Small Pox alert with New Vaccine

Small Pox alert with New Vaccine

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time- One Hundred Seventy One

Palash Biswas


Global warming, climate changes and Globalisation, altogether play havoc with Man and Nature. India has become a dumping ground of everything junk, poisonous and injurous to health. Indian law and policy makers are least concerned with public health as the concept of Welfare State withers away! HIV and Condom marketing, mineral water, prohibited chemicals, vaccines- everything targets the poor Indians! So once again a Small Pox Red Alert and A New Vaccineawaiting FDI clearance!
Smallpox is highly contagious and spreads primarily through prolonged social contact or direct contact with infected body fluids or contaminated objects, such as bedding or clothes. It can spread through the air in closed spaces but isn’t transmitted by insects or animals.Officials said the School of Tropical Medicine, Calcutta, is still equipped for diagnostic tests for the virus.Early symptoms are high temperature (101-104°C), bodyache and headache. In two to three days, red spots appear in the mouth and tongue and break open into sores. Rashes all over the body follow.The rashes become fluid-filled bumps that turn into pustules. Finally, scabs form and fall off, often leaving lifelong pitted scars. Occasional side effects include blindness and infertility in males.Smallpox was last reported in India in 1975, when around 1,400 people were infected. The disease is caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.The deadlier form, V. major, has a mortality rate of 3 to 35 per cent while V. minor causes a milder form of the disease called alastrim and kills less than 1 per cent of patients.

“The world is unprepared”

The World Health Organisation had declared the disease eradicated in 1979, so vaccines are not available. No specific cure is known for the viral infection that can kill up to a third of patients.

West Bengal health officials have said the School of Tropical Medicine, Calcutta, is still equipped for diagnostic tests for the virus. However the STM told TIMES NOW that all vaccines to fight the disease had been destroyed after the elimination of the disease globally.

Speaking to TIMES NOW, Director of the School of Tropical Medicine N K Pal Shah said no country, except perhaps UK, USA and Russia, currently has vaccines against Small Pox.

“The whole world is unprepared to combat the disease,” he said adding that prevention of an outbreak would include identifying and quarantining the suspected case as well as the neighbourhood and vaccinating them within 4 days of the onset of first case. “But, I believe report floated by media is unconfirmed report,” said Shah.

Emission Permits Advance; Bush Urges Climate Goals (Update1)
Bloomberg - 3 hours ago
By Mathew Carr and Alex Morales. June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Greenhouse-gas permits in Europe rose after President George W. Bush proposed a new round of international talks to curb emissions.
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The Emperor's Green Clothes Spiegel Online

Small pox and measles spread in Burma-Bangladesh border area (Brief News)
5/24/2007


Small pox and measles is being spread among children in the Burma-Bangladesh border area, reports a health worker. Many children in Maungdaw Township are now suffering from the disease, which broke out in the area at the beginning of last month. The disease is now infecting children in the border area of Bangladesh near Burma. A doctor from Nila border town in Teknaf confirmed that many children in the area are suffering from a small pox and measles epidemic.
http://www.narinjara.com/details.asp?id=1277

However, Bangladesh authorities have not yet confirmed any case of small pox and said they have been investigating the situation.In Kolkata, The West Bengal government issued a warning in all districts after reports from New Delhi about the possible return of smallpox, considered eradicated from the world 30 years ago, along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.

The West Bengal Director of Health Services Sanchita Bakshi said border security agencies have been asked to monitor if anyone is entering India with fever, one of the symptoms of the disease.

"There is no need to panic as this is a false alarm," Health Secretary Naresh Dayal told reporters in New Delhi.

Dayal said, his ministry had interacted with the World Health Organisation (WHO), which assured them that there is no outbreak of smallpox either in Bangladesh or Myanmar.

Authorities in the health ministry said the whole scare germinated after a message from the government to a few border states about a possible outbreak of smallpox in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Cherian Varghese, a senior health coordinator of WHO-India, said that vigilance is always good but there is no such outbreak in Bangladesh. "We have no knowledge of it. Neither people nor authorities should not worry," he told IANS.


