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From the Front Row: Climate change and public health with Peter Thorne

Published on October 13, 2022

This is the first episode of a four-part series exploring different aspects of climate change and its various impacts.

This week Anya chats with Dr. Peter Thorne, professor in the University of Iowa College of Public Health’s Department of Occupational & Environmental Health and co-director of the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center. He has held a number of prominent national leadership positions, including serving as chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.

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Anya Morozov:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. When we think about major issues in public health, one that comes to mind is climate change, but what exactly is climate change and how might it impact the way we live, learn, work, and play? In other words, why is climate change a public health issue? That’s the topic of our episode today. Of course, climate change is a big topic, so we won’t be tackling it in just one episode. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we walk through many different aspects of climate change and its impact on public health.

Anya Morozov:

If this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field of public health. My name is Anya Morozov, and today I’m in the Zoom studio with Dr. Peter Thorne, a professor in occupational and environmental health, and co-director of the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center here at our very own University of Iowa College of Public Health. Welcome to the show, Dr. Thorne.

Peter Thorne:

Well, thanks for having me, Anya.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. So to start off, we always like to just kind of walk through the background of our guest, and specifically for you how it relates to climate change.

Peter Thorne:

Yeah, well, I’m happy to talk about that. So I was trained as a chemical engineer and a toxicologist, and my real day job as a pulmonary toxicologist, and I teach in that area. But over the years, I’ve gotten involved with policy, really translating the research that we do at the university into rules and regulations and policies that help ensure the health of the public, and particularly as a pulmonary toxicologist that involves air pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency where I’ve done quite a lot of work.

Peter Thorne:

But as I’ve studied this, I’ve recognized that air pollution is tied very closely to climate change, that many of the adverse health effects associated with climate change dovetail with the use of energy and energy is certainly important to the solutions we’re looking for to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from climate change. I took a look at the landscape of teaching on the university and recognized that we really didn’t have a course in climate change at the University of Iowa, yet I see this as perhaps our grandest challenge in public health in the 21st century. So I felt a strong desire to develop such a course, and I did develop a course called Climate [inaudible 00:02:35], Climate Change in Public Health, and I’ve been teaching that now for seven years, and this has really made me increase my scholarship in this area. And we’re actually doing research in my lab group now on climate change and health.

Anya Morozov:

Well, that’s great. So you started with pulmonary toxicology and then found an unfilled niche at the university in terms of an important class topic and decided to help fill it. So thanks for doing that. Next, we’re going to move on to a very big question, but what exactly is climate change in kind of layman’s terms?

Peter Thorne:

Yeah, so here it’s important to differentiate between climate change and anthropogenic climate change. So anthropogenic means human caused or of human origin. So climate change in general is just how over long periods of time the climate of the earth changes. And this happens on a grand scale in geologic time, depending upon the tilt of the earth in relationship to the sun, the eccentricity or the elliptical nature of the orbit of the sun changes over long periods of time, 400,000 year cycles. So it’s a natural phenomenon in geologic time for there to be ice ages and periods of time when there might be, for instance, dinosaurs on the North Pole. That hasn’t happened in 65 million years, but it does happen.

Peter Thorne:

But when we talk about climate change in the context of human caused climate change, anthropogenic, it’s happening over a very short time scale. Basically, the starting point is usually the industrial revolution around 1850 when we start burning coal and using fossil fuels for energy up until the present period of time when we’re seeing changes in the climate that are so rapid that they could never have happened naturally and have never happened naturally.

Peter Thorne:

So it’s really an unusual situation that is, there’s many, many lines of evidence showing that this is caused by humans releasing greenhouse gases to the environment and all the changes that come there from.

Anya Morozov:

I’m taking a class called Global Environmental Health right now. I think you’re one of the instructors for that as well. And one of the things that they showed pretty early on was just a chart of the CO2 in the atmosphere over time, and it is, there’s like this big kind of jump towards recent times that does not really match the longer term patterns. So that would probably be the anthropogenic climate change.

Peter Thorne:

Yes, and CO2 is just one of the big greenhouse gases. Methane and nitrous oxide are the other ones that are of primary concern, and all of them have gone up drastically. And a number of people who work in the area of climate change talk about when they were born in terms of what the parts per million of carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere rather than giving a birth year. So I was born at about 300 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And that curve you are relating is called the keeling curve.

