How to Make Climate Change Doubters Pay a Political Price

More than any past report, the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment in November made clear the devastating effects of climate change on global public health. As it and other analyses have described, these aftershocks will be generational and wide-reaching but particularly crushing for vulnerable health systems in developing countries. In response, multinational organizations and elected officials must reprioritize how they delegate scarce health resources to ensure that recent progress in combating both communicable and noncommunicable diseases is not reversed. And even the status quo is too little; current efforts are insufficient and poorly funded.

A woman wears an air-filtration mask while crossing
a street in San Francisco, California, October 13, 2017. 

In purely economic terms, health consequences dwarf the other effects of climate change in sheer cost to the United States, estimated at $141 billion due to heat-related deaths alone by 2100, vastly outpacing infrastructure damage to coastal cities from sea-level rise (estimated at $118 billion).

Read the Medium story by Vin Gupta and Juliette Kayyem - “How to Make Climate Change Doubters Pay a Political Price.”

The Depravity of Climate-Change Denial

The Trump administration is, it goes without saying, deeply anti-science. In fact, it’s anti-objective reality. But its control of the government remains limited; it didn’t extend far enough to prevent the release of the latest National Climate Assessment, which details current and expected future impacts of global warming on the United States.

A trailer park destroyed by the fire that swept
 through Paradise, California, this month - risking
civilization for profit, ideology and ego.

True, the report was released on Black Friday, clearly in the hope that it would get lost in the shuffle. The good news is that the ploy didn’t work.

The assessment basically confirms, with a great deal of additional detail, what anyone following climate science already knew: Climate change poses a major threat to the nation, and some of its adverse effects are already being felt. For example, the report, written before the latest California disaster, highlights the growing risks of wildfire in the Southwest; global warming, not failure to rake the leaves, is why the fires are getting ever bigger and more dangerous.

Read the opinion piece in The New York Times by Richard Krugman  - “The Depravity of Climate-Change Denial."