Smallpox jitters after 28 years but WHO denies the report.The World Health Organisation has said reports of small pox outbreak in Bangladesh is yet to be checked but there is no eruption of the deadly disease in Myanmar, West Bengal Health Minister Suryakanata Mishra today said here. Alarmed by reported outbreak of small pox at Rajshahi district in Bangladesh, West Bengal government had yesterday sounded a general alert in the state's northern districts.

"The WHO's South Asia office has informed the National Institute of Communicable Diseases that it is not small pox that has infected some people in Myanmar," Mishra told newspersons here.

"Regarding Bangladesh, they are yet to get information whether the disease is small pox or something else," he said.

Stating that steps like screening people coming in from Bangladesh through land borders or at the airports have begun, Mishra said there was no need to be alarmed.

"The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) at Atlanta in the USA has been contacted on the issue," he said adding that at present there was no preventive medicine for small pox as WHO had several years back declared that small pox had been eradicated.

Now see the report as WHO has denied the report of Small Pox. Is this the marketing of a New Small Pox Vaccine?

Acambis Small Pox Vaccine Awaiting FDA Endorsement
Written by OJ Fagbire
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
Tag it:
By Thursday, a small pox vaccine produced by Acambis PLC will be reviewed by a panel set up by the Food and Drug Administration. The Acambis small pox vaccine is rated as a second-generation vaccine which is manufactured by applying the cell-culture lines. The vaccine is a derivative of an older vaccine called Dryvax, made by Wyeth.

The manufacturer of the vaccine claims to be awaiting the endorsement of the FDA before sourcing for funds from the government via grants. The vaccine which is also called ACAM2000 would not be sold commercially in the United States since the routine vaccination of children in the US stopped in 1972.

Skin rash is one of the results of the virus and it could be severe and deadly in some cases, say 30% of the entire cases.

According to the FDA, safety measures with small pox vaccines like ACAM2000 and Dryvax is of utmost concern. There some side effects accompanying the vaccines and they comprise of seldom cases of inflammation of the heart-wall muscle known as myopericarditis and severe skin infections. A Report from clinical research says Acambis vaccine has no fatalities.

The agency carrying out the studies reached an observation that one of the studies involving the vaccines suggested the rate of myopericarditis is higher than previously suspected. Ten cases of myopericarditis were seen in the studies and manifested in both vaccines.

The FDA concluded that, ‘‘However, the potential benefits of administration of ACAM2000 during a smallpox outbreak to persons who are determined to be at high risk of exposure or who have been recently exposed outweigh potential risks.’’
http://www.vaccinerx.com/news/latest/acambis-small-pox-vaccine-awaiting-fda-endorsement-20070516-273-26.html

USIBC launches health initiative for India

Washington, June 1: The US-India Business Council (USIBC) has launched a new initiative -- 'Coalition for Healthy India' (CHI) -- to provide improved access to healthcare in India, including access to the latest treatments and innovations.

USIBC President Ron Somers, in a statement yesterday, said, ''The CHI intends to bring together the US and Indian business community, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and medical professionals to coordinate and support improved access to healthcare in India, consistent with efforts being taken by the Government of India as well as the corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes being pursued throughout India by the US and Indian private sector.'' He said ''the initiative includes bolstering the protection of intellectual property and innovation so that the best class of treatments and devices across the broad spectrum of healthcare challenges facing India are and remain available and accessible to the common man.'' The CHI will concentrate on raising health standards, including the accreditation of health care facilities and penetration of health insurance coverage, with a particular emphasis on rural areas where more than 60 per cent of Indians live and work.

Moreover, CHI will work collaboratively with other efforts underway in India to raise awareness about the scourge of HIV/AIDS, while promoting preventative measures and improving access to effective and affordable treatment regimes.
http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=34230

We should have a thorough study on Public health in India

India Together: Public Health Issues - HomepageThe proposed Public Health Foundation of India will establish five 'world class' institutes to train 1000 public health professionals every year. ...
www.indiatogether.org/health/public.htm
WWW VL Public Health: Asia - IndiaHealth Promoting Schools. National Public Health Associations. Geriatrics Society of India. National Public Health Education and Research Facilities ...
www.ldb.org/vl/geo/asia/3ind.htm