Peter Thorne:

That’s the measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, and it just shows that it has been going up dramatically. And so I was born at 300, now we’re at 417 parts per million carbon dioxide, and the historic average is about 285 parts per million. So we have dramatically added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and most of that, or much of that has been absorbed by the oceans. So if not for the oceans taking up so much of that, we would’ve put even higher concentrations into the atmosphere. And by the way, I’ll be lecturing in global environmental health on the topic of climate change later in the semester.

Anya Morozov:

Very excited for that. Great. But yeah, it sounds like this is yet another curve that we’d like to flatten.

Peter Thorne:

Exactly.

Anya Morozov:

So moving on, we gave a brief overview of climate change. I’m sure we could spend an entire episode just talking about that, but kind of trying to get more towards the health impacts of climate change. I know there’s many, but what do you think are some of the most concerning health impacts of climate change? Maybe like your top three or something.

Peter Thorne:

Well, first I’d like to think about human impacts because the human impacts relate to the human health impacts directly. So what we’re seeing already and what the climate models have been predicting for decades is that we’re seeing rising sea level as we’re melting glaciers and the arctic ice and the Greenland ice, this water’s going into the sea and it’s raising the sea level at the same time we’re warming the oceans. And when you warm water, it actually expands in volume. So those two are compounding to cause an increase in sea level. So it’s that when we get storms and particularly hurricanes and typhoons that come with a storm surge, that is having a much bigger impact on the land. And so these events, these what we used to call natural disasters, I call them climate exacerbated disasters are really inundating many coastal areas which is causing a lot of suffering.

Peter Thorne:

People losing homes, often people who were stationary as being migrants, climate migrants have to move to other places. And so along with that, oftentimes their health suffers. We have people who are living in refugee camps where infectious diseases are more likely to occur because of problems with sanitation and just the clustering of people as we know from pandemics and cholera epidemics, that when you have a lot of people thrown together under poor living conditions that these kinds of situations arise. So that would be one category of effects. Many places are experiencing drought and increased heat. A lot of global warming is occurring such that we’re starting to see temperatures being elevated well beyond what they normally would be. And oftentimes it’s nighttime temperatures so people don’t get the relief of cooling from the day’s heat. And this is leading to heat stroke, heat stress, particularly among those who live without air conditioning and modern conveniences that we have and people who work outside, laborers, construction workers, farmers, people like that, suffering from heat stroke.

Peter Thorne:

And we’ve seen a number of extreme heat events occur in Europe in the last decade. Much of Europe doesn’t have air conditioning because traditionally they haven’t needed it, and now they do. And we see deaths and heat stroke occurring among people there. So that’s another one. And then on the more mundane level, perhaps not life threatening as often, but we’re seeing people who have allergies. This one touches close to home, people who have seasonal allergies, allergy season is coming sooner, It’s lasting longer, the burden of pollens is higher. So we have more extreme levels of allergy, and we’re starting to see new allergy species move northward in many parts of the world, such that new allergens are being introduced and allergy suffers are there.

Peter Thorne:

So that’s three. And let me give a fourth one. And this is that water quality and quantity are becoming major problems around the world. There’s many places that don’t have sufficient water resources anymore. In some cases. These are places where the winter produce snow pack in the mountains and that snow stored the water as if it were in a reservoir. When it warms up just a little bit, that snow can come as rain, and then there’s no storage, which foretells of bad things later in the year when they need that water. In other places, we’re finding that the water is becoming contaminated due to harmful algal blooms. And this is increasingly a problem we’re seeing in Iowa where surface water is warmer and the cyanobacteria that create these harmful algal blooms, outcompete other organisms, and then you get the production of cyanobacterial toxins like microsystems and saxitoxin, and this makes the water unsuitable for drinking, swimming, fishing, and even showering. So it becomes a problem for communities to supply safe water for the people to drink and use. So those are just four. There’s more.

Anya Morozov:

Yes. Yes. I’m sure there are many more, but thank you for providing that overview. And you also created a great segue to the next question, which is when we think about Iowa specifically, you mentioned water contamination due to algal blooms. What are some other regional health impacts that are likely to result from climate change?

