Climate Change and Human Health Impacts

Climate change do has a huge impact on the planet. The changes in climatic conditions could result in tremendous loss of life on earth. The living habitats could be disturbed by the influence of climate. Public health and safety issues may also arise, distribution and existence of animals and plants may also alter, loss of infrastructure and economy of the affected area could be disturbed by factors like farming, forestry, mining and tourism. Other impacts of climate change are rise and fall of oceanic and sea levels due to rainfall or glacier melting. These changes are results of one another. The rising temperatures results in the melting of glaciers in the polar regions and which in turn results in the migration of species living in that particular zone or could also result in the extinction of species. For example researchers have found that there has been a decline of the Adelie penguin breeding pairs on Antarctica due to rise in temperature where the number of pairs has come down to 11,000 from 32,000 in past 30 years. Alpine plants, some butterfly species and foxes have moved to higher altitude or cooler areas.  Few other incidents have also happened in the past 20 years due to rising temperatures like; there has been an enormous growth of insect species called Spruce bark beetles which feeds on spruce trees. These beetles have wiped of almost 4 million acres of spruce trees in Alaska. From North Pole to South Pole the global average surface temperature has increased between 1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit.