Global Warming Is Science Not Politics And It Is Affecting Humans

Okay, an environmental group based in San Francisco says that 17% of our species are threatened by rising sea levels.

Yeah, I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” when it came out.  Al Gore did the best he could but he is not my choice for a scientific spokesman on global warming.

This being said, he had plenty of enthusiasm and seemed to be real.  My immediate reaction when I saw the film was “Yeah.  This looks like real science.”  I mean, when I was in prep school I actually thought Scientific American was more “fun” than “Seventeen”–  which my mother of blessed memory actually encouraged me to read, thinking it would somehow make me more socially acceptable or maybe even more “normal.”

It obviously did not work terribly well.

I never understood, back then, why I had to learn about a scientific phenomenon that appeared quite real — from a politician.

I do now, of course.

So when I fell over the report I initially linked to I thought “Oh my God, nobody is going to believe this.” The report from San Francisco, linked in my lead paragraph might be discounted by some who associate such origins suggest an association with the “Save the Whales” folks of the sixties to those old enough to remember.

One in three of America’s threatened species are at risk from this thing, this increase of water on the earth’s surface, that is a direct result of global warming.The esteemed British medical journal The Lancet –no slouches — estimate that 160,000 people have died of global warming since 1950, an estimate which anyone else I can find thinks is wildly conservative.

Incidentally, the Lancet, to their credit, offers full length articles to anybody — you do not have to be a doctor — and this is great news because I look more and more outside the U.S. of A. for my information.  Moreover, it seems to me that the Brits are not quite as dependent as the American docs on drug companies, although they are not as far behind as I wish they were.

At any rate, if you find it hard to trust foreign or even San Francisco sources, try our friends at NASA.  I mean, whatever you think of them, they are as American as the flag.

They explain that human activity produces gasses.  Nothing rare or esoteric — rather, mostly water vapor.  A little bit of the ever popular carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide (not enough to relieve anyone’s pain or give them euphoria) a little methane (please don’t worry about cow farts or even human ones – there is a great explanation here🙂

But before I could get too comfortable with that one, I found an article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggests the effects of methane and other gasses may be underestimated.

This layer of gasses, elegantly explained by the folks at NASA, acts like a sort of “thermal blanket,” heating the earth.

The evidence page of the NASA site is pretty damned compelling.  The warming trend may have started back as far as the industrial revolution , but it is warming more and faster, has been measured since the mid nineteenth century, but is happening the fastest ever, recently.

Clear evidence that it is really happening includes the rising sea levels that are making it easier for species to become extinct (which do not seem to be terribly good for humans)warmer earth surface temperature, warming oceans, shrinking ice everywhere, glaciers retreating, record hot temperatures everywhere, and the acidification of the oceans.

Maybe I am a chauvinist, but I hear myself keep asking what this means for the human species.

The effects are both direct and indirect but all seem to be onerous for our poor species. At this point, I tend to trust foreign sources more than American ones, especially because American sources seem to be mostly governmental.

Although I have seen earlier reports from the World Health Organization that said about 160,000 people had died from causes attributable to global warming since the 1950’s, I believe this one, that attributes 140,000 deaths a year by 2004 from the global warming of the 70’s to be far more accurate.  The phenomenon is increasing more in recent years than in the past by far.

Remember, the World Health Organization (as represented by a fearless Chinese female physician) has already said that at the rate we overuse antibiotics, they will be so useless within two years that a human will be able to die from a scrape to the knee.

They tell it like it is.

The basic needs of humans — which no one can deny — are water, food, and shelter.  These are all affected by global warming.

A lot of the diseases that kill people directly, like diarrhea and dehydration and dengue fever and malaria, are climate sensitive.  The warmer it gets, the more places they happen, and the more people they get.  Moreover, there are a lot of hot places where health care is neither plentiful nor organized.

Trust me — I am the one whose nickname was Pollyanna in residency, and I am not in the business of sewing doom and gloom here.  But I happen to know a lot of things that I can’t possibly link to, because I have to give all kind of passwords and secret numbers to prove I am a real doctor to get to them.

Trust me also, because, well, I am a little bit old but not at all stupid.  I remember things that I learned in training.  I have this magic switch I turn on in my head when I think a hunk, or even a splinter, of knowledge could save somebody’s life, or at least improve their health.  I remember everything I ever learned in medical school and subsequent training.  I do, however, confuse movies and movie and TV stars and rock singers on a regular and consistent basis.

Thank God I have a husband to keep all of that vital information straight.

The Examiner says that malaria in New York happens because that city is “crossroads of the world.”

One of the sites I cannot link my esteemed readers to because I am not aiming this at doctors (having essentially given up on members of my own esteemed profession) has suggested that at least some of this was traced to a bunch of New Yorkers who traveled on a tour to East Africa without “chemoprophylaxis” for malaria.

