HUMAN HEALTH: Some experts argue that the human health impacts of climate change need more attention. Pictured: tree pollen on a windshield.
Image: Flickr/Earl
When they picture the adverse effects of climate change, public health scientists hope the American public won't think of them as something that happens to glaciers or polar bears, but turn the focus more on themselves.
"The face of climate change ought to be people," epidemiologist George Luber, associate director for global climate change at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview last week. "We ought to kind of internalize it."
Luber and Natural Resources Defense Council scientist Kim Knowlton took the lead in writing the human health chapter for the draft 2013 National Climate Assessment, which was released last month and is now open for public comment (Greenwire, Jan. 11). The report, which is the third of its kind, lays out the impacts climate change will have on the United States, including on its citizens' health.
While past reports focused on the future, the 2013 edition shows "it's already happening now," said Luber, speaking on the sidelines of a two-day symposium he helped organize, which was co-hosted by CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
Some of those effects are easily identified, like the injuries and loss of life that result from more frequent and intense storms. Others are more subtle, like loss of power after a storm that may expose a region to extreme heat from lack of air conditioning, the cumulative effect from more allergies due to higher pollen counts, and the introduction of new diseases from warmer climes that Luber said are already popping up in unlikely places.
"Those can be surprises," he said.
Toxic fish and disease-carrying air
Over the past eight years, for example, fish in the northern Gulf of Mexico have begun to be poisoned by ciguatera derived from toxins in algae that are more common in the tropics but that now thrive in the Gulf's warming waters, clinging to oil rigs.
Soggy Vancouver Island in British Columbia has become an unlikely new home for Cryptococcus gattii, a tropical and subtropical yeast-based fungus that causes lung disease and a kind of meningitis when it is inhaled. Scientists think the fungus hitched a ride in ballast water from ships and was able to survive in the northwest because of higher temperatures.
The symposium, which was held at Department of Health and Human Services headquarters on Wednesday and Thursday, brought together climate and health researchers from academia with state and local public health administrators from states that have received funding from CDC and NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to look at the local health effects of climate change to find ways to minimize them.
"What we're doing is bringing the researchers into the same room as the people who are doing the public health response," Luber said.
Participants at the meeting heard from panelists on issues like the effects of climate change on the inner city, managing heat exposure in the rural South and the lack of air conditioning in Washington state nursing homes.
Simon Mason of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society said climate scientists needed to better understand what information public health administrators need in order to keep populations safe.
For example, he said, there are plenty of data about weather patterns now and what they are likely to be many decades from now, but that may not help a city or state plan for changes in the midterm.
A near-term void in health science
"Predicting the next 10 years, that's still pretty much of a data loss," he said.
Luber said the intersection of health and climate science is as complex as it is new. Systems are still being developed to allow researchers to look at disease occurrence in the context of weather data and to see how they interact. "That's not easy," he said.
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6 Comments
Add CommentSome effects are less subtle than algae or illness. In 2010, Russia experienced the highest heat wave it had seen for 130 years. Subsequently, they stopped exporting wheat. Countries in the middle east are their major market. The 'Arab Spring' started as food price protests in Tunisia. Take a look at Table 10 here, http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/rr-impact-russias-grain-export-ban-280611-en.pdf. Tunisia was the poorest of the Russian customers, and that is where the unrest started. Coincidence? Unlikely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese kinds of heat waves have increased from 1 in more than 100-year events, to 1 in 10 year events, and the trend is upward. The Pentagon has it about right; climate change is a risk multiplier. We are inviting risk to the point where us suffering from it is becoming more likely than not.
More directly on same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://necsi.edu/research/social/food_crises.pdf
How come society as a whole has to pay for the damages from climate change while the fossil fuel companies that have profited from being able to spew their CO2 into the atmosphere FOR FREE get to laugh all the way to the bank? My only guess is that they got away with putting lead in gasoline or releasing acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide (among many other examples) for so long that they just expect the rest of us to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt also deletes comments that showed you're a science DENIER. In summary, I quoted the climate change statements from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society and the American Physical Society all showing that people a lot smarter than you or I have determined that climate change is a problem and we neet to reduce emissions pronto.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPart of the problem might be that they have successfully convinced many that their costs are the peoples' losses, and that it's just not worth paying a bit extra to accelerate the transition to greater efficiency and alternatives. No mention of 'future' costs though, for infrastructure, food and insurance etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI should add that I fully appreciate the concerns of regular folks and business owners of modest means, who rely on the deeply ingrained fossil energy infrastructure for their livelihoods. But if we as a society are serious about this issue, some sort of international carbon pricing agreement is probably in order. And that may need to include a transitional dividend to at least lower income people, in order to allow time for a switch to newer technologies.
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