Climate change and health: Tony McMichael and an "index of existential risk"

It's another average day for me, except that that, were Tony McMichael still alive, it would be his 76th birthday. Tony was one of the the first leading figures in public health to recognize the risk to human health from climate change.

The trough in the annual cycle of carbon dioxide levels is now over 405 ppm (parts per million). The Federal President of the Young Liberals has just pronounced that Australia should not take any leadership role in tackling climate change. Even more worryingly, he has suggested that the billion or so people without electricity should be illuminated by coal burning. (But Indian President Modi does not agree (see endnote - PPS)). The lead author of a new article on ancient climate (about 50 million years ago) has just been quoted as saying that “Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America.. but we have no data so we don’t know.” At the time he was discussing (called the early Paleogene), carbon dioxide levels may have been 1000 ppm.

I have an article under review which reports an "index of existential risk" for climate change and health, identified in the climate and health literature. I looked at 2,146 articles, editorials and news items, published in the first 25 years of this literature (1989-2013 inclusive). Each paper was given a score between 1 and 3, depending on the degree to which they recognized that climate change may pose an "existential risk" to civilization, and thus health. The average score of these papers was 1.37. 

The average score of Tony's 74 papers was 1.99 (see figure). I mentioned this last week, when I had the chance to talk at the Public Health Association of Australia's 2018 conference, after I received the 2018 award for public health, ecology and environment, named after Tony McMichael. The slides for my talk ("From life support to regional overload") are here. 

The press release for this award stated that I see civilization at risk, not life, if we continue the current trajectory of fossil fuel burning (and other approaches to planetary boundaries). This is not because it may become so warm that there may again be crocodiles and palm trees in the Arctic Circle, but because the chaos that will be inflicted upon human society through many processes associated with "regional overload" (of which unfavourable climate  change is but one) are likely to outweigh human coping capacity. Here are three candidate contributors, in no order: (1) drought, heat and rising food prices triggering more political instability; (2) sea level rise on the US East Coast leading to a massive loss in property values and thus worsening a financial crisis; (3) a mass human flight from north east China later this century, due to intolerable heat and humidity. 

Even now, solutions might be found. The technology for electricity and elective transport is rapidly advancing. California seeks to be 100% carbon free by 2045. Education reduces fertility (reduced fertility in many settings is important, not to slow climate change, but to reduce climate change related catastrophes in the global South). But these solutions need high level recognition by our political leaders, and that needs the global middle class to understand that rapid transition, towards sustainability, is both urgent and attainable.   

PS Later this month I am teaching, in Finland, in a short course on climate change and health, based on my edited book. (I have just agreed to edit a second edition but it will take some time.)

PPS Prime Minister Modi is reported as saying that:

1. He saw the 121 country International Solar Alliance as the future OPEC for meeting energy needs of the world

2. India would add as much as 50 GW (gigawatts) of non-hydro renewable energy to its existing 72 GW and is on track to reach its target of 75 GW of clean energy by 2022

3. That India’s solar energy increased by nine times in the last four years

4. That in the next four years as many as 28 lakh (2.8 million) solar pumps would be installed which would help avoid 10 GW generation capacity. 

5. 31 crore (310 million) LED bulbs were distributed

50GW is a lot - according to the 2018 Clean Energy Report less than 6 GW of large scale renewable energy projects were under construction or expected to start in 2018, in Australia.

Tony McMichael's 74 papers (1989-2013 inclusive) on climate change and health, scored by their recognition of existential risk.

The loss of freedom in our ecologically-constrained world

In 2015 we published a paper called "Implications of ‘structure versus agency’ for addressing health and well-being in our ecologically-constrained world" in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, (Vol 8 pp 47-69). It's behind a paywall, but one of its key points is that as limits to growth tighten, freedom for all will be reduced.

Here are three examples, simply from today's radio:

1. Free speech in Britain: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown just stated (on Late Night Live) that in the UK if a university student should mention Western hypocrisy over human rights they risk being reported to the British authorities. I tried to verify this (it is so Orwellian) but so far with no success.

2. Information about financial risks: I today watched a documentary called "We as a people will become afraid of the ocean' about the inexorable sea level rise and its effect in Florida. At its end, Professor Wanless (Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami) warns that, perhaps by 2050, many people from Florida will become like Okies - that is, wandering the US, penniless, looking for a home, having lost their assets in Florida (no doubt with profound global financial flow-ons). Yet, today, property prices in Florida continue to boom. This illustrates another loss of freedom - millions of investors, collectively, are walking into a gigantic financial trap, due to the "echo chamber" of a poor understanding of science (and limited education). They lack the freedom to know what is going on - even though they think they are making independent decisions.

More encouragingly, residents of Florida in November 2016 voted against an amendment, supported by the big utility companies, which would have slowed the solar transition which is happening, despite the collective incomprehension of climate change in the US and many other places.

