Hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works - Examining the Human Health Impacts of Global Warming

Interview

Hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works - Examining the Human Health Impacts of Global Warming

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SEN. BARRASSO: Thank you very much, Madame Chairman, and my thoughts and prayers are with the folks of your home state today, the rescue workers, the firefighters and the residents.

The -- I'm looking forward to this hearing this morning because for the last 20 years I've been doing television reports in my home state of Wyoming on preventable causes of diseases, giving people information that they can use to stay healthy, to keep down the cost of their medical care and things they can do in prevention, and that's, you know, people washing their hands and staying active and exercising more and eating less, getting adequate sleep.

And there are so many current-day health problems that we need to deal with -- malnutrition, HIV, potential issues with bird flu -- and what I'm always doing is trying to seek that balance on how we can focus our resources and attention today on current-day preventable problems and at the same time looking for ways to prevent problems and help protect people in the future.

So I'm looking forward to today's hearings.

Thank you very much, Madame Chair.

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SEN. BARRASSO: Thank you very much, Madame Chairman, and I think that is a tragic case that you reflected upon. And I think my initial comment -- I talked about trying to find a balance of how we do the best we can today and also trying to protect into the future, which I was so glad to hear about the organization that was in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this health, protection and research effort that's going on and what we can do there.

I was reading an article in Investor's Business Daily, and this comes to try to find this balance. This was last week; it talks about Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of the Atmospheric Department at Colorado State University. And in the article, it says they found that one dollar spent fighting HIV/AIDS produces $40 in social benefits; a dollar spent in fighting malnutrition yields $30 in social benefits; but a dollar fighting the lower CO2 emission yielded between 2 to 25 cents in benefits, and it's trying to find that balance. And I don't know if you have any comments on how we can best use our limited resources in a --

DR. GERBERDING: You know, I'm a scientist, not an economist. But I just read the Harvard Business Review this week from -- the October edition, where they are presenting the issue of climate change to corporate international communities and really making a very strong business case that it's not just an issue of corporate social responsibility or philanthropy anymore, it's an issue of corporate survival and economic security for businesses.

So I think the broad dimension of sustainability and climate change and their intersection are things that we need to look at. And I hope in the hearings and the debates that go on about various legislation, this will be an area that will come up.

As a public health official, I'm always balancing the need to take care of a(n) emerging or urgent reality today and the need to do things like plan for a pandemic, for the health consequences of a climate change. I think we have to be able to do both, but getting that responsible balance is part of what needs to be a very open debate. And I agree that it should be a debate.

SEN. BARRASSO: And then the other question is we hear about the tragedy of what happened in Europe and the heat wave and all of those that perished, and then one reads reports that, you know, with any change in temperature, a degree rise or two, there are reports of a number of lives that have been saved by not having the cold impact in the deaths that are caused by cold and the cardiovascular impacts of the extreme cold.

Any comments on how that --

DR. GERBERDING: No, there is better science now relating temperature and mortality rate, including a very large study done in the United States where this was looked at geographically and by various population subsets.

I think one of the things to say to help put the European experience in perspective, in none of that climate tracking data that went on over a long period of time was there an event where 25,000 people died from a winter storm. So what we're dealing with is not just the gradual increments in temperature that may be offset by less cold and more heat, but also these extreme events which are devastating, and particularly to vulnerable people in our population. We have to look at the total impact, not just kind of the stable reflection of temperature and health status, and I think there is a lot of uncertainty there. And we need to really be looking at the past climate and anticipating what it means in terms of the future and what we're seeing happening right now today in the United States.

SEN. BARRASSO: Thank you very much.

No further questions.

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