An Interview with Dr. Kirk Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health at UC Berkeley Part 1 | |||||
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The effects of climate change is being felt all over the world – from increased severity and frequency of storms, rapid melting of glaciers, crop losses, and rising sea water levels, to name just a few.
The golden state of California in the United States has experienced its own share of hardship from global warming such as droughts, heat waves, reduction of the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Ranked as one of the top institutions of higher learning in the nation with 61 Nobel Laureates associated with the university, the University of California, Berkeley is pooling its vast resources of top scientists, researchers and professors to research and address the effects of global climate change. Today, Supreme Master Television presents an interview with Dr. Kirk Smith, a professor of Global Environmental Health at UC Berkeley. The university is also his alma mater where he received his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. Dr. Smith holds the Maxwell Endowed Chair in Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also founder and coordinator of the campus-wide Masters Program in Health, Environment, and Development. His research work focuses on environmental and health issues in developing countries, particularly those related to health-damaging and climate-changing air pollution, and includes ongoing field projects in India, China, Nepal, and Guatemala. He serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory boards including those for the Global Action Plan for Pneumonia, the Global Energy Assessment, and the WHO Air Quality Guidelines. He is on the editorial boards of a range of international journals and has published over 250 scientific articles and 7 books. In 1997, Dr. Smith was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors awarded to US scientists by their peers. SUPREME MASTER TV: So welcome, Dr. Smith. Dr. Smith: SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: So I took a long trip out through Asia and the Pacific, saw the conditions in the third world of people living in poverty and terrible environmental conditions, and came back and decided to change my career, to use my scientific background, but in environmental health issues. So I’ve been working on these issues now more than 30 years. In the case of climate change, of course we were aware of that during the 70’s and 80’s, but I became convinced around 1990 that this was a serious problem and so devoted a portion of my research to climate change issues in the third world. HOST: Dr. Smith: That’s one category of impact. Another is the shift in disease vectors now, not mainly mosquitoes, but others as well. So if malaria exists because of mosquito population in a certain area of Africa, and doesn’t go up the mountains of Africa because it’s too cold, but if you change the temperature, the mosquitoes will go further up to the mountains. And for example, some of the major cities in Africa were purposely set at places in the mountains to avoid malaria. Nairobi and Harar are a few good examples, big cities now. Well, they’re starting to get malaria in Nairobi now. And you’re going to see more of that, the extension of the disease vectors. Another is increase in diarrhea because of warming of sewage [which] gets into the environment and the bugs can grow better and that’s considered to be one of the impacts. Another is sea level rise, causing displacement of coastal populations with health impacts associated with that. Another is that climate change will increase outdoor air pollution, particularly ozone, because it’s currently a function of temperature and sunlight. So even in California, it’s expected that we’ll have more outdoor air pollution because of climate change. HOST: SUPREME MASTER TV: Number one, I’d like to ask, if there would be an increase such as this. And also what about psychological stress? Is there an increase in psychological disorders due to the changes in the atmosphere? And do you see those increasing? Dr. Smith: Yes, you and I at this moment are causing stress for somebody. So, stress is not all negative. It can get people to act, so maybe that’s good. But obviously, there can be a negative side to it. I think the big stress is going to be in these refugee populations. If you get displaced because there are droughts, displaced because there are floods, displaced because of sea level rise, that’s a very stressful situation. And even, if there are no diseases, there usually are with the refugee populations, there will be lots of psychological stress. And so I think that is an impact. HOST: There have now been systematic studies on the health effects of climate change. They found that as of the year 2000, which is, you know, now sometime passed, there were about 150,000 premature deaths around the world from climate change already. Now that assessment is being redone as we speak. I’m on the committee; we’re sure it’s going to be much larger now; but the problem is not the 150,000. It’s the fact that it’s growing, and we expect a lot more. It gives you an idea of the distribution around the world of this impact. And 88% of that impact is in Third World children, because they’re the ones that are already vulnerable, they’re the ones that are malnourished, they’re the ones that don’t have access to medical care, they’re the ones that live in bad environments already. And so they are the ones that are going to be suffering from climate change health effects.
