World sickens as heat rises
Infections in wildlife spread as pests thrive in climate change

Climate change is favouring pests and parasites and triggering widespread outbreaks of disease in wildlife, according to US scientists.

Warmer summers and milder winters are encouraging disease- bearing infections that blight coral reefs, kill shellfish colonies, and threaten lions, cranes, vultures and even ferrets. The global warming is also helping to spread tropical diseases to human habitations previously unaffected by such illnesses, they report in the journal Science today.

"This is not just a question of coral bleaching for a few marine ecologists, nor just a question of malaria for a few health officials. The number of similar increases in disease incidence is astonishing," said Richard Ostfield, of the Institute for Ecosystem Studies, in Millbrook, New York.
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The Truth on Warming

The journalist I.F. Stone used to joke that the government issues so much information every day, it can't help but let the truth slip out every once in a while. The Bush Administration's recent report on global warming is a classic example. Though far from perfect, it contains some crucial but awkward truths that neither George W. Bush nor his environmentalist critics want to confront. Which may explain why the Administration has sought to bury the report, while critics have misrepresented its most ominous conclusion.

U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 made headlines because it contradicted so much of what the Administration has said about global warming. Not only is global warming real, according to the report, but its consequences--heat waves, water shortages, rising sea levels, loss of beaches and marshes, more frequent and violent weather--will be punishing for Americans. The report's biggest surprise was its admission that human activities, especially the burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are the primary cause of climate change. Of course, the rest of the world has known since 1995 that human actions have "a discernible impact" on the global climate, to quote a landmark report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the White House has resisted this conclusion. After all, if burning fossil fuels is to blame for global warming, it makes sense to burn less of them. To a lifelong oilman like Bush, who continues to rely on his former industry colleagues for campaign contributions as well as senior staff, such a view is nothing less than heresy.
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