[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 110 (Tuesday, June 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3794-S3795]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back for my weekly ``Time to Wake 
Up'' speech, which, given the theme of the week in Washington, it is 
going to focus on the health consequences of what is going on in 
climate change. It is timely to do so because just recently the 
National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for the 
Southwestern United States. In California, San Diego County set a 
record at--hang on--124 degrees.
  As a result of this heat, the National Weather Service warned of ``a 
major increase in the potential for heat-related illness and even 
death.''
  In Phoenix, AZ, it got up to around 120 degrees. It got so hot that 
flights had to be grounded at the Phoenix airport because the hot air 
was too thin for the jet engines to get enough bite on the air for the 
planes to fly safely. The emergency rooms saw patients coming in with 
burns caused by walking barefoot on hot pavement or touching their cars 
that had gotten so hot in the sun that they were burned. There were 
several heat-related deaths reported in the Las Vegas area and in 
California.
  This heat wave problem is not going away. ``Heat waves like the one 
we are seeing in the Southwest are becoming much more frequent,'' said 
Robert E. Kopp, director of the Coastal Climate Risk and Resilience 
Initiative at Rutgers University.
  He went on to say: ``Looking forward, we expect the amount of extreme 
heat on the planet to continue increasing even more'' with obvious 
health effects.
  It has gotten deadly serious in many places. In the 2003 European 
heat wave, there were more than 30,000 deaths across the continent, and 
the 3-day 1995 Chicago heat wave killed more than 700 people.
  We need to pay attention. As Mr. Kopp concluded, ``that calls for a 
major rethink of the systems that we rely upon.'' This is not normal 
any longer.
  This week also saw the publication in the Providence Business News of 
an article by Nitin Damle called ``Climate Change's Dire Health 
Consequences.'' Nitin Damle is a physician in Rhode Island. He is a 
leader of our medical profession in Rhode Island, and he just recently 
was the President nationwide of the American College of Physicians.
  In the Providence Business News, he writes:

       The medical community is witness to the health effects of 
     climate change now and not in some distant future. There are 
     five categories of health effects that will affect not 
     thousands but millions of people in America and around the 
     world.

  First, as we just talked about what we saw in Arizona and in Southern 
California, he goes on to say:

       An increase in global temperature and frequency of heat 
     waves will expose people to a risk of heat exhaustion 
     (dehydration, headaches, weakness, nausea and vomiting) and/
     or heat stroke (high fever, stroke, confusion and coma). The 
     most vulnerable will include the elderly, with multiple 
     heart, lung and kidney conditions, multiple medications and a 
     poorer ability to regulate their body temperature.

  But Dr. Damle went on to say:

       Children will be at risk due to their inability to thermo 
     regulate, as will laborers who work outdoors and the 
     homeless. History tells us that there have been 7,400 annual 
     deaths between 1999-2010 in the United States, 15,000 deaths 
     in France in 2009, 70,000 deaths in Europe in 2003 and 15,000 
     deaths in Russia in 2010 from heat waves.

  Respiratory effects are another health consequence that Dr. Damle 
elucidates here.

       Respiratory effects from particulate matter and ozone 
     result in exacerbation of asthma and other chronic lung 
     conditions.

  He continues:

       Fifty-five percent of the U.S. population tests positive 
     for allergens and 34 million people have asthma. The 
     increased length of the pollen season and growth of allergen-
     producing weeds, grasses, mold and fungus will lead to more 
     exacerbations of asthma and chronic lung conditions at an 
     annual cost of $56 billion per year with visits to the 
     emergency room and hospital admissions.

  I was at a conference recently and saw a presentation by Dr. Kari 
Nadeau, who is the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & 
Asthma Research at Stanford University and the Naddisy Foundation 
Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics.
  I am going to borrow a few of her slides that relate to the asthma 
and allergen concerns. Let me start with this graph, which shows asthma 
prevalence nationwide and asthma prevalence in Rhode Island.
  In Rhode Island, we run a little bit higher for the experience of 
asthma than nationwide, and this is an issue that is important to us. 
It comes home to roost. Dr. Nadeau used this slide. This was exposure 
to extreme heat and precipitation events associated with increased risk 
of hospitalization for asthma. This was a study that was done in 
Maryland. As the temperature went up, and there was extreme heat or 
precipitation, and asthma hospitalizations went up as well.
  She showed a graph from another study in New York that of the ED 
visits, or emergency department visits, related to ozone or related to 
smog, which is a well-known asthma trigger

