Health and Climate Change, Chapter 1: Global warming impacts on earth: damage to human health

As indicated by various scientific organizations—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the World Health Organization, and World Wide Fund for Nature, among others, the earth is in an accelerated process of socio-environmental degradation. This is due to the enormous quantity of greenhouse gases that humanity has poured into the atmosphere for more than two centuries which has resulted in anthropogenic global warming, the sixth mass extinction of the species, and a generalized contamination of air, water, and soil. Human health has not escaped this catastrophe. A growing number of studies reveal the health effects of such degradation. In this chapter, we review some of the most important studies on the impact of climate change on human health.