The Unseen Effects Of Climate Change And A Hotter World

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The other day, my friend Jock Gill, who lives in bucolic splendor in Peacham, Vermont, dropped me a note to ask why CleanTechnica does not spend more time explaining to people the consequences of climate change other than melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Why, he wanted to know, don’t we focus more on the important health benefits of particulate-free energy? The avoided costs of respiratory illnesses caused by dirty energy create an enormous benefit. It is important to look at the complete value stack, he said.

He is correct, of course, but being relatively new to the CleanTechnica community, he may not be familiar with the many articles we have published about fine particulates and the harm they do to our lungs and hearts, how they lodge in our brains and tissues, and how they are particularly harmful to young people whose bodies are still developing. We even did a story about how scientists have detected fine particulates in the placentas of pregnant women, which means they are even affecting the growth of fetuses in the womb. You might think that the reactionaries in America who are screaming about reproductive health would be up in arms about that, but of course they would first have to think rationally, something they and their so-called leaders seem incapable of doing.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof penned an op-ed piece recently in which he explored all the small ways that climate change is affecting all of us. We tend to focus on the cataclysmic risks — polar ice caps melting, seas rising dramatically, our planet becoming uninhabitable — and those are real. But over the last couple of decades, Kristof says, we have accumulated evidence that the more mundane impacts of heat are already upon us and impacting our daily lives.

For example, more people fall off ladders on hot days than on cool days. They are more likely to kill themselves or someone else. Meanwhile, students learn less on hot days and perform worse on exams. After a natural disaster, students are less likely to go to college. In other words, extreme weather damages far more than property; it also is devastating to human capital.

“The familiar climate catastrophe framing may be missing some of the most important features of the real climate change story,” R. Jisung Park, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, notes in his excellent recent book Slow Burn. He argues that we have been so focused on apocalyptic scenarios that we haven’t focused enough on the other consequences of climate change.

Unless we do more to address the impact on education, hotter temperatures may reduce student learning in the United States by about 10 percent over the course of a year, Park’s research finds. Because Black and Latino students disproportionately live in hotter parts of the country and attend schools with less air-conditioning, rising temperatures appear to magnify the learning gap, Park says. Then there are forest fires. We focus on the immediate damage caused by fires, such as the 20 to 30 people who die in America from wildfires in a typical year. But wildfires linked to climate change are exposing more people to smoke that may claim far more lives.

Climate Change And Air Pollution Are Connected

Air pollution already is linked to an estimated seven million deaths globally each year, mostly by contributing to heart disease, respiratory diseases and cancer. Researchers estimate that in the United States, wildfire smoke claims 5,000 to 15,000 lives each year — yet these deaths don’t get attention because there is no dramatic footage of flames to frighten us. People may think that their loved ones died of heart disease or old age, but another factor may have been climate change.

Climate change may influence crime as well. The researchers find that murder, aggravated assault, and rape are more common when temperatures rise. One researcher estimated that the increase in temperatures because of climate change may lead to 1.6 million additional cases of aggravated assault and 200,000 additional rapes in the United States over this century. Even professional athletes are affected. One study looked at how tennis players do when temperatures rise. When it is 95 degrees, the likelihood of a double fault increases and rallies are shorter.

Climate Change Is Complicated

A dozen years ago, scientists worried that the Earth might heat by 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, compared with the pre-industrial period. It now seems more likely that the increase will be around 2.5 degrees or less — which is still deadly. Globally, Park said he expects that “unabated climate change will lead to very significant increases in mortality.”

Kristof writes that we don’t need to hype the risks or conjure nightmares because we now have abundant evidence that even at current levels of warming we are doing great damage to our species. “I’ve written my share of apocalyptic pieces about climate, from ‘methane burps’ to the acidification of seas dissolving some plankton that are the basis of the food chain. These are legitimate concerns. But doomsday scenarios haven’t brought us to our senses, and we shouldn’t let them distract us from the lesser challenges. If we let warming continue, more people will be victimized by crime, children will learn less, and more of us will slip off ladders.”

The Takeaway

Jock Gill and Nicholas Kristof are correct. Focusing on the slowing of the Gulf Stream or the melting of glaciers in Greenland may make it harder for us to see the smaller, everyday consequences of our warming planet. Instead, we focus on racist rants of politicians who lack the mental acuity to understand the things that are going on around us every day or the will to do anything about them. Jimmy Buffett once warned us, “Power is a dangerous drug. It can maim, it can kill.” The last so-called presidential debate was 90 minutes long. Each candidate was allotted one minute to talk about climate change when in fact that topic should have been the subject of the entire event.

In the final analysis, the issue is pollution — of our lands, our waters, and the air we breathe. Polluters should pay a heavy penalty for the crud they pump into the environment, but have gamed the system to let themselves off the hook. Our focus does not need to be on fossil fuels versus solar and wind. It should be on the pollution that gets added to the air, water, and land around us. If we don’t make polluters pay, we as a race will largely disappear from the Earth. Scoring political points is not more important than survival. Those who think otherwise are not leaders, they are charlatans who are unworthy of your support. On November 6, 2024, please vote wisely.