People probably know that scientists
have been studying climate change for years
and looking at how a changing
climate affects global temperatures and
sea level rise, and that's important, but
I think that most people don't know that
there's hundreds of studies now
connecting the dots between climate
change and human health, and that's a big concern.
Climate change is fueling more
frequent—and more intense—and
longer-lasting heat waves, and that heat is
not just an inconvenience to people. It
kills people.
Some of the people who are most vulnerable to that
extreme heat include children, and older adults, and
households that are economically
disadvantaged, and that's not just a few
people; that amounts to many millions of
people in the U.S.
Another concern is air pollution.
The warmer temperatures are, the higher the
concentration of some really important air pollutants.
Breathing ground-level ozone smog can
irritate your eyes and your throat, and
really damage your lungs and airways.
There are other kinds of air pollutants
that are also affected by climate change.
Take the kind of pollens that can make
allergy symptoms much, much worse, or even
trigger an asthma attack. The longer our
warm weather seasons, the more pollen is
produced in the air. So, it's like a double
whammy for health: ozone smog, and pollen.
There's another way, a third way, that
climate change is affecting people's
health, and that's insects and the
illnesses that they can carry, like
dengue fever, like West Nile virus, like
Zika virus, that are carried by
mosquitoes and Lyme disease that's carried
by certain kinds of ticks.
The thing is, people don't
think often about how much those
illnesses caused by climate change cost,
and not just in human suffering and pain
and illness, but in dollars and cents.
It's big dollars.
NRDC looked at just six of those kinds of events
that have occurred very recently: a wildfire
episode, a hurricane season, a flooding
episode, a West Nile virus outbreak, and
air pollution episode, a heat wave, and
found that it costs over 14 billion
dollars just to people's health.
Those are costs that we don't think about and
we need to.
I guess my hope as a scientist who studies
climate change and health is not that people will get
super bummed out listening to all of these
effects, but that they'll be energized
and demand preparedness and demand
cleaner energy and demand building
healthier and more secure communities
for their children's future.
