Australian doctors have a particular responsibility in the fight to achieve urgent international reductions in carbon dioxide emissions
Most people in the scientific community believe that global warming is occurring, and that it will cause dramatic changes in climate patterns, with potentially serious effects on human health in the form of widespread epidemics, trauma, malnutrition and, in vulnerable areas, famine.1,2 The special danger to children has been stressed.3 Recent observations on the shrinking Antarctic ice mass suggest that the pace of these changes far exceeds that previously predicted.4 There is now little contention that global warming is largely the result of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human energy consumption,2 and that these effects are just within reach of reversal only if worldwide emissions are rapidly stabilised.
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- 1 Westmead Institute for Cancer Research, Westmead Hospital, Sydney, NSW.
- 2 University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW.
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