HPH NOW, May 26, 2006, Public Health Foundation of India LaunchedPoised to become the world's most populous nation by 2040, India faces daunting challenges: huge burdens of disease, lack of needed medical care in many ...
www.hsph.harvard.edu/now/may26/ -

InfoChange India News & Features, india health news, public health ...InfoChange India News & Features, india health news, public health, India Healthcare, India Health indicators, Health studies, Health data, Infant mortality ...
www.infochangeindia.org/HealthItop.jsp?section_idv=2

The McKinsey Quarterly: The Online Journal of McKinsey & Co.A foundation for public health in India, from McKinseyquarterly.com, an on-line journal of business and economics published by McKinsey & Company featuring ...
www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_abstract.aspx?ar=1668 -
Public health in India : an overviewDownloadable ! Author(s): Das Gupta, Monica. 2005 Abstract: Public health services, which reduce a population's exposure to disease through such measures as ...
ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/3787.html
Website for the Ministry of Health & Family WelfarePublic Expenditure Management ... National Health Accounts India, 2001-02 / Errata ... Designed and Hosted By Health Informatics Division - National ...
mohfw.nic.in/
ALL INDIA INSTITUTE OF HYGIENE AND PUBLIC HEALTH(i) The celebration of 50th Anniversary of Independence saw the culmination event with the National Seminar of "50 years of Public Health in India, ...
mohfw.nic.in/kk/95/ib/95ib0y01.htm
Smallpox
Smallpox is a disease caused by the Variola major virus. Some experts say that over the centuries it has killed more people than all other infectious diseases combined. Worldwide immunization stopped the spread of smallpox three decades ago. The last case was reported in 1977. Two research labs still house small amounts of the virus. Experts fear bioterrorists could use the virus to spread disease.

Smallpox spreads very easily from person to person. Symptoms are flu-like and include high fever, fatigue and headache and backache, followed by a rash with flat red sores.

The U.S. stopped routine smallpox vaccinations in 1972. Military and other high-risk groups continue to get the vaccine. The U.S. has increased its supply of the vaccine in recent years. The vaccine makes some people sick, so doctors save it for those at highest risk of disease.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/smallpox.html
The Disease
Smallpox is a serious, contagious, and sometimes fatal infectious disease. There is no specific treatment for smallpox disease, and the only prevention is vaccination. The name smallpox is derived from the Latin word for "spotted" and refers to the raised bumps that appear on the face and body of an infected person.

There are two clinical forms of smallpox. Variola major is the severe and most common form of smallpox, with a more extensive rash and higher fever. There are four types of variola major smallpox: ordinary (the most frequent type, accounting for 90% or more of cases); modified (mild and occurring in previously vaccinated persons); flat; and hemorrhagic (both rare and very severe). Historically, variola major has an overall fatality rate of about 30%; however, flat and hemorrhagic smallpox usually are fatal. Variola minor is a less common presentation of smallpox, and a much less severe disease, with death rates historically of 1% or less.

Smallpox outbreaks have occurred from time to time for thousands of years, but the disease is now eradicated after a successful worldwide vaccination program. The last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949. The last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in 1977. After the disease was eliminated from the world, routine vaccination against smallpox among the general public was stopped because it was no longer necessary for prevention.

Where Smallpox Comes From
Smallpox is caused by the variola virus that emerged in human populations thousands of years ago. Except for laboratory stockpiles, the variola virus has been eliminated. However, in the aftermath of the events of September and October, 2001, there is heightened concern that the variola virus might be used as an agent of bioterrorism. For this reason, the U.S. government is taking precautions for dealing with a smallpox outbreak.

Transmission
Generally, direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact is required to spread smallpox from one person to another. Smallpox also can be spread through direct contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as bedding or clothing. Rarely, smallpox has been spread by virus carried in the air in enclosed settings such as buildings, buses, and trains. Humans are the only natural hosts of variola. Smallpox is not known to be transmitted by insects or animals.