Peter Thorne:

So I think this is a good opportunity to introduce the notion of the inequality, of the impacts of climate change. There’s definitely problems of environmental justice and social inequality. For instance, we’re anticipating that Iowa is going to have as many as 15 days above 106 each year by the year 2040. And so with that, the people who can’t afford air conditioning or have poor housing that can’t really be affordably air conditioned, we’re going to need to provide cooling centers and other public health infrastructure to help people like that and to have people monitoring those who are in need, the elderly and the poor, and getting them to cooling centers. So that’s something that IO communities need to be planning for in terms of people working outside, as I mentioned earlier, we may have to adjust the day or just not do certain types of work, when there is extreme heat like that.

Peter Thorne:

Iowa has had some increasing numbers of swim advisories put out there where it’s not safe to swim in certain waters. We need to be communicating these more effectively and in multiple languages because typically a sign is put up in English that just isn’t all that informative or visible. So we’re working to try and do more about advancing information about that.

Peter Thorne:

And then the extreme events is the other. We’re seeing a huge increase in disasters. The US government tracks billion dollar disasters over time, and the numbers are going up dramatically with time. And we’ve seen certainly our share of extreme rain events and flooding in Iowa. So we can anticipate that those will become more extreme and more common as we go forward in time because warmer air holds more water and a lot more energy so that when big storms come, they have the capacity to dump as money, as we’ve seen in Iowa, even rainfall events of 15 inches of rain in one rainfall event. And that’s really without precedent in our 120 years of keeping track of weather and these kinds of dramatic events. So when we do have flooding, it displaces a lot of people. People lose their homes, their livelihoods, their farms, and that causes a lot of mental health problems as well. And so we’ve been hearing in Iowa a lot about mental health services and needing a lot more and a lot better mental health care. This certainly is brought out very dramatically when we have these climate disasters.

Anya Morozov:

You mentioned a lot of things there that are all kind of very different, but all tied to this common theme of impacts from climate change.

Peter Thorne:

Yeah. And one other thing we can think of long term is Iowa probably is going to become a destination for people escaping the coast. So the forecast for Florida take it as one example for 2050 and 2100 quite a ways out in the future, but much of Florida is expected to be underwater. And so those Floridians will need to go somewhere. And many of them may choose to settle in Iowa because we’re at 700 feet above sea level or 650. And so we may become a destination for people moving here, and that’s something we should be thinking about as well.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, and it’s like it’s 2050 is not that far away. We’re in 2022, almost 2023 now. So that is getting closer and closer. And yeah, it sounds like we have a lot that we need to be preparing for. One thing, this is kind of a tangent, but related to the impact of really hot days. I know over the summer, me and a bunch of other public health students actually helped Johnson County with a kind of an emergency preparedness exercise where we did give surveys across Johnson County to randomly selected households about extreme heat and whether they’d experienced symptoms and then what mechanisms they had or didn’t have to take care of themselves on extreme heat events. So if they had air conditioning or if they had medical devices and things. So there are preparations kind of getting in place even at the local level, which is I guess a positive.

Peter Thorne:

And in addition to the 3.2 million people in Iowa, we have about 25 million hogs. And I know that livestock producers worry about the extreme heat, both from the standpoint of the health and welfare of the animals, but also they don’t convert feed to body mass as fast under extreme heat conditions. So that means that it takes longer to raise a pig to be ready for slaughter under extreme heat circumstances.

Peter Thorne:

So there’s just a lot of other aspects of this that pertain to the economy of Iowa, and particularly with regard to agriculture, which is such a big part of what we do here, but importantly, Iowa can be part of the solution, and we are being part of the solution from the standpoint of renewable energy. Iowa is one of the three leading states in terms of production of energy from wind, electrical energy from wind, and we are now the top in terms of the proportion of our energy needs that are met from wind. And we’re about number three in terms of total megawatts of power generated from wind. So Iowa is really out there in terms of demonstrating the feasibility of wind energy as a clean energy solution instead of coal and fossil fuels.

Anya Morozov:

Yes, that is one really good kind of glimmer of hope and exciting thing that we can be part of the solution, as you said, and we’re just a kind of preview. We’re going to dive into that in a future episode. So stay tuned.

