Global health issues are signpost of warming

By Alvin Powell

Harvard News Office

The human health consequences of global warming are real and occurring now, not in some distant future, with lives lost to heat waves, drought, and superstorms, according to an author and the director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment.

Ross Gelbspan, author of several books on climate change, cited recent media stories from around the world as evidence that the health effects of global warming are being felt today: a cyclone kills 3,100 in Bangladesh; Australia suffers through its worst drought in 1,000 years; a heat wave kills 74 people in India; floods in Africa kill 100 and require food aid for almost 300,000; China floods affect 200 million; snow falls in the Chilean wine region for the first time in 50 years; and the list goes on.

Gelbspan and Center for Health and the Global Environment Associate Director Paul Epstein spoke Dec. 6 at a press briefing on climate change, hosted by the Center for Health and the Global Environment. The Boston event was held as delegates from around the world met in Bali to discuss setting up a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which requires ratifying nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Epstein, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, cited “father of pathology” Rudolph Virchow, who said that epidemics are like signposts saying that something is wrong in the system. Virchow, who lived in the 1800s, was speaking about public health ills caused by industrialization and crowded cities, Epstein said, but the statement applies equally to what we’re observing today with global warming.

Public health emergencies are occurring clustered around severe weather outbreaks while new diseases are emerging around the world, Epstein said. In the 1800s, public health became the driver for change in industrial cities. With public health consequences of global warming growing more apparent, Epstein said, perhaps public health can be one of the drivers for change on the global warming issue.

Examined from a public health perspective, Epstein said, some of the proposed solutions to global warming aren’t very attractive. Though coal is an abundant fossil fuel and some tout clean coal technology as a way forward, Epstein said the byproducts of processing and burning even “clean coal” include soot, mercury, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen oxides, which would have to be disposed of, perhaps by burying.

“Let’s just leave it in the ground to begin with,” Epstein said.

Biofuels are considered another option but also have potential public health impacts, Epstein said, including the use of pesticides and fertilizers. There are further questions about displacing other crops from farmland to grow the plants that will be raw materials for the fuels.

Nuclear power remains an alternative to burning fossil fuels, but Epstein said the waste storage issues that plagued the nuclear power industry in the past remain.

Gelbspan said that renewables are a viable option, noting that the nation’s “wind corridors” could produce enough power to meet the nation’s energy needs. He also said that we need to stop thinking that we have to get our power from big, centralized energy systems.

Gelbspan and Epstein said the urgency to do something about climate change is mounting, as evidence grows that changes are occurring faster than expected.

“The climate is changing so much more quickly than scientists believed even five years ago,” Gelbspan said