A person with smallpox is sometimes contagious with onset of fever (prodrome phase), but the person becomes most contagious with the onset of rash. At this stage the infected person is usually very sick and not able to move around in the community. The infected person is contagious until the last smallpox scab falls off.
http://www.smallpox.gov/AboutDisease.html


Pl see also:
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/index.asp
http://www.smallpox.gov/
World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/en/



Smallpox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
Smallpox (also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera) is a highly contagious disease unique to humans.[1] Smallpox is caused by either of two virus variants named Variola major and Variola minor. The deadlier form, V. major, has a mortality rate of 3–35%, while V. minor causes a milder form of disease called alastrim and kills ~1% of its victims.[2][1] Long-term side-effects for survivors include the characteristic skin scars. Occasional side effects include blindness due to corneal ulcerations and infertility in male survivors.

Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths in the 20th century. As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.[3] After successful vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the eradication of smallpox in 1977.[4] To this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated from nature.[5] However, there are recent reports of smallpox in Asia as reported by the Times of India(June 2007).[6]


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Hindu - 21 hours ago
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: About 25000 people have been hospitalised in various districts of the State with symptoms of chikungunya, Health Minister PK Sreemathy said here on Thursday.
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3 Tennesseans Possibly Exposed To TB-Infected Man
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Chandigarh Newsline, India - 26 May 2007
They maintain that vaccines for Hepatitis-A, typhoid and small pox should be encouraged. “This is a positive step towards better health as these vaccines ...


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Articles/Stories: Biological and Chemical Weapons In An Age of Terror
Manila Mail, DC - 30 May 2007
... expanding an attack well beyond the original point of deployment, using such contagious diseases as small pox, ebola, AIDS, or plauge. ...

New Vaccine Can Save Lives but the Cost May Leave Some at Risk
WTOC, GA - 2 May 2007
"There are probably people that fought small pox vaccines as well," says Senator Johnson. Grace felt the same way. "You wonder, did they all say this when ...

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MSNBC - 31 May 2007
‘It's been kind of a pox on both your houses,’ he says. ‘There's a disconnect out there between the people and Washington. … It seems lately whoever has ...

Earlier reports indicated that Smallpox, the only human infectious disease thought eradicated, returned to haunt the Bengal following reports of outbreaks in Bangladesh and Myanmar.The Calcutta airport, port and border posts have been told to screen passengers from these countries, especially Chittagong, director of health services Sanchita Baksi said.The World Health Organisation had declared the disease eradicated in 1979, so vaccines are not available. No specific cure is known for the viral infection that can kill up to a third of patients.

“We received a communiqué from the foreign ministry yesterday about the outbreak of smallpox and measles along the borders of Bangladesh and Myanmar,” a health department official said. “Any passenger from these two countries with fever and rashes will be secluded and tested.”

“We will not seal the borders till final confirmation of the outbreak is received,” chief secretary Amit Kiran Deb said. District magistrates and chief medical officers of health in every district have been alerted.

Chicken pox strikes state capital


PATNA: Chicken pox, one of the most easily communicable diseases, has spread in certain parts of the city once again.
About 20 persons, including children, have been hit by the disease in Kurji and Dujra localities here during the last fortnight. Normally, this disease strikes during early childhood or during adolescent stage. Few people know that if the disease occurs in old age, it can lead to extreme proportions and can cause a lot of complications. Quite unlike its sister disease small pox, which has already been eradicated worldwide, chicken pox hasn't been eradicated yet and almost everyone is at a risk of getting infected, says paediatrician and IMA, Bihar unit, secretary Dr Arun Kumar Thakur.

Inadequate infrastructure to screen passengers

TIMES NOW’s Sambit Pal reported that despite the alert being sounded two days ago that travellers should be screened, the lack of adequate infrastructure means this may not be implemented effectively. Cross-checking with border check-post at the Indo-Bangla border at South 24 Parganas, as well as Kolkata airport has revealed in fact, that no screening had this morning begun despite the warnings. There are at least 10 flights operating between the two countries from Kolkata airport everyday. Moreover the government will be hard pressed to monitor the inflow of people from porous parts of the border.



To reach that conclusion, the researchers contrasted the clinical features of Lincoln's illness as cited in a host of sources with the manifestations of smallpox, of the milder form of smallpox that occurs in immunized people and of the most common diseases with symptoms that mimic smallpox.