Peter Thorne:

Right. Good.

Anya Morozov:

So kind of turning a lens towards health equity, which is central part of public health, you already mentioned a few, but there are so many examples of how the impacts of climate change can create health inequities. So for the sake of time, can you walk us through one or a few examples of how you see the impacts of climate change creating health inequities?

Peter Thorne:

Sure. How about one domestic and one international? So let’s start with the domestic. We know that there’s a mal-distribution of people exposed to the pollutants that arise from fossil fuels, both in terms of extractive industries such as fracking and refineries, where the people who live near refineries and have the biggest burden of exposure to those pollutants are people of color and people of low income. When we have climate change and warmer climate, we get more production of ozone and particulate matter, particularly fine particulate matter, and it especially affects those people who are already experiencing higher levels of exposure pollutants. So they have the disease burden that many of us do not have by virtue of being able to live in healthier places. So at EPA right now, a lot of the discussion about this and analysis of policies since the Biden administration came in is including an evaluation, a granular evaluation of what is the differential impact on people of different socioeconomic and racial groups.

Peter Thorne:

So there’s a lot of progress happening on that that is really encouraging just in the last two years. On the international front, I mentioned, well, let, let’s think of Bangladesh as an example. So Bangladesh had a huge flood this year. They had record temperatures that were melting glaciers and snow pack in the Malia at the same time. They had monsoon rains that were of record proportion such that a third of the country was underwater. So when you think about a third of a country that has some 300 million people being underwater, you can imagine that that produces a lot of climate refugees. And so thinking about that, where are those people going to go? Where is the relief going to come from? The international aid agencies haven’t the capacity to take care of that many people, and in the future, these are going to become more common affecting more places in the world, and they’ll be more extreme.

Peter Thorne:

And so we have to worry about climate refugees, and in many cases, the places that are at least able to take care of their citizens and address these disasters are the countries that contributed the least to climate change. In other words, over years, they haven’t used coal and oil to power their economies like the western nations and the developed nations have. So many feel that the polluters should pay and that it’s incumbent on us as rich countries that really produced most of the greenhouse gases to provide the relief and the financial assistance to these countries that are suffering because of basically all those greenhouse gases that we emitted. So far, we’re not seeing that really the country’s responsible for this have been mobilized to provide that relief, but that needs to happen in the future.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. That is one just major global injustice that no one person is going to solve. But the more we kind of create those pressures, I think the more we can hopefully take some of those smaller steps. Like you mentioned now, the EPA does the evaluation of differential impact on socioeconomic status and racial groups. That’s a small step and definitely a lot more is needed, but at least it is something in the right direction. And I think it came from an increased awareness of the scope of this issue and the scope of the injustice that our current system creates, so.

Peter Thorne:

In relation to what you just said Anya, I’m hopeful that our increased awareness for domestic policy will also extend to having a better view of the world and seeing the injustices that we face globally.

Anya Morozov:

Yes. So that leads right into our next question, which is how do you remain hopeful in the face of such a large public health issue? I mean, you said you kind of found this niche and are teaching about climate change, and I mean, sitting in global environmental health right now, it can be a pretty grim class sometimes. So how do you stay hopeful?

Peter Thorne:

Well, first of all, I don’t want the class to feel like doom scrolling and not offering solutions, but seeing basically 50 years of inactivity to a large extent, it is very hard to be hopeful sometimes because there’s been a lot of talk from politicians and delegates to UN conventions about the solutions. We as scientists understand the problems. The climate models tell us what’s coming. They’re extremely accurate and reliable, yet we don’t seem to be having the countries, the nations of the world take the steps that are needed to deal with it. So what I turn to when I need to have that injection of hopefulness is empowering the young people to be the change agents because I think the people of my parents’ generation and my generation in particular have failed your generation. We say we care about the future. We say we care about children, but our actions don’t really show that.

Peter Thorne:

And so there’s a lot of young people that are understanding what is at stake and are learning about the solutions, learning about how dire the predictions are, and what drastic measures need to be taken. And so I think that if we can mobilize the young people who have this understanding to be engaged in the political process, be engaged, really be outraged by what’s happening, and talk to people who are in a position to make a difference and then become the people who make that difference, that’s what gives me hope. And it’s more than living a green life and walking the talk it’s more than just voting, it’s more than all that. It’s really becoming engaged with the process and becoming part of the solution that is going to lead to change. And I’m really hopeful that all of my students will go out and be part of that change.

