If you’ve been hiding under a rock, you might not know anything about climate change. We are bombarded with news about climate change. Still, it is a very big subject. Climate change is more than just warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. It impacts almost every aspect of our lives. Just one of the impacts of climate change will be a rise in diseases, including Asthma. Just how do we get from a warmer climate to a global rise in disease? Let’s dive right in and see!
Climate change is not just driven by human activities, it is intertwined with human activities. For example, as human population has risen, so too has farming. Between humans using water directly (drinking, bathing, swimming pools, watering your lawn, industrial use) and farms using water for irrigation, humans have put a huge demand on local water supplies. This demand is so great that it has emptied rivers, lakes and reservoirs. The availability of water in lakes and rivers impacts how quickly local foliage grows, how often dry foliage catches fire (a major issue on the West Coast), and the local temperatures.
Pretty straight forward, right? Well, regardless of the simplicity of the logic areas where people and farms demanded more water than the local water sources can supply have been slow to recognize the problem. There is perhaps no worse example than California, where both the population and farming have been growing for decades, and where whole towns have been without water for years.
California has had periodic droughts forever. Every 10 or 20 years, they would have a major drought. Now, one drought just runs into the next. With many towns on constant “water alert”, droughts are still happening even when everyone has already restricted their water use. Any attempt to return to old patterns of water use will cause a new drought.
It’s not that California has not attempted to fix the problem. California has an incredible network of underwater tunnels and cisterns that move billions of galls of water from Northern California to Southern California where the droughts are worst. But it’s not enough.
Before humans tried their hand at moving water around, nature created a pretty brilliant system. Underground there are layers of soil, minerals, and rock. The unique organization of these layers is how groundwater goes underground and forms aquifers. In California, a key to this process is a layer of clay. Clay is a combination of plate-shaped minerals and water. The water must go through this layer to enter the aquifer, purifying water as it makes this journey.
Ongoing droughts have not just drained the aquifers, it has sucked the water out of the clay. Normally, the minerals in the clay are pretty randomly distributed. However, as water leaves the clay, the clay particles start to form into stacks. This process is similar to taking a wet clay pot and heating it up in a kiln. Before the clay could absorb water. After heating in a kiln, the clay pot becomes impermeable. Permanently.
After drying, the more tightly stacked clay has much less room is left for new water to move into and out of the clay layer. That means that it becomes MUCH more difficult for the aquifer to become recharged with new water. As of 2018, some California regions were sinking a couple of feet a year. That requires massive shrinkage in the clay layer.
What has this got to do with Asthma? For that, we need to examine the Salton Sea. The Slaton Sea was created by accident between 1902 and 1907. Water spilling from a fault in the Colorado River formed the lake, and for decades it was filled from continuing spills from the Colorado and runoff from farms. As water from the Colorado River has been drained away by a growing population and agricultural demands, the sea has been drying up and blowing away.
What’s blowing off the lake bed? Lead, mercury, toxic elements and a lot of dust. All of the chemicals from pesticides and other runoff has been concentrated in this dust. As the lake continues to dry out, more particulates go into the air. Residents around the Salton Sea have the highest level of asthma in California, triple the average. All medical evidence points to the toxic dust.
The Slaton Sea isn’t alone. As we run out of water more lakes and river beds are drying up. The bottoms of lakes and rivers are coated with silt or very fine particles. Areas with factories or farms often dumped toxic waste, sometimes unintentionally, into these waterways. After decades of absorbing toxic waste, fine particles from those dry beds are becoming airborne.
This has happened before. During the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, bad farming policies “supercharged” a drought in the mid-west. There were dust storms that had mountain high clouds of dust covering whole counties at a time. This spun up the dusty soil, and a huge number of residents who breathed in this air developed “dust pneumonia”. There are no official numbers, but at a minimum… thousands died.
Hopefully, we won’t have the same scale of dust storms. But then again, the dust from the 1930s did not have the industrial contaminants that are now locked in river and lake beds. More droughts mean more toxic dust everywhere. In the air, and in your lungs.
The full health implications of Global Climate Change are very hard to predict, although more and more experts in diverse fields are beginning to focus on this issue. As the Arctic warms, the permafrost is melting and matter that was trapped and frozen is now being exposed. We know that this will release massive amounts of carbon into the air. It may also release dangerous bacteria and viruses that haven’t been seen for thousands of years. Warmer oceans will lead to more algae. This is expected to increase the number of bacteria, including bacteria that are dangerous to humans.
Changing weather could create new health threats. There will be a debate for decades over how much and how soon. What do you think? Will Global Climate Change lead to major new health threats? Or is this just too speculative? Leave a comment and let us know!