Katharine

First, let me give a little bit of personal background. I'm a third-year undergraduate student studying neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. During the first half of President Obama's first term, I am going to graduate school to earn my PhD degree in neuroscience and do research.

Climate stability is important to more than just the environment; it is important to human health. Three major areas of concern within climate change's effect on human health are:

1) Air quality;

2) Drug production;

3) Disease.

Air quality will almost certainly be affected by global warming. Excess pollution exacerbates the respiratory and cardiovascular diseases of those affected, and will drive up hospitalization, putting massive burdens on the health care system. If pollution is severe enough, the burden on physicians will be as great as some physicians in Africa, many of whom carry a burden of being responsible for the health of several hundred individuals. The situation of disease in Africa is dire, as many of us know; do not let the rest of the world follow them. In addition, air that is too hot can produce several health effects, such as more pronounced weight loss (which may be problematic for people who are underweight, and approximately a third of the world's population suffers from problems with maintaining an adequate level of energy intake), an increased pulse rate, and hyperthermia (which humans are not well-adapted for).

2) We get much of our drugs from plants and animals - taxol, an important drug in treating breast cancer, for example, comes from a threatened Pacific yew, and exenatide, an important drug in regulating type 2 diabetes comes from the saliva of the threatened Gila monster (a small lizard). If the world's other species are decimated, we will lose important new sources of drugs to treat human disease and we will lose natural sources of drugs that people overseas require to support their population when a lab in which to synthesize identical compounds is unavailable to them. In Africa, Artemisia annua is being grown for artemisinin to treat malaria. It is vital that we preserve the environments in which these species grow to treat human disease.

3) Disease itself will proliferate if the climate is affected. Zimbabwe is ravaged by cholera, partially because of its inadequate ability to deal with the problems of its environment (and partially because Mugabe is incompetent). Erosion and sea level rise will have disastrous effects on soil and plants and contaminate controlled water environments to spread disease.

The denialists MUST be stopped.

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