Anya Morozov:

So kind of a all hands on deck hopefully. Yeah, I do think, I see a lot of my peers, we do care a lot about these issues, and I hope that we can kind of use that to mobilize ourselves and then also mobilize people who aren’t like outside of our circles.

Peter Thorne:

Well, there’s a lot of disinformation that’s out there, and much of it is deliberate. And so becoming literate in terms of knowing how to read across things, knowing how to find facts, and from fiction, I think the young people are getting pretty good at this because they’re being used with disinformation. And so I think that’s a really important part of it. Some of this disinformation may fool some people, but I hope it’s not fooling young people.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. Actually, speaking of disinformation, I just learned today that the idea of the carbon footprint was actually popularized by BP, and it was kind of as a way to get people to think of reducing carbon footprint as an individual problem rather than an industry problem, which in reality, I think it’s both. But that was a surprising bit of disinformation I learned about just today.

Peter Thorne:

Yeah. Well, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, then really easy things to do are to insulate your home so that you use less fossil fuels to heat it, to drive less, or drive an e-vehicle, so you use less fossil fuels to use less materials, many of which are produced using fossil fuels like plastics, to change your diet so that you’re consuming food that is not traveling so far or is more locally produced. So all these things have to do with reducing fossil fuels. Right? So it’s interesting that BP is, as you said, was using that as a way to deflect from fossil fuel.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. Again, I don’t think any of those things are bad things to do, or focusing on your impact is a bad thing, but when it deflects from other larger scale impacts maybe. Well, anyway, we’re kind of nearing the end of our time. What is one thing you thought you knew but were later wrong about?

Peter Thorne:

One thing that I’m perplexed by is I’m a scientist. I come from a family of people who have a scientific lens that they apply to most things. And I’m always surprised at how few people are really literate in the sciences enough to be able to comprehend what underlies climate science and see the way I see so clearly that this is a looming disaster. And so part of the teaching that I do is really to get everybody up to understand the underlying science, which has, for the most part, been known since about 1885. And it’s not new science. It’s all been there all that time, and it’s just gotten more detailed, our climate models have gotten more sophisticated. But there’s no question about the science, it’s just about implementing that science to change policy. And that’s the part that frustrates me because as a scientist, it seems like the solutions are pretty much there and we should just act on them. But clearly the world doesn’t all see it that way, and that is a challenge.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, I’ve had similar discussions about a lot of public health topics where when we’re in this college, we’re kind of inundated with these topics all the time. And it can be hard to get to a place where you’re realizing that people outside of the College of Public Health maybe don’t view the world through that lens. And so how do you get people up to speed and kind of peel away that lens to teach other people how you came to that lens in the first place?

Peter Thorne:

So when I travel around Iowa in the world, I like to talk to people about it and listen to them, and what do you know about this? What do you think? How do you come to have the views that you have? I find that very interesting and edifying because I’m learning more the social dimensions of the topic rather than the science, which I already know very well. And talking to farmers about climate change, well, oftentimes where we can come together is they see that the growing season has gotten longer. They plant sooner, they harvest later, they have to plant faster because the spring rains come more dramatically. They have to ensure they have adequate soil moisture because there’ll be a drought later in the summer. They don’t necessarily ascribe that to climate change, but they see that their farming practices have had to change. And so there are ways to talk about this topic with anybody, and it’s just a matter of understanding where they’re coming from and what their values are.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, actually getting out there and having those discussions is great. Overall, this has been a really enlightening discussion. We’ve covered a lot, and thank you so much for coming on today and providing all of your insights on such a big picture topic. For our listeners, just remember that this is only week one of our four part series, and I’m really excited for all of the topics that we’re going to dive into over the next month. So stay tuned and thank you, Dr. Thorne.

Peter Thorne:

Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking to you today.

Anya Morozov:

And that’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Dr. Peter Thorne for coming on with us today. This episode was hosted, written, edited, and produced by me Anya Morozov. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook, and our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.