Happy New Year with a new Weblin Event

I wish everybody a happy new year. There were probably rumours that we will have the next climate change tour quiete soon. And yes it is true, we will start as usual at 1pm European time on Sunday the 11th of January 2009. Have a look at the www.weblin.com event section and you will see, which local time will be your starting time. 

Our topic for that sunday will be climate change and refugees. The numbers of refugees will increase as an direct effect of climate change due to rising sea levels effecting islands (Tokeleau) or coastlines (Bangladesh, Netherlands) . However the indirect effects will be maybe even more severe.  Desasters like floods, storms and deseases will accure more  and more. Problems getting worse, when governments can not handle the situation, which can be a reason to be forced to leave the country by itself.

We will discuss for two hours our future gloabal migration and situation of refugees on Sunday the 11th of January 2009. Meeting point: http://unsleepingworld.wordpress.com

Come with your weblin avatar (download: www.weblin.com)

Event Report: Climate Change and Human Health

This time we went on a journey through the web with a very international group of weblins. With some back and forth translations and we had several interesting discussions on the topic Human Health and learnt a lot from each other. Especially, interesting was fro me the point that we could ask each participant how effected the weblins home country already is.

As the World Health Organisation announced in 2008 also the Climate Change and Human health day we visited their very informative webpage.

We had especially a look at the 10 facts on climate change and health of this United Nations organisation.

Just follow this link:

http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/climate_change/en/index.html

and then click on: Read more about climate change and health

Here you can see us on this page:

Health risk are coming from climate change and of course directly from pollution and carbon emmision, which cause climate change. So people are wearing constantly face masks in areas of asia due to air pollution. Dierect health risk are caused from natural desasters like Hurricanes and Floods causing losses not only in developing countries like Kathrina in the US or Floods in Europe. Another direct cause is the temperature increase effecting especially the elderlies, which have problems to adapt suddenly to hotter summers. More severe and less directly is the connection of major desease connected the changes in climate zones. The main point is that the change in climate provides living conditions for insects carrying diseases in new areas like the malaria „mozzies“.

Especially, the connection of spreading diseases even like pestilencia is the topic of the slide show in a german journal. Follow this link to have a look at some impressive or even sad photographies:

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,582878,00.html

Or like in this picture the spread of Tuberculosis.

Afterwards we came back to the World Health Organisation to have a look at the current spread of several diseases:

http://www.who.int/ith/maps/en/

Thanks to all the participants on that tour and the very interesting discussions. Also thanks to our photographer with the weblin name: Tobbelmobbel, who also had the initial idea for this not so well known topic.