Where have all the flowers gone? – Changing climate, seasons and weather and the challenges and opportunities for public health research

Abstract

Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations produced the Paris Agreement1 of December 2015, despite its subsequent notorious political challenges, the zeitgeist of global warming and subsequent climate change (GWCC) concerns has moved on from debating its very existence, toward understanding the way in which GWCC is and will manifest now and in the future. Any dispute regarding the attribution of global warming, and the consequences of climate change, to industrial-era emissions of greenhouse gasses emanating from anthropogenic origins, is now in the realm of ‘Flat-Earthers’. The more relevant questions are now about how we rehabilitate the worldwide fossil fuel addiction (mitigation) and how we respond to the impacts of GWCC (adaptation).