do or do not think that dense urban environments are better than sprawl, I am just saying that there are so many ramifications to any major shift in how people interact with the environment that plans and policy need to be well thought out and strategies should try to address the problems foreseen by the solution to the current problems. And part of that is identifying the actual motivations we have for solving a problem. 

It makes me think of a new despair.com tag "Government: If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions."