I just spent the last two days at a meeting of the Institute of Medicine on "Climate and Human Health". The setting was nice - San Francisco's Presidio National Park - but the topic was disturbing. Here's the gist:

• Nobody's arguing anymore about whether global warming's happening. Even the federal government people are saying this is serious.
• The health effects are going to be complex and hard to deal with. Speakers discussed heat waves, extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods, infectious disease spread, worsening air quality, worsening pollen, and even worsening poison ivy.
• Our health system isn't prepared for this. The health agency representatives are still struggling to get their heads around what to do, and they really don't yet have a plan.

Yet I emerged from the meeting fairly optimistic. The fact that scientists and high-level government officials are getting together to even talk about this stuff means that there has been movement. Just a year ago, almost nobody was talking about the effects that global warming will have on our health. Now it's the topic of many major meetings, and lots of smart people are seriously working to figure this out.

Most of the speakers referred to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) most recent assessment of human health effects. It's an interesting read, and it's here. The IPCC is pushing for increased "adaptive capacity". That doesn't mean that we shouldn't do everything in our power to cut our emissions of greenhouse gases. It does mean that no matter what we do to our emissions, we're still going to be hit with some serious climate disruption.

So the new climate strategy is twofold: cut our emissions ASAP to minimize the damage, and at the same time, prepare for some nasty times ahead.

Hey, I live in San Francisco so I have an emergency kit in case of earthquakes. I guess people in the rest of the country need to catch on and put one together as well.