But there are people who die in the world because of it. And the biggest group is Third World children. It’s one of the things I haven’t heard many people talk about. The fact is that the impact, in terms of health of climate change, is actually children, in particular children in Africa, India, the poor places in Latin America. And it’s because of malaria, it’s because of diarrhea, it’s because of malnutrition, or another effect of climate change on health is changes in the crop productivity in areas where they’re already right at the level, right at the edge of malnutrition. And that’s a big impact as well. Malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea and the increase in sea level rise, and the increase in hurricanes, you know, severe weather events, which have severe health effects, those things are considered real. On the other hand, there are more subtle things. For example, if you change the precipitation, the rainfall and the temperature, you are going to change the pattern of pollens. SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: HOST: Ranked as one of the top institutions of higher learning in the nation with 61 Nobel Laureates associated with the university, the University of California, Berkeley is pooling its vast resources of top scientists, researchers and professors to research and address the effects of global climate change. Today, Supreme Master Television presents an interview with Dr. Kirk Smith, a professor of Global Environmental Health at UC Berkeley. The university is also his alma mater where he received his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. Dr. Smith holds the Maxwell Endowed Chair in Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also founder and coordinator of the campus-wide Masters Program in Health, Environment, and Development. His research work focuses on environmental and health issues in developing countries, particularly those related to health-damaging and climate-changing air pollution, and includes ongoing field projects in India, China, Nepal, and Guatemala. He serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory boards including those for the Global Action Plan for Pneumonia, the Global Energy Assessment, and the WHO Air Quality Guidelines. He is on the editorial boards of a range of international journals and has published over 250 scientific articles and 7 books. In 1997, Dr. Smith was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors awarded to US scientists by their peers. SUPREME MASTER TV: If you could just go through the pie chart and explain to us a little bit about what actually is on there, what it means to us and to the near future. Dr. Smith: Those, we can't do anything directly about. The other – the much larger portion of it is human emissions, some of which are from the energy industry, emissions from coal mines, from oil refineries, from leaking gas pipelines, those technological fixes, we can deal with those. Waste water in landfills, that’s the methane from sewage plants, poorly operating sewage plants, or let’s say “old style” sewage plants, landfills where you don't capture the methane, as they are in most of the world, that's where we put our garbage. There are obviously solutions to that, but rice paddies, produced in wet conditions; there is dry-land rice too that does not produce methane. But wetland rice, you think of methane. People are working on low-methane varieties of rice, ways to dry out the rice field once in a while, so the methane production stops and so on. And then there's biomass burning which is what my research focuses on, that also produces methane. And by improving a household stove in the Third World, or a fireplace in the Silicon Valley, you can reduce methane emissions that way. But the biggest single slice here, the red slice, on the human side, is animals. And that's livestock, large livestock that, produce methane partly as part of their digestion but also because of the manure. And that is something that we all contribute to, all of us who eat meat and I must say, drink milk as well. But the largest portion of it is meat; the immediate fix is to eat less meat. So you and I can have an impact. I can have an impact and our friends and colleagues can have impacts by eating less meat. When you eat less methane, you’ll be responsible for less of that methane. Over time, the growth of methane emissions would be lower. HOST: SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: In the long run we have to deal with CO2, because that is the primary greenhouse gas. But CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas. Its issue is it lasts a long time so it lasts hundreds of years in the atmosphere. What we emit today will be in the atmosphere for hundreds of years; methane is the second most well-known greenhouse gas but is much more powerful. Dr. Smith: It, of course, is a fuel itself; natural gas is methane, but it’s a very powerful greenhouse gas as I mentioned. But it also helps create ozone. And I’m talking not about ozone way out, but ground-level ozone, which is a very powerful health pollutant and also a greenhouse gas. So one of the impacts of methane is that it’s causing the background level, a sort of global level of ozone to rise in the atmosphere. So now ozone levels far from cities are getting to be almost up with health-damaging areas in causing global warming. Dr. Smith: So, if we emit some methane today, in the next 20 years, it’s going to produce more damage than the same amount of CO2 produced. And once the heat gets into the Earth’s system, it doesn’t matter whether it came from CO2 or methane, the problem is the heat. And so that heat, from methane just as the heat from the CO2 will melt the glaciers, will cause the sea level to rise, will cause diseases to change their patterns and so forth. Many of us, not just myself but other people working in the climate science area, are beginning to think that we have not emphasized methane enough. So, of the emissions in the next 20 years, the CO2 in this year’s emissions will only be about 40% of the total warming. The other 60% or more will be from the shorter-lived gases, most important of which is methane. So, many of us are saying, if you want to make an impact soon, slow down the melting of the glaciers, slow down the rise of the sea level and so on, give us more time to deal with things, give society more time, shouldn’t you work more on methane? Dr. Smith: So your vehicle you drive, the air travel you have, maybe the furnace in your house and so forth, those are CO2 producers. And most of us don’t see the methane that we produce. It’s one step removed. But we still produce, each of us, a lot of methane by our activities one step removed. Some of us might produce methane if we had, say, some kind of pit in the backyard that was filled with garbage or something that might produce some methane. But where do we produce our methane? We produce it through our sewage, through the landfills, where our garbage goes (SUPREME MASTER TV: Right.), through the leakage in the natural gas pipelines that supply our houses, through the emissions of methane from coal mines, where they mine our coal to power our power plants, and from some sources that aren’t related at all to CO2, for example, animals, livestock; the biggest single source of methane emissions, human methane emissions, human-caused methane emissions is livestock. SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: SUPREME MASTER TV: And how might that impact us on a global level and help us reduce the methane, thereby reducing, slowing down the process of global warming? Dr. Smith: I mean, there are a number of reasons to think that moving to low meat or less expansion of meat consumption, maybe a decline in the rich countries, and slowing the growth in the middle-income countries like China, it has been official, one is greenhouse gases. Already livestock is 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions, excuse me, the meat system, which includes the animals, includes growing the food for the animals, includes the transport of the meat, includes the fertilizer to grow the food to feed the meat. There was a recent article last fall in Lancet, the famous medical journal that laid this all out showing that. And that’s with not treating methane any more than the sort of normal way it is used. If you treat it more, if you worried about it a bit more as we were talking about a minute ago, then that 20% will go up to maybe 30%. So the 30%, in the next 20 years, is going to be due to meat production. So there is something that an individual can do. Most of us aren’t growing our own meat, but when you pick out that slab of meat from the Safeway (supermarket chain), you are, in a sense, turning on the whole system that creates it; just as you turn on the electricity in your house, you’re turning on the power plant. SUPREME MASTER TV: Dr. Smith: There is a whole bunch of agricultural land somewhere making the food to grow those animals. We’re all connected together, we live on the same planet; we do one thing, it affects everybody. And this is a very important illustration. It’s going to take a lot of effort, the media, and maybe the schools to get at this. HOST: |
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