"The serious form of smallpox, known as variola major, was the only disease that closely fit Lincoln's clinical features: high fever, weakness, severe pain in the head and back, prostration, skin eruption -- plus the severity and approximately 21-day duration of Lincoln's illness," said Dr. Armond S. Goldman, an emeritus professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UTMB and lead author of the study.

"Smallpox was rampant in the United States at that time," Goldman noted. "In addition, although immunization against smallpox was practiced in the mid-19th century, there is no historical evidence that Lincoln was immunized against smallpox before his illness." Moreover, Goldman said, "The milder form of smallpox, known as variola minor, first appeared in the United States at the turn of the 20th century and was unknown in the United States during the mid-19th century when Lincoln became ill."

"Lincoln's physicians attempted to reassure him that his disease was a mild form of smallpox," Goldman noted, "but that may have been to prevent the public from fearing that Lincoln was dying."


Goodbye, universe
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070528/asp/knowhow/story_7836760.asp

In three trillion years, the Milky Way and its immediate galactic neighbourhood will change into an island universe, reports T.V. Jayan

The Milky Way, and (below) Krauss (right) and Scherrer have been greatly acclaimed for their prediction of a ‘static universe’

It’s an occurrence that shouldn’t be bothering us. Long after humankind is dead and gone and the sun — the sole source of energy in the solar system — burnt out, the universe will not appear to be the same as it does today. The visible universe is destined to shrink to an abysmally small size, say researchers. Besides, it would appear static too.

The Milky Way galaxy and its immediate galactic neighbourhood are bound to get lost in the huge expanse of dark void in a few trillion years, says Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, the US. That is because this local group of galaxies, that stays together due to gravitational pull, would have moved so far from the rest of the universe — and that too at a faster rate than the speed of light — that no information (such as light) will reach it. The disappearance of the information that currently allows us to see how the universe expands over the visible horizon may thus give the false notion of a “static universe” — a perception commonly held by astronomers at the turn of the 20th century.

What remains will be “an island universe” consisting of the Milky Way, Andromeda (our nearest galaxy) and a few puny galaxies that will form a galactic Local Group, says Robert Scherrer, theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University, and a co-author of the study.

To track motion, we need markers. Consider a person in a glass enclosure. The person cannot feel the wind outside. The only way he can perceive the wind blowing is by seeing the motion of objects that are being blown around by it. With the Local Group being so far away, no such markers will be available to observers from galaxies in the group, says T.R. Seshadri, an astrophysicist at the University of Delhi.

Incidentally, our solar system would be long gone before this happens. The sun is almost close to half its life, which is estimated to be 10 billion years. Krauss and Scherrer let their imagination run wild by presuming that there will be earth-like habitable planets around other stars at that point in time, with scientists studying the universe with instruments similar to those available today! (Both the Milky Way and Andromeda consist of billions of stars and some of them may be sun-like.)

In such a scenario, many observational pillars on which modern cosmology are propped up — such as the cosmic microwave background radiation from the afterglow of early universe formation and the movement of galaxies away from the Local Group — will not be available to them, they argue. “While physicists of the future will be able to infer that their island universe has not been eternal, it is unlikely that they will be able to infer that the beginning involved a Big Bang,” says Krauss.

This prediction of a “static universe” has won Krauss and Scherrer the annual prize of the Gravity Research Foundation, whose earlier recipients included Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.

Subhabrata Majumdar of Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, however, does not think this is a “significant piece of work”. But, of course, it has popular appeal, he says.

Ironically, the reason for the perceived “static” nature of the universe is related to the ever-increasing speed at which the universe is expanding. According to the current theoretical models of cosmology — which are built on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity — the initial momentum for this unhindered expansion came from a fiery Big Bang explosion that occurred some 13.7 billion years ago. However, ever since, the acceleration has picked up, thanks to a mysterious repulsive field or energy — called dark energy — that scientists think permeates space. Dark energy, which caught the attention of scientists about a decade ago, can be described as the growing tendency of empty space to create more empty space, thereby distancing anything in the universe that is not bound by gravity. Researchers estimate that 70 per cent of the universe is made up of dark energy.

