Scientific studies calculate climate change as health danger

The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that climate change poses a public health danger, an idea President Donald Trump called a “scam.” But repeated scientific studies indicate that this is a documented and quantifiable harm.

Time and time again, research has found increases in illness and death – thousands each year – in a warming world.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 findings, under the Obama administration, provide the legal basis for almost all regulations combating global warming.

“It’s mind-boggling that the administration would overturn the endangerment finding; it’s tantamount to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity exists,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington.

Thousands of scientific studies have examined climate change and its effects on human health over the past five years and primarily show that climate change is increasingly dangerous for humans.

Many conclude that thousands of people in the United States have died and even more have become ill because of climate change in recent decades.

For example, a study on “Trends in Heat-Related Deaths in the United States, 1999-2023” in the prestigious journal JAMA shows that the annual number and rate of heat-related deaths have more than doubled over the past quarter century, from 1,069 in 1999 to a record high of 2,325 in 2023.

A 2021 study in Nature Climate Change looked at 732 sites in 43 countries – including 210 in the United States – and determined that more than a third of heat deaths are due to human-caused climate change. That means more than 9,700 deaths per year worldwide attributed to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

A new study released this week found that 2.2% of summer deaths in Texas between 2010 and 2023 were heat-related “as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat to Texas.”

In the more than 15 years since the government first determined that climate change posed a public health danger, more than 29,000 peer-reviewed studies have examined the intersection of climate and health, including more than 5,000 focused specifically on the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed search database.

More than 60% of these studies have been published in the last five years.

“Study after study shows that climate change is putting health at risk, for one simple reason: It’s true,” said Frumkin, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health appointed by President George W. Bush.

At an event Thursday at the White House, Trump disagreed, saying, “This has nothing to do with public health. This whole thing is a scam, a giant scam.”

Experts strongly disagree.

“Health risks are increasing because human-caused climate change is already upon us. Take for example the 2021 heat dome, which killed (more than) 600 people in the Northwest,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician who directs the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “New climate attribution studies show that this event has been made 150 times more likely due to climate change.”

Both Patz and Frumkin said the “vast majority” of peer-reviewed studies show adverse health effects from climate change. Peer-reviewed studies are considered the gold standard in science because other experts look at the data, evidence and methods, requiring changes, questioning techniques and conclusions.

The different studies focus on different aspects of health. Some looked at deaths that would not have happened without climate change. Others looked at illnesses and injuries that didn’t kill people. Because the researchers used different time periods, calculation methods, and specific aspects of health, the final numbers in their findings do not completely agree.

Studies have also examined disparities between different people and places. A growing area of ​​research is attribution studies that calculate what proportion of deaths or illnesses can be attributed to human-caused climate change by comparing real-world mortality and illness to what computer simulations show would occur in a world without peaking greenhouse gases.

Last year, an international team of researchers reviewed previous studies to try to establish an annual health cost of climate change.

While many studies are limited to heat deaths, this team attempted to introduce various types of climate change deaths – heat waves, extreme weather disasters such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, wildfires, air pollution, diseases spread by mosquitoes such as malaria – and discovered hundreds of thousands of climate change deaths around the world.

They then used the EPA’s own statistics that put a monetary value on human life – $11.5 million in 2014 dollars – and calculated a global annual cost “on the order of at least $10 billion.”

Studies also link climate change to waterborne infections that cause diarrhea, mental health problems and even nutrition problems, Frumkin said.

“Public health is not just about preventing disease, death and disability, but also about well-being. We are seeing more and more people displaced by rising seas, intensifying storms and fires,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a physician and dean emerita of the George Washington University School of Public Health.

“We are only just beginning to understand the full health consequences of climate change. »

The problem becomes more complicated when cold-related deaths are taken into account. These deaths are decreasing, but in the United States there are still 13 times more deaths from cold exposure than from heat exposure, studies show.

Another study concludes that until the world warms another 2.7 degrees (1.5 degrees Celsius), the number of temperature-related deaths will not change much “because of offsetting decreases in cold-related mortality and increases in heat-related deaths.”

But this study indicates that once temperatures exceed this threshold, and if society does not adapt to increased heat, “total mortality increases rapidly.”

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropic organizations, a list of supporters, and funded coverage areas at AP.org.