White House Announces Initiative to Focus on Health Concerns of Global Warming: We’ve Already Done It For Them!

Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”


—


It seems like the Obama Administration is a bit behind the times when it comes to today’s announcement that it will start a new initiative to focus on the health effects of climate change.


There is no need for the White House to outlay federal resources for the time and effort that will be involved—we have already done it for them (and, undoubtedly, for a minuscule fraction of the price)!


Two and a half years ago, we released a publication titled “ADDENDUM: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” that basically was a non‐​government‐​influenced look at how climate change would likely impact the United States in the future, based a lot on current trends in climate and society. We titled it an “ADDENDUM” because the U.S. Global Change Research Program, back in 2009, released a similarly titled report that was so incomplete that, well, it needed an addendum. We knew the government wasn’t going to supply one, so we produced one ourselves.


In our report (available here), we included a chapter on human health. Here are the key messages from that chapter:

• The health effects of climate change on the United States are negligible today, and likely to remain so in the future, unless the United States goes into precipitous economic and technological decline.
• Death certificate data indicate that 46 percent of all deaths from extreme weather events in the United States from 1993–2006 were from excessive cold, 28 percent were from excessive heat, 10 percent were from hurricanes, 7 percent were from floods, and 4 percent were from tornadoes.
• Over the long term, deaths from extreme weather events have declined in the United States.
• Deaths in the United States peak in the colder months and are at a minimum in the warmer months.
• In U.S. cities, heat‐​related mortality declines as heat waves become stronger and/​or more frequent.
• Census data indicate that the migration of Americans from the cold northern areas to the warmer southwest saves about 4,600 lives per year and is responsible for three to seven per cent of the gains in life expectancy from 1970–2000.
• While the U.S. Global Change Research Program states that “Some diseases transmitted by food, water, and insects are likely to increase,” incidence of these diseases have been reduced by orders of magnitude in the United States over the past century, and show no sign of resurgence.

We effectively show that if you want to focus on the health of Americans, there is no need to bring climate change into the equation—especially if you are hoping to find negative impacts (which appears to be the goal of the Administration).


Scads of new science–on everything from heat‐​related mortality, to asthma, to extreme weather–continues to support that general conclusion.


Of note is that accompanying today’s White House announcement is an announcement from the USGCRP that it has produced its own report “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.”


Based on loads of past experience with the USGCRP, we can only imagine the worst.


Public comments on this draft of the USGCRP report are due on June 8, 2015. It’s on our calendar.