Climate Change Emergency
Leading climate change experts and organizations have observed that the world urgently needs a worldwide emergency response to the deteriorating planetary climate change crisis.
CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY MEDICAL RESPONSE provides the online resources for this most vital emergency response ever.
Scientists, clinicians, and health professionals have called for attention to climate change on both practical and ethical grounds. Several well-established principles point to a vigorous, proactive public health approach to climate change. But this is not happening.
— Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH,
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
to the American Public Health Association, March 2008
The mission of
CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY MEDICAL RESPONSE
is to secure a SAFE GLOBAL CLIMATE
for today's children worldwide and for future generations.
To do this we propose that global climate change be addressed as the human rights / population health / survival issue of our time, potentially of all time.
Clearly, the current "management model" is not working. A new, more effective approach would be the well known and proven medical emergency assessment and management model. Over the past couple of decades, the field of medicine has developed a specialized medical emergency and management model that is super effective and is very different from standard medical assessment and management.
Right now the life of the planet (the essential ecosystems of the biosphere) — meaning the health and survival of future generations — is in peril. According to Hansen et al (2007), tipping points could be breached at any time. If we allow this to happen, we will have no way of controlling the situation and a planetary cataclysm will be unleashed (ibid). Right now then, Code Red must be called for the Earth, in the hope of saving our planet and our future.
The medical model would include integrated climate change risk assessment (specifically for the health and survival of human populations) and precautionary catastrophic-risk-averse medical model mitigation (treatment) plans.
This would be a major upgrade to how global change is being addressed now. Global climate change is a uniquely deadly threat to humanity and needs a uniquely effective extreme precautionary risk assessment and management model.
GLOBAL "CLIMATE SAFETY" FIRST
Our hope is to catalyze an international
DECLARATION OF THE DANGEROUS GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
STATE OF EMERGENCY
led by the human rights, education, and health care communities.
As the May 2009 Lancet-University College London report, Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change, pointed out, global climate change needs to be solved by leading professionals from several disciplines, who all have a stake in the crisis, all working together.
Our intention is to focus discussions of global climate change on the worst risks to the most vulnerable populations, rather than the current approach of assessing the most likely impacts based on computer model projections. We also need to work for the inclusion of carbon feedbacks in scientific assessments of global climate change.
Our goal is to provide an ethics-based human rights and population health definition of "dangerous interference with the climate system," to inform the decisions of governments and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations.
Our mission is ...
- to help raise a strong voice for the ethic of precaution and population survival risk assessment, which should be given first priority in planning and policy making for the protection of human population health from global climate change, for this and all future generations;
- to give strong support to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endangerment finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants, and to work for other nations to follow the example ;
- to provide a one-stop planetary emergency response site for human rights, aid, education, and healing professionals;
- to educate these concerned and influential professionals about the unprecedented planetary emergency of global climate change, in order to enable them to educate their professional associations and policy makers at all levels;
- to contribute to a global climate response of these concerned professionals who will inform, on an ethics-driven scientific (non political) basis, leaders of government, institutions and professions that there is now
- a huge risk to the survival of large regional climate-change-vulnerable populations (eg, in Africa and Asia)
- a high risk to the sustainability of civilization, and
- a real risk to the "very survival of humanity" (UNEP GEO-4, 2007);
- to strengthen the influence and ability of concerned professionals to sound the alarm for the rights of vulnerable regional populations and future generations to live safe from the risks of disastrous and catastrophic global climate change, through dissemination of what they have learned;
- to gather a group of concerned citizens from all walks of life to support this initiative;
- to provide a continually updated
state of the climate
based on the most current peer-reviewed published literature; and
- to disseminate a statement in support of a planetary climate change emergency declaration.
 On 7 December 2009, the Administrator of the EPA signed two distinct findings regarding greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act.
Endangerment Finding: The Administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) — in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.
Cause or Contribute Finding: The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases [...] contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare.
Doctors can lead from the front — just as we did when we came to understand the evidence of the harmful effects of smoking.... Doctors can understand. We can change the world by speaking up and acting — together and individually — internationally, nationally, and locally....
— Richard Smith, Editor, British Medical Journal (1997)
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