Tackling climate change is important for the health of the planet, right? Absolutely. But too few Americans make the connection between climate change and human health–and the financial toll of those health problems. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”
Axios reported that the world faces “a climate change-fueled health crisis — from increased emergency department visits due to heatstroke, exacerbated asthma and even heart attacks to injuries and illness linked to severe storms,” such as Hurricane Ian.
Let’s start with extreme heat. You may recall that in the summer of 2021 Seattle hit 108 degrees, some 30 degrees above normal. About 600 additional people died over a week in Oregon and Washington. Writing in Time magazine, Dr. Sameed Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania reported that two recent studies of the contiguous U.S. found that from 2008 to 2017, between 13,000 and 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat.
Climate change, Axios reported, has also been linked to increased risks for kidney disease, obesity and diabetes, injuries, the transmission of infectious diseases, some cancers and poorer mental health. “We are learning more and more that the combustion of fossil fuels is contributing to a massive epidemic of chronic disease around the world that dwarfs AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined,” said Gary Cohen, president and founder of Health Care Without Harm, a group that focuses on reducing health care's carbon footprint.
Wildfire is another growing threat related to climate change, especially in the West. Those fires kill a number of people, including firefighters, and they destroy homes and other buildings. But they also pollute the air. Researchers found a 27-fold increase over the past decade in the number of people experiencing an “extreme smoke day,” which is defined as air quality deemed unhealthy for all age groups. In 2020 alone, nearly 25 million people across the contiguous United States were affected by dangerous smoke, Mira Rojanasakul reported in The New York Times.
“We have been remarkably successful in cleaning up other sources of air pollution across the country, mainly due to regulation like the Clean Air Act,” said Marshall Burke, a co-author of the research and professor of earth system science at Stanford. “That success, especially in the West, has really stagnated. And in recent years this started to reverse.”
The research, Rojanasakul wrote, indicates that wildfire smoke could be a leading cause of that reversal, wiping out most of the progress. Particulate pollution causes more than short-term irritation. It has been linked to chronic heart and lung conditions, as well to cognitive decline, depression and premature birth.
Then there’s infectious disease. More than half of the infectious diseases known to affect humans are being aggravated by climate change, scientists reported recently in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. The research found that illnesses like hepatitis, cholera, malaria, and hundreds of others were spreading faster, expanding in range, and becoming more severe because of climate-related events.
It’s not just transmission that’s increasing; climate change is also making it harder to fight off these diseases by reducing people’s health, immunity, and access to medical care, the researchers concluded.
“The environment harbors dozens of other carriers of illnesses you’ve probably never heard of,” Zoya Teirstein wrote in Grist. They come from bugs, shellfish, and even soil. With global temperatures rising, well-known vector-borne illnesses are becoming more common, and other, lesser-known diseases are spreading into new areas.
These illnesses will “continue to tax our public health and medical care systems for years to come,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites they spread can cause joint pain, skin lesions, long-term memory problems — even death.
Then there’s hunger. The number of people experiencing extreme hunger has more than doubled in some of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, Oxfam International said in a new report. Some 48 million people are now suffering from acute hunger, and nearly 18 million of those people are on the brink of starvation. Conflict remains the primary driver of hunger, but “the onslaught of climate disasters is now outpacing poor people’s ability to cope, pushing them deeper into severe hunger,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.
The report found a strong correlation between extreme weather and rising hunger in 10 climate hot spots, wrote Karina Tsui in The Washington Post. “Climate change is no longer a ticking bomb,” said Bucher. “It is exploding before our eyes.”.
These soaring costs are not included in the prices of fossil fuels. They are what economists call “external costs.” We believe that fossil fuel prices should include such costs. If Congress opted for an honest price by enacting a carbon fee, there would be stronger incentives to speed the transition to clean energy.