Global Warming Is No Longer a Back-Burner Issue

There has never been a more exciting time to be in environmental health research, nor a time of greater danger and urgency, than Earth Day 2000, which is Saturday.

On the plus side, our rivers no longer catch fire, our urban and suburban water supplies and air are cleaner, and many of the gross health problems of the environment are behind us. We had one close call with depletion of the ozone layer, but now that the use of chlorofluorocarbons has been banned, we think the hole in the ozone could begin to repair itself and return to normal this century.

But we earthlings appear to be sliding toward another big problem: Our planet’s temperature has been getting warmer and may continue to get warmer, bringing tropical diseases to formerly temperate areas and who knows what problems to areas that are already tropical.

Unfortunately, when it comes to this, we seem to have become politically paralyzed. We have fallen into endless squabbling about what part of global warming is natural or cyclical versus what is caused by development. We need to stop fighting and focus more on what can be done to slow the rise in temperature and, more especially, what we can do about the health and nutritional consequences of the trend.

Some initial steps have been taken. The National Institute of Environmental Health Science’s journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, has carried a study that indicates that ticks are moving farther north as the north grows warmer. Warming also increases the potential for epidemics of mosquito-borne dengue fever, a viral disease that causes fever, rash, prostration, pain and occasionally fatal shock. There are doubtless other debilitating and deadly diseases that could move north as well.

However, as Jonathan A. Patz of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health writes in the April issue of the journal, “adaption is feasible,” although at some cost. By “adaption,” Patz means providing more protection against flooding, water contamination and heat waves, as well as a better early-warning system for storms and new carriers of disease.

We can blindly hope for a temperature reversal or meekly settle for more illness and shorter life spans. Or we can invest in added environmental health-related protections.

While Patz’s study is a start, we need a coordinated, well-financed study of the urgent health problems that could stem from global warming. We need, in particular, research on how we and the other life forms of Earth can adapt. Such a focus on health should reduce the partisanship, from both the left and the right, that too often bars progress.