This jacket is for global warming!

This is a cooled vest designed for a Vietnamese shipyard in Haiphong, where already temperatures go into the mid-thirties each summer.  These vests give some relief but hot work is still a major problem, and it will get worse. In many developed countries, there are health and safety provisions that ensure work ceases above certain temperatures. In general, developing countries have no such provisions.

In the West we are fortunate in having the health infrastructure to study and ameliorate the problems caused by global warming. We  learned much from the European heat wave in August 2003 which caused in excess of 30,000 deaths. Studies in France, looking at vulnerable populations, identified additional factors  that contributed to deaths in those over 65 years of age and living at home. These were lack of mobility, pre-existing illness and housing that lacked insulation, was located on the top floor and was in an urban heat island as shown by satellite imaging. Appropriate dress and access to air conditioning were shown to be protective.

The projected changes in Sydney's climate due to global warming indicate that there will be a significant impact on the health of the city's human residents. Professor Tony McMichael, Head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University and a long-serving IPCC scientist, has recently stated: "Heat waves will become much more frequent, rather more intense, and they'll be impinging on an ageing population, so we'd expect the number of deaths and hospitalisations to increase rather dramatically by the middle of this century. For an increase of two or three degrees centigrade, we'd expect the total number of deaths each summer in a city like Sydney to increase by a factor of three, four, five, depending on just how much the temperature is rising."

Photo: Tord Kjellstrom