Tuesday, April 5, 2011

On April 1, I interviewed Dan Ferber, co-author of a fascinating new book, Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It. We discussed the ways climate change causes extreme weather events, and how those events can increase the rate of infectious diseases, threaten our food supply, and strain our national security forces in the face of global shortages of natural resources. We discussed the ways in which children are particularly vulnerable to the health impact of climate change, and ways that everyday people can make a positive difference in our nation’s ability to thrive. You can check out the podcast of this episode of Go Green Radio at: http://tinyurl.com/3buuw7h

Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It.by Harvard health and disease expert Paul R. Epstein, MD, and award-winning science journalist Dan Ferber, reveals the complex links between global warming and cholera, malaria, lyme disease, asthma, and other threats such as crumbling ecosystems and lost services. They also examine abrupt climate change, which could cause catastrophic droughts, crop failures, large-scale migration, and war, according to a Pentagon projection. Dr. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHGE) at Harvard Medical School, has been documenting the links between global warming and declining human and environmental health since the early 1990s. Co-author Dan Ferber, a contributing correspondent to Science, traveled to rural Kenya, Honduras, Harlem and other places to talk with doctors, patients, scientists and others who are wrestling with these changes. The authors tell their stories and describe Epstein's quest to alert the world to the public health dangers of climate change. Then they draw on the latest science to vet climate solutions, and lay out a suite of innovative solutions to shape a healthy global economic order in the twenty-first century.

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