That means, if you are traveling to a country where malaria tends to happen, the forewarned are supposed to take medication before the trip.  Yes, it works.  I learned about this in medical school in great detail.  Even though in France, we were closer to Africa and many colleagues and all relevant teaching staff had plenty of experience, colleagues in every country with a medical school who are known to me seemed to know all about it.

Major Walter Reed, M.D. – for whom they named the official  U.S Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. (recently closed) — discovered the importance of mosquitoes in the transmission of yellow fever in 1900.  In 1898, the illness was a real problem to the American occupation force in Cuba.

Malaria is mosquito borne, too.  The species is the Anopheles, and the illness is “eminently treatable,” so keeping with the tradition of the military researching tropical diseases that occur in places the military ends up trying to develop a vaccine for this, using “volunteers.” 

As I can affirm as a veteran, the existence of “volunteers” for anything within the military is suspect at best.  A description of what it is like to be bitten by what sounds like a very large and very ornery Anopheles mosquito by one of these volunteers was captured by our friends at the Washington Post.

Our very own Centers for Disease Control trace the history from the 1880 discovery of the parasite by Laveran who got the 1907 Nobel Prize — French Army doc, ergo one of my peeps.  There was an “eradication” of malaria in the United States in 1951, but now there are plenty of cases  — CDC delicately does NOT mention the numbers in their history.

According to a November 2013 story  the U.S.A. has the highest rate of malaria it has had in the past 40 years, and almost all malaria in America came from travelers.  If there was so much as one case that did not, the question needs to be asked if we have these horrible monster mosquitoes here, as I know of no other way the illness can be contracted.

Incidentally, it says here no single antimalarial drug is 100% effective, which casts, at the very least, a shadowy question mark on the assertion made by the military that it is ethical and appropriate to ask people to volunteer to get infected with malaria.

Mosquitoes and parasites like malaria are certainly climate-dependent.  They happen where it is warm and wet, so it makes logical and simple biological sense that global warming is associated with an increased incidence of similarly climate-dependent illnesses, of which malaria is but one.

Another example would be dengue fever, another disease of tropical climates.  It’s been around for a long time.  It is also mosquito-borne, but it is one of a series of viruses, as opposed to a parasite like malaria.  It is endemic to several regions and seems to be (surprise surprise) on the rise, and I think we all know why. Enough illnesses already.  Enough death already.

I am practical.  I really want to dig in and fix this mess, since everyone now living — as far as I am concerned — deserves, at the very least, to continue to do that and get chances, real chances.  We aren’t there yet, but we gotta try.

I have looked in enough places to understand that this s not something a single solution is likely to solve.  The problem is too complicated and too big.  It is more a civilization than an individual that creates this heat-trapping layer of greenhouse gases.

I am not saying there is no solution.  I am saying that it will take some intervention of the governmental or intergovernmental level.  This is tough, but I have to believe deep down that humans want to preserve their own species, and will come up with something.

The first thing I decided is that the United States is unlikely to be a leader on this one.  Our government has closed down for no demonstrable reason and botched health care beyond recognition, so it does not seem realistic that this country, many people in which seem still to think this is a political and not a scientific problem, to do much that is useful.

How neat that the first thing I find about how this thing will be solved, comes from Canada — a country with tons of natural resources and a “carbon footprint” (contribution to greenhouse gases) about the size of a mosquito’s foot.

The thing in the way is not the people who say that there is no problem, but the people who say the problem cannot be solved.  Makes sense to me.  A combination of solutions could, and should work.
The best of what I have found so far on the web includes the following.

Another lovable Canadian, a scientist from University of Calgary, working with a team on a technology to capture CO2 from the air.  CO2 seems to be one of the major culprits, so this “near commercial technology” is a great idea, indeed.

British idea, putting giant tubes in the ocean.  Apparently cold water pumped to the surface would make surface algae bloom and suck CO2.  People are pro and con.  Sounds like one of the cheaper ideas out there; worth testing on a smaller scale, it seems to me.  I hope someone pursues this.

American legal-political approach — consensus among large groups of folks (like the U.N.) is not doing it, focus on the few major players who seem to be responsible for most of the problem.  Fine with me, just jump in somebody, faster than we are doing now.

Tax carbon emissions.  They are apparently already doing this in both Australia and British Columbia.  Those lovable Canadians and Australians.  Somebody who knows more about things like politics and economics than I do has to check this one out, but as far as I can tell, it makes some sense.

Personal actions, involving your heat or your car, may be personally satisfying, but it is tough for me to imagine them making an immense difference in a country like ours where most people I know don’t believe it is real, or think it is a political construct, or even if they believe in it, don’t really care.

They might help you feel better about yourself and that is just fine.

This makes more sense — Get informed.  The first step on doing anything about any issue, all too rarely taken.

Talk about it.  Try to do something that affects the government, like endorsing and voting for candidates who might actually do something about this.

And do what personal stuff you can.

THE END

“Global Warming” (climate change) is a scientific problem – not a political one.