Global warning: climate sceptics are winning the battle reads the headline of an article about comments made by James Hansen recently:
Part of the problem, he said, was that the climate sceptic lobby employed communications professionals, whereas "scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don't have the wherewithal to do it."
I agree with Hansen. It’s a lot like the SNL skit where Dukakis looks over and says, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” Despite the weight of scientific evidence on climate and atmosphere, the stuff that needs to be done to stop the train we are on is being thwarted by a message machine that’s kicking our butts.
We have the science. We have the temperature data. Climate data isn’t making the difference. What will?
I wish I knew. But until someone smarter than I am figures it out, I am going to keep trying new tacks to make some inroads among people who are either sitting on the fence, or maybe even those who dispute the fundamentals. Another strategy I like to try is going around the current barrier. And to me it looks like no amount of changing temperature, or weather pattern data, are going to get us anywhere. So I’m looking for another path.
Perhaps there’s another story to tell. Maybe there are ways to at least prepare for the damage and mitigate the problems we’ll face from climate crisis events if we can’t stop the train in terms of CO2 levels or temperature changes or other random weather wackiness.
One of those routes might be public health. Why do I think this is worth a shot? Because conservatives are afraid of death, or so some researchers suggest. And if this fear drives them to bolster the military, why can’t we harness this to drive climate-wise? Or at least use their fears to prepare us all for some of the consequences.
The reason I got to thinking about this is because I just finished a book called Changing Planet, Changing Health by Paul Epstein, MD and Dan Ferber, a science writer. Ferber has been a practicing MD for decades in all sorts of places, with all sorts of connections and seats at tables around the climate change arena. He’s not new to the game, he’s been in it. And he’s been connecting the dots every effectively. Ferber has been writing for many science-minded outlets including some with broader public audiences. This is a nice team of science + communication. What we have here is science and wherewithal.
I learned about the book from a Skeptically Speaking podcast that you can access here. That night I signed on to my local library and got the book ordered through library loan (and thank you, librarians).
It seemed to me that this book makes the kinds of points that might actually scare people in ways that a couple of degrees of warmer weather doesn’t. In this book they describe a variety of public health problems that could become very likely should we shift the temperature much more. It starts with cholera, and describes known cases of climate variations that have led to outbreaks of cholera. And they point out that a reservoir of cholera is the ocean. Did you know that there is cholera floating off shore of your beach house? Did you know that a change in temperature could ramp that right up—and up the coast—destroying your shrimp industry and causing a lot of illness and death? Yep. They have the data. It has happened. It could happen a lot more.
They cover malaria, and point to specific and well-documented cases of temperature changes that enabled malaria to spread to new places. And because these new locations are full of people who haven’t seen endemic malaria before, they get much sicker, in fact. They have the data to show why the mosquito hosts are more potent with just small temperature shifts upward.
Pg 52: “researchers had demonstrated that climate warming of just 0.5°C (0.9°F) over two decades would more than double the mosquito population.”
Although this should scare people with summer homes near the lake, they may still only associate it with developing countries. They shouldn’t, but they might.
But wait, there’s more! More lyme disease. More seasonal allergies. More asthma. These are things suburban families might be more aware of.
They also describe what they call the silent killer—heat waves. Again, they have the evidence of how awful this can be, with dramatic numbers of people who have suffered and died in heat waves.
But there are other public health consequences blowing in the wind. One of them would be food insecurity. Crops are going to face new threats in a turbulent climate:
Pg 116: “In the fall of 2004, Louisiana State University plant pathologist Ray Schneider was giving a tour to a visiting soybean farmer when the two found signs of the dreaded disease. Samples sent to the US Dept. of Agriculture lab in Bethesda, Maryland, confirmed their fears: soybean rust had made it to the United States. Scientists later figured spores had probably been transported up from South America in September on the winds of Hurricane Ivan….”
On the winds of Ivan. But here’s another key point:
“Scientists were ready for the invasion. Even before soybean rust blew in, they had been working on modeling to evaluate its spread, tracking it by satellite or airplane, and developing genetically modified soybean varieties resistant to the disease.”
