Can Climate Change Make Us Sicker? 

Jason shared this Time/CNN article with me–it was really intersting.

In this article, Bryan Walsh writes about the effect of climate change on human health, including

• a rise in malaria caused by the increase in strong downpours
• heat related deaths caused by heat waves in places not used to such temperatures (Europe 2003), especially the elderly
• water borne diseases because the water cycle changes (heavy rainfall)

“For him, carbon dioxide should be treated as a pollutant that damages human health, albeit indirectly, and it’s in our medical interests to reduce it. ‘Energy policy becomes one and the same as public health policy,’ says Patz”

Check out the Nature editorial that says that slowing global warming would be very difficult because the “technological changes needed to decarbonize energy could be much harder than we thought”–are we already too late?

“the priority should be adapting our public health system to a warmer world, versus spending on carbon mitigation.”

Patz thinks that we have a plan for  the effects is important but even more important would be “cutting off the problem upstream”

On the page of this article, there was a podcast  that was an interview with Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (that’s where Mr. Landow went to school–I wonder if he knows him!), in which he elaborated on some of the ideas in Walsh’s article.  It was also a good example of an expert interview–I think the interviewer may have been Walsh.

Some interesting ideas:

• Important not just adapting, but fighting the causes–

• Greenhouse gases have a 1/2 life of 70-100 years–we will have a warming, so we will need to adapt, but that is not all–if we only focus on that, “we’re mopping up the floor while the faucet is still running”

• Patz talks about the importance of environmental policy merging with energy policies and health policies–they all converge with climate change.

Reflection

This was an informative article and interview.  The fact that the CO2 is not going away for awhile, no matter what we do made me realize that adaptation and preparation for the health and economic concerns is going to be essential.  But that is not enough–I think people may think the fix is the solution–we’ll take our medicine and avoid malaria, but do nothing to stop the cause of the disease (literal and metaphoric).