It is largely a function of sociology's divisions into specialisms that studies of population health and health inequalities tend, with a small but growing number of honourable exceptions, to be conducted in terms of individual nation states; and that phenomena like climate change tend also to be explored in an academic silo. In this chapter it is argued that the era of the Anthropocene has compelled a global orientation too long neglected or denied in the fields of health and health care. At the start of the last chapter, different if provisional views on the beginning of the Anthropocene were noted. While as yet there is no consensus, a team of scientists has recently affirmed the existence of a new geological time period marking the start of humanity's impact on the planet. While humans began to have an impact on the planet a while ago, with the rise of widespread farming and later the Industrial Revolution, these developments remained geographically restricted. Colin Waters, representing the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), has maintained that the Anthropocene is ‘visible globally’ in the top sediment layer of the Earth's surface, starting in the 1950s. The AWG declares that the Anthropocene is marked by the appearance of plutonium and other indicators of the surge in human activity typically called ‘the great acceleration’. Other ‘markers’ include the increasing consumption of fossil fuels, the greater use of nitrogen fertilisers and enhanced global trade spreading species across the planet and homogenising the plant and animal life of the planet. The AWG is focusing on Crawford Lake in Canada as a monitoring site. While some scientists still insist we are yet to leave the Holocene period, others deploy a different nomenclature for the emergence of the Anthropocene, including the Capitalocene and even the Proletariocene.

Setting these disputes to one side, we can now agree on the nature and extent of recent climate change and its genesis in human activities. Ten of the warmest years since records were first kept 143 years ago have occurred since 2010. Although warming is not taking place uniformly across the plant, the upward trend in the globally averaged temperature shows that more areas are warming than cooling.