So scary things can blow in—but there may be ways to prepare and mitigate them effectively. If we are able to prepare for them without anti-science forces in the way, that is.
Some of the food problems are going to be more complex than some wayward spores. They show the data that indicates there will be increased weed pressure at higher temps and CO2 levels. The weeds are going to be able to out-compete the food crops in some cases. The plant-eating bugs may actually become more effective, because it looks like natural plant defenses (the pesticides that plants naturally make themselves) may go awry in a climate change scenario. They show data that indicates this, at least for some plant/pest combinations. Of course, drought could be another possibility.
It’s not just food plants that are going to be affected, of course. They illustrate the known cases of beetle infestations damaging forests—as the beetles spread to new areas previously too cold to sustain them. Not only does this damage the forests, but it can also result eventually in fires. Fires can certainly affect the property of suburbanites, but it can affect their health too. The particles in lungs from smoke can cause damage long after a fire is gone.
Besides the obvious damage of flooding, too, is the aftermath. And the molds. We’ve heard this from Katrina, and from the Joplin tornado as well. Even if you think you can dodge the event—the hurricane or the tornado—can you dodge the air afterwards? How lucky do you feel exactly?
Monster storms also leave mental health damage, a public health issue that isn’t as obvious perhaps.
Of course there are also algal blooms and associated toxins that could become more frequent. How tasty does that clambake sound now?
Not mentioned in the book is some more recent data I came across lately on infection and IQ. Maybe we could also point out that their kids could end up with lower IQs if they are fighting more diseases. There are suggestions that when your body needs to fight disease it’s not building up the brain functions as well as it could: Why Is Average IQ Higher in Some Places?
The authors spend a lot of time linking the public health issues in the larger network of the biological and social systems of the planet—which certainly makes sense. But I think that’s possibly too much for the average conversation with a fence sitter. However, for those longer conversations, you’d be prepared if you read this book, and a lot of you interested in this topic would appreciate the context.
That describes what I think are the strongest features of the book, which covers about the first 2/3s. The last 1/3 or so then moves on to some of the political barriers and solutions that we can aim at. But none of those would be new to anyone who has been following the climate change politics as most people here have. {One interesting note though—one of the author’s strongest allies in policy seems to have been the insurance industry. I know that may seem like strange bedfellows, but think about people who evaluate data and risks….}
In the podcast, before I read the book, I asked Dan Ferber if these sorts of stories carried the risk that we face in linking specific weather events to climate change—which has been known to cause fractures within the climate science and activism arena. He said that he thought not—because in these cases they provide in the book there is evidence of what happened and why. In other words, we have the data here to stand on—clear cases of climate causing health havoc and the results. Even if they doubt the reason, fence-sitters have to have seen specific and memorable weather situations of late that they can muse about as you tell them these stories. And ask them how prepared they feel for more of those events.
Another reason I think this tack might work was one of the political barriers that I was reminded of by this book.
Pg 219: “…on October 23, 2007, Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation’s top disease-fighting agency, was scheduled to testify about the health impacts of climate change to a Senate committee. She submitted 6 pages of written testimony, but reporters quickly obtained copies of the 12 pages of written testimony she had planned to deliver and uncovered that the White House had censored it….The testimony “was eviscerated” an unnamed CDC official told the Associated Press.”
The Bush administration didn’t want people to hear about the health effects. Yeah, they had plenty of pathologies and obstructions for lots of reasons. But ya gotta wonder if they did it because they thought it might have been an effective meme.
My hope is that this data can shake up some of the people who are just not that worried about blasting their air conditioner a bit. They need to be more scared of public health consequences of climate change. They need to imagine cholera at their beach house, and fires and smoke- and particle-filled lungs in their mountain retreats. But we can also offer them hope that if we prepare (like the soybean rust story) we can lessen the impact, and if people who dispute the science don't stand in the way.
So I’d recommend the book if you are interested in public health, and in ways to talk about changing climate in a way that changes the emphasis a bit. More ammo is better. But even if we don’t stop the train, maybe we can personally be aware of the consequences and prepare our communities as best we can.
An excerpt from the book, courtesy of Scientific American:
Malaria on the Rise as East African Climate Heats Up