Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings January 2014, Volume 27, Number 1

coat their nostrils with petroleum jelly if they dared to venture outside. Many were isolated by the storms, which crippled cars and machines; they were marooned for days on end without food, barely surviving on the ragged edges of poverty. Some were driven mad by the never-ending dust. By 1935, inhabitants began to abandon the Plains in what became the largest mass migration in US history. By the end of the decade, on the eve of World War II, >2 million people had been uprooted—including 85% of the population of Oklahoma—and 500,000 more were left homeless. Deserted farm houses covered the landscape, and the community schools, churches, banks, and businesses were shuttered, leaving behind ghost towns. Aside from the profound psychological toll, there also were serious health consequences from living in a dust-choked environment where summer temperatures soared to 120°F and air-conditioning was extremely rare. Simply venturing outdoors could prove fatal. Many suﬀered from malnutrition and starvation, and many subsisted on pickled tumbleweed, yucca roots, and road kill. Even the dust itself was lethal: the churning winds milled the soil into an extremely ﬁne particulate with a high silica content, which scratched throats and eyes and penetrated deep into the lungs, causing a potentially lethal condition known as dust pneumonia or the brown plague, similar to the black lung that developed in coalminers. Although no deﬁnitive public health records were kept during that period, it is estimated that 7000 people suﬀocated from the dust and thousands more were permanently incapacitated, condemned to a lifetime of hacking coughs and respiratory diﬃculty. Will we see the Dust Bowl conditions again? Marsa’s answer is “absolutely.” She indicates that by the end of this present century we can expect the midsection of the USA to be gripped by extreme droughts and baked by 90°F days for more than half the year. We will no longer call them droughts because the weather patterns will have permanently shifted and the land will simply become desert. The cover of the November 1, 2012, Bloomberg BusinessWeek noted after Hurricane Sandy turned much of the northeastern USA into a gigantic disaster zone: “It’s global warming, stupid.” Rising temperatures and greenhouse gases. Starting in March 2012, much of the nation sweltered under triple-digit temperatures—3282 daily temperature records were broken in the month of June 2012, and July was the hottest month since recordkeeping began in 1895. A severe wind storm, a type called “Derecho,” swept across hundreds of miles, with wind gusts up to nearly 60 miles per hour and lasting >6 hours, and cut oﬀ electrical power to nearly 4 million people in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia for up to a week. The exceptionally dry conditions ignited raging wildﬁres across the Western USA that incinerated >7 million acres. The heat also contributed to the record-breaking drought, the worst since Dwight Eisenhower was president, that engulfed 80% of the continental US by mid July, aﬀected 165 million Americans, and decimated 65% of cattle production and 75% of the corn crop. January 2014 At the end of October 2012 came Hurricane Sandy, which has been described as “historic” and “unprecedented.” The sheer energy generated by the storm surge and the destructive potential of the waves in its wake reached 5.8 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 0 to 6 scale, the highest ever measured. Exceptionally high ocean temperatures brought this very last season Atlantic hurricane barreling up the East Coast to crash into a cold front that was coming down from Canada. The front’s frigid air was fueled by the unprecedented September melting of Arctic ice, which had shriveled to 1.3 million square miles, the smallest ever recorded and less than half the area it had occupied only 40 years earlier. The collision of these two weather systems turbocharged Sandy and transformed it into a “Frankenstorm” that stretched about 850 miles and caused historic destruction and catastrophic ﬂooding in the nation’s most populated regions. At least 110 people were killed and thousands lost their homes. Enormous swatches of the electrical grid failed, leaving millions—including much of lower Manhattan—without power for days and some for weeks. New York’s entire subway system was shuttered for days; LaGuardia Airport was submerged, and many of New Jersey’s iconic beachfront resort towns were turned into piles of kindling. As the weeks wore on, many stranded residents were sickened by serious respiratory infections and developed what came to be known as “Rockaway Cough.” As the planet gets hotter, we will live sicker and die quicker! Indisputably, the planet is heating up. For >100 years, scientists have cautioned that burning fossil fuels like coal and oil would cause global warming because these fuels add enormous amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is considered a “greenhouse gas” because it creates a hothouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation from the sun, inhibiting the planet’s natural cooling mechanisms. While greenhouse gases are normally present in the environment—plants use CO2 for photosynthesis and we exhale CO2 every time we breathe—we have released tons more into the atmosphere since coal came into widespread use in the early 19th century at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. With more carbon-spewing vehicles and factories constantly coming online to accommodate population growth, carbon emissions continue to climb. By 2011, annual global carbon dioxide emissions had reached 31.6 gigatonnes, an increase of 3.2% over the previous year. (A gigatonne is 1 billion tonnes, equivalent to about twice the mass of all 7 billion people on Earth twice. This means that 31.6 gigatonnes is more than 60 times the aggregate weight of every single person on planet Earth.) That ﬁgure is

Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings January 2014, Volume 27, Number 1 | Page 71