Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings January 2014, Volume 27, Number 1 | Page 73

to be the greatest moral issue of this century. . . . It’s hard for
people to recognize that we have a planetary emergency.”
Many scientists now believe we are on the tipping point
that could unleash unstoppable forces. Melting permafrost in
Siberia could belch millions of tons of methane—a greenhouse
gas 20 to 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide—into the
atmosphere and change the climate abruptly and cataclysmically, and some areas, especially here in the USA, will be more
impacted than others.
Newly industrialized developing nations such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey are rapidly creating a
huge middle class that will demand more goods and create more
pollution, putting additional pressures on a global ecosystem
already buckling under the weight of human consumption.
Vast stretches of the world could become virtually uninhabitable, forcing the exploding population—expected to reach 9
billion by 2050—to squeeze into ever smaller patches of livable
land. The rule of thumb is that every 1°C rise in temperature
(a little less than 2°F) decreases crop yields by 10%. Higher
temperatures halt photosynthesis, prevent pollination, and lead
to crop dehydration. How will we grow more food to feed all
these extra people on a planet with more frequent droughts,
floods, and heat waves? Food prices could double, pushing billions into starvation. Radically rising sea levels and the massive
desertification of the grain baskets of the world, among other
problems, will make it very hard for even the most developed
economies to survive.
Rising temperatures and health. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that worldwide over the past 3
decades 150,000 people have died as a result of a warming
planet—mainly from increased mortality due to high rates of
malaria, diarrheal diseases, and floods—and 5 million cases of
illness can be attributed to it annually. Up to 5 million deaths
occur each year from air pollution, hunger, and disease as a
result of climate change and emissions from carbon-intensive
economies.
WHO has identified >30 new or resurgent diseases in the
last 3 decades. The incidence of dengue fever, long thought
eradicated in the USA and once close to being wiped out in
South America, is now climbing in the Western hemisphere.
The number of people hospitalized in the USA with it tripled
between 2000 and 2007, according to the CDC, and the species
of mosquito that spread dengue fever have established a firm
foothold in the continental USA.
A hotter planet is also promoting the spread of numerous other vector-borne pathogens from ticks, mice, and other
carriers of potentially deadly microbial hitchhikers surviving
milder winters and fanning out across the country into newly
suitable habitats, transmitting Rocky Mountain spotted fever,
equine encephalitis, St. Louis encephalitis, and babesiosis, a
once uncommon malaria-like infection. Lyme disease has migrated from Connecticut and New York to the Canadian border
and westward to the Great Lakes region. The sweltering summer
of 2012 saw the largest outbreak of West Nile virus ever in the
USA, according to the CDC, with 38 states reporting 1118
cases, including 41 deaths.
January 2014

Heat waves, like the one that killed >70,000 people in Europe in 2003 and 2005, are projected to become common. In
2010, Russia wilted under its most intense heat wave in 130
years of record-keeping with daily highs in Moscow hitting
100°F instead of the normal summer average of 75°F. Severe
droughts ignited wildfires in the countryside, smothering Moscow in poisonous smog for 6 straight days. The combination of
unprecedented heat and suffocating haze doubled the death rate
to an average of 700 a day and >52,000 people overall.
Big cities will feel the heat more acutely because of their high
concentration of asphalt, buildings, and pavement, which tend
to absorb more heat in the day and radiate less heat into their
immediate surroundings at night than rural areas do. Therefore,
built-up areas get hotter and stay hotter, creating “urban heat
islands” in which temperatures are 5° to 10°F warmer than surrounding areas. In the not-so-distant future, major metropolises
like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Phoenix could become uninhabitable hot zones for months at a stretch, triggering
the deaths of thousands.
Allergies and asthma have reached epidemic proportions in
industrialized nations. Asthma rates have increased by 50% in
each decade for the last 40 years, and more than 300 million
people worldwide now have asthma, while an additional 400
million