3. The Philippines: The president of this overcrowded, desperately unequal country has himself killed numerous people without proof, or court, ushering 6,000 copycat crimes and desperately overcrowded jails. To what extent is the drug epidemic a symptom of this overcrowding and inequality? And, what has happened to Catholic morals there? Pope Francis, so good on the environment, did try to suggest that people need not breed like rabbits (after a visit to this benighted country). Slowing population growth in climate change vulnerable places, such as the Philippines, would also be good for adaptation.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also speculates (in her interview) on how easily the world could slide into World War III, something I have also repeatedly warned of (eg). And this interview was first broadcast months before the election of Donald Trump.

What can be done?

Like Yasmin, I am pessimistic. But the rise of Bernie Sanders, the failure of the Florida power companies to get their way, and the falling price of solar are rational causes for hope, as is social media, and people like Xiuhtezcatal Tonatiuh. As I recently mused, the excesses  of capitalism have released demons from the netherworld, as Marx long ago predicted. If enough people see the risk we face we could again see a fairer world unfold. But with Trump filling the Washington swamp with members of the 0.1% who deny health care, social security, climate change and environmental protection, we could easily stumble into WIII.
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** Our abstract read: "The long-standing debate in public health and the wider society concerning the implications of structure and agency for health and well-being generally concludes that structure powerfully influences agency, and does so unequally, exacerbating social and health inequities. In this article, we review this debate in the context of increasing environmental degradation and resource depletion. As the global population rises and environmental resources per person shrink, conflicts over the underlying factors contributing to human health and well-being may intensify. A likely result of nearing limits is a further constraint of agency, for both rich and poor, and greater social and health inequities, including gender inequities."

Reflections on Emeritus Professor David Shearman’s contribution to Doctors for the Environment, Australia

This is the text of a talk I gave at a Doctors for the Environment, Australia (DEA)

Annual General Meeting, September 30, 2016 Adelaide, South Australia.

           

It is a great honour to be asked to comment on Emeritus Professor David Shearman’s contribution to Doctors for the Environment Australia. I first heard David’s name in 1998, during an interview by Norman Swan on the ABC’s Health Report. I can recall the moment, in Tasmania, driving towards the Eastern Tiers; I was impressed that a gastroenterologist would care so much about the environment and understand its deep connections with health. This interview was about his book, co-authored with Gary Sauer-Thompson, called 'Green or Gone. Health, ecology, plagues, greed and our future'.

In this book I learned that David participated, as an intern, in the first ever renal transplant, undertaken in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1962. At that stage stage I had no idea that I would ever meet David, let alone work with him. However, I had heard of DEA’s parent group, International Society of Doctors for the Environment (ISDE), and had met some of its representatives, when I was studying in London.

About then David met with Dr Gaudenz Silberschmidt, then ISDE’s Executive Officer, based in Switzerland, who had steered it through a successful first decade. In 1999 David met with Professor Tony McMichael, then based in London. They agreed to explore establishing an Australian branch of ISDE. David then visited Geneva to discuss this with Dr Silberschmidt.

David writes, in the history of DEA that the first task was to find a chairman. Bill Castleden, a surgeon, who had led a movement to protect old growth forests in the south west of Western Australia was identified, and pursued. Bill’s notes on this provides an eloquent insight into David’s character:

Within weeks of giving up day-to-day forest involvement in 2001, I started to receive emails from a Professor David Shearman in Adelaide asking if I would be interested in joining a group of doctors he wanted to assemble to alert the public and the government about the close connection between a healthy environment and healthy human beings.

I ignored his emails. I had had enough of campaigning for Doctors for the Forests in Western Australia.

And still David Shearman persisted. He wrote of his almost lifelong commitment to environmental causes, of his past-Chairmanship of the South Australian Conservation Council and his book writing and his publications. After months of email bombardment and discussions with Wendy, we agreed that we would go for a weekend to the Mornington Peninsular south of Melbourne to meet the potential steering group of doctors he had collected from each State. I was not really sure what it was all about or if they were all too deeply green to be reasonable human beings!

In 2001 and 2002 two teleconference were held, leading to our first actual meeting. This was held in October 2002 in a beautiful setting lent to us by Grant and his wife, who was related to the late Ron Castan, a barrister and human rights advocate who had played a leading role in several landmark legal cases, most notably that in which the High Court acknowledged the land rights of Eddie Mabo and his family.

Commemorating Ron Castan’s life, Justice Michael Kirby wrote

“In two hundred years time they will still talk of Mabo. There was no more radical design than that which Ron Castan conceived with his colleagues to rewrite 150 years of settled land law. It was a plan breathtaking in its boldness. It challenged fundamentals. It did so in an area traditionally resistant to change in every legal system - rights in land.