“If the universe expands in an accelerated way, the number density of galaxies will ultimately become so small that we will not see the distant ones,” Seshadri told KnowHow. According to Krauss and Scherrer, this would begin to occur over the next 100 billion years or so.

Similarly, around the same cosmological time scale, detecting the cosmic background radiation that convinced most physicists and astronomers that there was, in fact, a hot Big Bang would be next to impossible. “The intensity of radiation (around 100 billion years later) would be smaller by a million million times, which means detectors will have to be a million million times more sensitive,” says Krauss. Then, later, the wavelength will be even longer and since such radiation is absorbed in the galaxy, it cannot make its way to us.

This would also mean the death knell for modern cosmology. “Cosmology is an empirical science, just like the rest of physics. That is what makes it so remarkable, namely, that we can actually observationally probe the universe and learn about the past and the future. When these observables disappear in the distant future, cosmology as an empirical science will be largely over,” Krauss told KnowHow.

Krauss, a noted popular science writer and an ardent champion of science who once wrote to the Pope appealing him to “not build walls” between science and religion, thinks that we’re living in a special time in the evolution of the universe. If the universe was an order of magnitude younger, observers would not have been able to discern any effect of dark energy on the expansion. Similarly, when the universe is more than an order of magnitude older, observers will be hard pressed to know that they live in an expanding universe, as dark energy would have been all pervading.

Climate change — the X factor
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070528/asp/knowhow/story_7836770.asp

Scientists do not know much about polar ice caps or solar activity. And unknowns like these might just prove to be more crucial than what we know, writes P. Hari

If polar ice caps melt quickly, sea levels will rise much faster than scientists think
James Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has for long been one of the most prominent figures in climate change research. Ever since the 1980s, he has been an outspoken critic of White House policies on global warming. Recently, he privately circulated a paper on the cost of scientific reticence, a tendency among scientists to be cautious and absolutely sure before making a public statement. This paper is generating interest in the community of climate scientists and will be published soon in Environment Research Letters.

Hansen’s target is the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), a body that is known to be cautious in making statements about the future. Hansen acknowledges that IPCC needs to be cautious, and scientific objectivity demands that we speak only about things we know. But his problem is that this cautiousness is stopping it from communicating important things to the public. Specifically, he thinks the IPCC is not communicating to the public and policy makers the threat of a potentially large rise in sea level. IPCC is right to be cautious, he says in the paper, but excessive caution is dangerous as the mechanism of sea level rise has a built-in delay. By the time we are sure, it may be too late.

Hansen is agitated because the IPCC has ignored the effects of melting ice sheets on sea level rise. IPCC has its estimates about sea level rise — between 28 and 42 centimetres by the end of the century. It takes into account factors like thermal expansion — water expands as it warms up beyond four degree centigrade — and some ice melting, but it does not consider fully the effect of melting polar ice caps. This is because there is very little in scientific literature that IPCC can use. We do not understand ice caps well; we do not know how quickly they will melt. Since IPCC uses only things that are understood to science, it did not fully consider polar ice melting in its models and used what we understand well. What is wrong with that approach?

From a scientific point of view, there is nothing wrong. But if ice caps melt quickly, sea levels will rise much faster than we think. So foresight demands that we should be prepared. Hansen thinks there are positive feedbacks in polar ice melting that we cannot afford to ignore. Ice reflects sunlight back into space. If there is less ice, less heat is reflected and this causes more ice to melt. “Ice sheets are the thing when it comes to sea level rise,” says Hansen. The problem is that the effect can be non-linear, which means our correlations between temperature rise and sea level rise may not hold any more after some point. No one knows when we will approach this point. We may have already passed it (the most unlikely scenario), we may pass it in the next few decades, or we may pass it by the end of the century. “I think IPCC should make it clear that ‘business as usual’ scenarios for climate change imply an almost certain sea level disaster,” says Hansen.

Hansen’s view is shared by a few other scientists. While runaway change for the worse is a clear possibility, there are unknowns that could change things the other way, although we can speak about them with even less certainty. One of them is the behaviour of the sun. Our star goes through periods of high activity, alternating with quieter periods. An active sun, like it is now, produces a warm climate on the earth, and quieter periods cause mini ice ages.