[[Page S3795]]

and the estimated increase in ozone-related emergency department visits 
for children in New York from the 1990s to 2020s resulting from 
climate-change-related increases in ozone concentrations. As the ozone 
concentrations went up, up went the ozone-related emergency department 
visits.
  The dark blue shows places where the emergency department visits went 
up 10 percent; the lighter blue, 7.8 to 9 percent; the even lighter 
blue, 6.6 to 7.7 percent; and in these counties, up 5.2 to 6.5 percent.
  Globally, we see that pollen counts go up in conjunction with 
increasing carbon dioxide. In 1900, there were about 280 parts per 
million of pollen production, and we hit 370 parts per million in 2000. 
I take it back. At 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, there were 
5 grams per plant of pollen production. At 370 parts per million of 
carbon dioxide, pollen production increased to over 10 grams per plant. 
We are over 400 now. We are headed for 720 parts per million. At that 
point, we have more than quadrupled the pollen output.
  We are seeing this happen not only in terms of the amount of pollen 
output that can trigger asthma but also the length of the pollen 
season. The months in which people who have asthma are vulnerable are 
extending themselves. Here, it is nearly 27 extra days. Here it is 24 
extra days, 17 extra days, 19 extra days, 14 extra days, 13 extra days. 
We went through the middle of the country and saw over and over that 
the ragweed pollen season is getting long, and it is worse for asthma 
sufferers.
  Another thing we have associated with climate change and with the dry 
drought spells has been wildfires. Wildfires, for obvious reasons, put 
a lot of stuff--ash and things--up into the air. In this monitoring map 
of California, when the wildfires were going on, you could see these 
spikes in asthma activity.
  Here is before the fire. Here is during the fire activity, and here 
it falls back down afterward. The risks for asthma climbed dramatically 
during that period. The wildfires present yet another climate-related 
risk for people who have asthma. And here are the wildfires in 
California, shown to increase asthma, as determined by the emergency 
department visits. The emergency department visits climbed based on 
various risk factors. So when you are seeing folks having to go to the 
emergency department for asthma, that has gotten pretty serious. There 
is a lot of support for Dr. Damle's assertion that this is a concern we 
should pay attention to.

  He goes on to list another category of concern: exposure to 
infectious disease from vectors such as mosquitos and ticks. He says it 
has and will continue to escalate.

       There is a documented increase in cases of dengue, 
     chikungunya, West Nile virus and Zika.

  He goes on to say:

       We will likely see a resurgence of malaria in certain areas 
     of North America.

  Other illnesses come from other consequences of climate change.
  He goes on to report:

       An increase in heavy downpours and flooding in America and 
     the world will lead to an increase in waterborne diseases 
     such as E. Coli and other bacteria (salmonella, typhoid and 
     cholera), parasites (Giardia) and viruses (Hepatitis A and 
     Norwalk) with an impact on millions of people around the 
     world.

  He goes on to cite extreme weather events, which create stress, 
anxiety, and depression. Hurricane Katrina, he reports, led to 32 
percent of people affected by the hurricane suffering from post-
traumatic stress.
  He continues:

       We know that there will need to be a global effort to 
     reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the 
     developed countries need to take a leading role developing/
     implementing and moderating the success of those mitigating 
     measures.

  He concludes:

       We need to reenter the Paris agreement and move forward at 
     the local and State levels for the benefit of our patients.

  He is a respected doctor in Rhode Island. He is a clinical assistant 
professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown 
University. Also, he was recently the president of the American College 
of Physicians.
  I know my colleagues don't want to listen to any of this stuff about 
climate change because the fossil fuel industry controls them so much 
that they cannot even say the words, in many cases, ``climate change'' 
on the floor of the Senate, but for crying out loud, you have the 
former president of the American College of Physicians talking about 
the health effects; you have a prominent researcher at Stanford 
University talking about the health effects; and you have the National 
Weather Service warning about dangerous health effects from climate-
related heat in the Southwest. When are we going to finally get around 
to having a serious discussion about this?
  It is great that we had a little pause on this wretched healthcare 
bill. I couldn't be happier to be rid of it for a while, and I am 
hoping we can be rid of it for good, but it is probably going to come 
back. We will have to hammer a few more stakes into the heart of this 
zombie before we are rid of it, and then we can move on to a serious 
bipartisan healthcare bill.
  There is good work to be done on healthcare. There is good work to be 
done on climate change. But we have to take the wretched special 
interest politics out so we can get to serious business.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.

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