'No Temperature Rise Is Safe': Top Health Experts Warn Climate Change Is Biggest Health Threat

Medical experts are worried. That is, top health officials from the leading medical journals across the world — including Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe — are calling for action to keep temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius to prevent devastation that will likely be wrought from climate change.

In a New England Journal of Medicine editorial Sunday, they wrote of the imperative to keep temperatures low, lest environmental destruction continues to hurt both the environment and human bodies. 

What Happened: Top health experts now collectively agree there is no time to waste for wealthy nations to do more to invest in non-carbon alternatives for themselves and the world, and to shift away completely from fossil fuel energy. 

“The risks to health of increases above 1.5° C are now well established,” the editorial reads. “Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe.’ In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people over 65 years of age has increased by more than 50%.”

The editorial listed many health problems associated with a warming climate, including pregnancy complications, dehydration, renal function loss, tropical infections and adverse mental health outcomes.

It also mentioned the consequences of destroying ecosystems that humans rely on, including food and water insecurity. 

The experts call on governments to “make fundamental changes” to the structure of current societies and their economies, noting that many political bodies have already invested “unprecedented” amounts of funding in things like COVID-19, and that the environmental crisis demands something similar. 

Why It Matters: Like many environmental and some economic scholars, these global health experts believe that investment in changes to the economy will likely pay for itself, providing new jobs, reducing air pollution, increasing physical activity and improving diet and housing conditions for billions of people. 

Though some industries are looking to find opportunities in technology and agriculture due to climate change, others are already being hurt or having to adapt because of warming in recent decades.  

As was previously reported by Benzinga, solar stocks continue to rise and companies that invest in heat pumps look to potentially benefit as places like the United Kingdom try to make them more available to common citizens. 

What Else: Despite issues plaguing the climate related to warming, that’s not the only cost associated with the worldwide phenomenon. In fact, air pollution is a major contributor to health problems in the U.S. and around the globe. 

One scientific study published in the Annals of Global Health found the “evidence is unequivocal: air pollution can harm health across the entire lifespan. It causes disease, disability and death, and impairs everyone’s quality of life. It damages lungs, hearts, brains, skin and other organs; it increases the risk of disease and disability, affecting virtually all systems in the human body.”

Thus, some scholars are discovering that paying to switch away from carbon-driven technologies — based on the improvements in air quality alone — pays for itself, as it could save up to $700 billion per year in health costs, according to a Vox article. As of last year, air pollution alone led to the premature deaths of about 250,000 people. 

Photo: Tony L Via Unsplash