The Court, beckoned by the advocacy of Ron Castan and those of like cause, rewrote the major premise. In a moment, 150 years of terra nullius was cast aside. A new chapter in the legal rights and national dignity of Australia's Indigenous peoples was begun.

I think it was worth reading this, not only because our next speaker (Julian Burnside QC) is a lawyer, but to remind ourselves of how racist the concept of terra nullius is. Unfortunately, there are many other laws and concepts which are also extremely unfair, including how we relate to Nature.

I digress: that meeting in Victoria was my first face to face meeting with David and his wife Clare.

Bill wrote about this:

David had carefully constructed a full weekend of meetings and presentations during which we had ample time to assess each other’s possible strengths and weaknesses. Over the final lunch and afternoon he had asked Don Henry, Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation and David Yencken of the Australian Collaboration to come to meet and talk with us. They made us feel we could, as a medical organisation, play a very important role in the overall effort to ensure a healthy environment for the next generations of Australians to grow into.

Our egos suitably massaged, we all agreed to set up DEA. David Shearman with his amazing persistence undertook to complete the necessary paperwork.

There is an impressive list of DEA’s achievements, to which many of you have contributed. Too many to read here, they include journal and magazine articles, position papers and a series of medical student led conferences. There were also many meetings with politicians and posters in schools and GP surgeries. There were at least two grants, including from the Poola Foundation and the Federal Environmental Education Research programme. Membership has grown steadily - there are now 260 medical student members - and since 2010 DEA has employed a full time administration Officer. DEA is a team effort, but I truly believe our achievements would have been far less than half, without the leadership, persistence and decency of David.

For several years I represented DEA to ISDE. I report that few, if any, of the other recent and current national ISDE affiliates have had anything like the success and influence of DEA in their own countries, at least in recent years. This is not intended as a criticism of them, because it is extremely hard to combine a career with running an NGO. And it is also not easy to do this after retirement. My main purpose is to stress how remarkable David’s contribution has been.

Director General of WHO, Dr Margaret Chan, recently wrote: “Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Climate change will affect, in profoundly adverse ways, some of the most fundamental determinants of health: food, air, water. In the face of this challenge, we need champions throughout the world who will work to put protecting human health at the centre of the climate change agenda.”

David is one such champion.

In recent years we have seen numerous heat records and record breaking storms, including in Fiji and the Philippines. Two percent of the Tasmanian world heritage highlands burned last summer, set fire by innumerable lightning strikes. In May this year, northern Tasmania experienced record-breaking floods.

Along the Great Ocean Road, the town of Wye River was first burned, then more recently flooded. Landslides, worsened by the cutting of burned trees on steep hills, have since blocked roads. There has been considerable economic distress. Much of the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached, and along the Gulf of Carpentaria, at least 10,000 hectares of mangroves have died back, apparently from abnormally warm sea surface temperatures and reduced river flows.

All of these things – more intense drought and more intense floods - have long been predicted by climate scientists, including increased lightning. In South Australia’s storm this week, electricity pylons fell like bowling pins and the whole state was blacked out for hours. Some towns are still blacked out. Mobile phones failed and so did internet access and a back up generator at a hospital.

There were thousands of lightning strikes, but no forest or grass fires. We can hope it will be another 50 years until this so-called “one in 50 year event” recurs, but that could be wishful thinking. One thing that will not take 50 years is the next coastal flooding, as the sea level continues to rise, and its rate of rise increases. The longest pier in the Southern Hemisphere, at Port Germein was damaged by high tides a few months ago and repaired. It has again been damaged, and it needs further repair. 

Along the Lachlan River, in NSW, they have had floods, and the wheat harvest will be reduced. Frosts are occurring later in spring, despite a well-documented warming trend. These events are linked; the building blocks of civilisation, particularly a stable ecology and climate system, are being harmed.

Climate change was also identified as a contributor to conflict and migration, in papers published in 1989 in the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine. These are topics relevant to our next speaker.

In summary, factors which motivated the foundation of ISDE and DEA remain more urgent than ever. Perhaps the only good thing is that the evidence of climate change is now so obvious that deniers are not taken very seriously. But much more needs to be done. For example, there have been attempts to link wind energy in SA with the state’s blackout, a process which confuses electricity generation with its transmission. There are some technical engineering issues with integrating wind energy into the grid, but the problems that climate change is already starting to deliver will be orders of magnitude greater. The time for national leaders to focus on trying to overcome these grid problems rather than promoting more coal or gas is long overdue. Both the ACT and Scotland plan to reach 100% of their electrical energy by 2020 from wind and solar; this engineering problem definitely can be solved. However, left another generation, the problems of climate and adverse ecological change may not be soluble. As David and Gary wrote in 1997, we must be Green or else we will be gone.

Thank you David, for your energetic and wise leadership, not only for DEA but for the national and the international movement for environmental and social justice.

Climate change and scientific reticence

This is a link to 1 minute 43 secs video about Australia's coal frenzy, explaining why I became the first Australian IPCC contributor to be arrested for civil disobedience to protest climate change inaction. Please spread the word!

Somewhat relatedly, the Arctic expert Peter Wadhams recently wrote: "In my professional lifetime, I have witnessed the transformation of the top of the world from a beautiful ice-bound expanse of wilderness to a region now characterized by warming and melting on all fronts. These changes represent a spiritual impoverishment of the earth, as well as a practical catastrophe for humanity. The time for action has long since passed.”

James Hansen has also written of scientific reticence, concerning sea level rise. Scientific reticence is another name for self-censorship. It occurs and is reinforced by conservative granting bodies and literature gate-keepers. Scientists know that to get published, or to get grants, many boundaries must not be crossed.

A very deep cause for these boundaries is euphemistically called "ideology". Developed countries, especially if English speaking, are governed by excessive forms of the profit-making motive, ultimately reinforced by violence, such as by the Central Intelligence Agency, as documented by David Talbot and many others. As a result of this ideology there are many taboos in research, reaching beyond catastrophic sea level rise to include the harmful effect of high population growth on development and, ultimately, the possibility that civilization will collapse.

Of course, there are other ideologies, such as extreme versions of communism, Nazism and many religions.

Reviewing a book critical of the corrupt Stalinist scientist Trofim Lysenko, G.A. Clayton wrote: "When fear born of tyranny stalks the land, men become corrupted and perverted along with their science and society. Whether it be the CIA, the Mafia, BOSS, the SS, the NKVD or any other instrument of coercion, once its growing power puts it beyond the reach of John Citizen and the Commonweal, the lamps of freedom go out and darkness descends."

A call for leadership over climate change, health, and human survival

In June 2016 severe weather events struck parts of NSW and Tasmania, characterised by the loss of several human lives, flash flooding, coastal erosion and considerable damage to coastal structures, including homes. Animals also suffered, as did people close to them, connected emotionally, economically, or in both ways. Sheep, cattle, bananas and even two horses in Western Sydney, used by disabled people died (one horse used by the disabled was rescued).

Some climate scientists still propose that no single event can be attributed to climate change, but an increasing number (including Kevin Trenberth) reverse the argument, pointing out that the climate is in a new state, and all such events are influenced by the hotter wetter atmosphere. 

Irrespective of their case, we know that the sea level is rising and its rate of increase is accelerating, as oceans warm and expand and as ice melts. Only very aggressive climate action can save parts of many of the world’s coastal cities from inundation by century’s end (including Miami, New York and New Orleans). 

Unfortunately, sea level rise is far from the end of the problems we face.

As I wrote in an article ("Sounding the alarm: health in the Anthropocene") currently under review: 

"Two recent papers and a commentary warn that parts of the Middle East and North Africa, especially near the Persian Gulf will become virtually uninhabitable under some plausible climate change scenarios by 2100, due to the combination of rising temperatures and humidity. Another, led by the director of the Max Planck center for chemistry in Germany, anticipates that: 

“climate change and increasing hotweather extremes in the Middle East and North Africa, a region subject to economic recession, political turbulence and upheaval, may exacerbate humanitarian hardship and contribute to migration”.

Australian non-leadership

Following the Sydney storm, NSW Emergencies Services Minister, the Hon David Elliott was asked on News Radio if he thought there might be a pattern emerging. After all, the world has recently experienced drought, fires, other floods, heatwaves, unusual lightning, coral bleaching, marine heatwaves..

Mr Elliott, who in 2012 attempted to ridicule Climate Councilor Tim Flannery about climate change (see facebook post to right), evaded the question, replying that he is “no weatherman” (listen at the 4 minute mark). 

It is good that some in the media are finally raising the issue of climate change at the time of the latest tragedy, but lamentable that people in high office with a duty of care to lead on this issue (including Barnaby Joyce the temporary Australian Federal Minister for Agriculture) somehow think their background as a lawyer or an accountant qualifies them to understand the science better. What is the point of publicly funding science if that advice is then regarded with contempt by our "leaders"?

Mr Elliott has a background in the army and as a peacekeeper. Encouragingly, many in the military are connecting the dots between climate change, ethnic divisions, population growth and conflict.

But evasion such as his is not good enough. We instead need genuine leadership such as from UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres to slow the rate of climate change. Its current trajectory, unchecked, will ruin the health and well-being of our entire species. If we take the Paris Climate Agreement seriously we might yet rescue civilisation. But as Kevin Anderson has repeatedly pointed out, it too contains considerable wishful thinking. We thus need real leadership, at all levels, but especially the top.