SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hi everyone, this is Reasonable, a show about economics, business, and politics, and I'm Oscar Rivas. I'm thrilled to speak with my guest today, Professor Christy Eby. Professor Ebai is an epidemiologist who studies the effects of climate change on human health. She's been one of the pioneers of this field and has been researching the health risks of climate change for more than 30 years. She's the founder and former director of the Center for Health in the Global Environment at the University of Washington School of Public Health. Christy Eby, thank you very much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

So you're an epidemiologist who studies climate change. And I've there's so many angles to take on the topics that you study. So I I I was thinking a good place to start was I heard you use the analogy of if you imagine us sitting in a car with the rearview mirror there, looking at the road behind us, um, and trying to conceptualize where we're going. How do we understand what the future is going to look like? Because a lot of our conceptions of it is based on, you know, historical patterns.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

I'll step back for a moment, if you let me. And a critical fact to understand in this field is that until the last few years, not the last year and a half, but the few years before that, there's been almost no funding in the space. And so there is research, there's robust research, there's a lot of understanding that was developed over those years, but it was pretty narrow with respect to all of the health challenges of a changing climate. And so until recently, almost all of the research, vast majority of the research, was on heat. And that's why when you look at the field, there's a lot of work on heat, there's less work on other issues that are equally as important. And it's not because the field wasn't interested in it, it's because there were limited opportunities given the funding. So, with that as the background, when we look across the field, if we want to think about the future, we do have to understand the past. And we need to look at the data sets, we need to understand associations between various weather patterns and health outcomes. A lot of the studies focus on temperature and precipitation. There is, of course, in health, as with all sectors right now, growing concern about the El Nino and what El Nino could mean for health. There's been a few studies looking at how El Nino does affect weather patterns. And you need to understand that if you're going to think what could happen in a changing future. And the work that I've been involved in looks at thinking about that future not just from the perspective of temperature change, precipitation change, sea level rise, which of course come out of the climate projections, but also to think about the range of possible socioeconomic futures and how that intersects then with changing weather patterns because of climate change. And there are five exemplar visions of how the world could unfold. There is, of course, thousands of ways the world could unfold, but there was a process to develop five. And they're arrayed along axes about challenges to adaptation and challenges to mitigation. One of these worlds is a world in which the world actually achieves the sustainable development goals and more or less on time. So it's a world committed to reducing emissions, to increasing adaptation, to addressing inequities, injustices. But that's not the only possible future. At kind of the other end is a future in which the world breaks into large world regions where each region goes its own way. There's limited investment in the international organizations, very limited funding, for example, to the World Health Organization. And in that world with these large regional rivalries, increased conflict, there would be higher population growth, particularly in low and middle-income countries. And that would present a very different world that would then interact with climate change and would give very different burdens of disease. So there are a group of people, I'm one of them, who is thinking about that, thinking about what these different worlds could look like, how the world could evolve from here along different trajectories. And we need to understand that because when you look, for example, at most of the projections around heat-related mortality, they're relatively simplistic. They say we've worked out the association between temperature and mortality, and we'll look at the changes in temperature with climate change, and then we'll just apply that and come up with a number of possible deaths. But we need to know about demographic change. Aging populations are going to have higher vulnerability. Urbanization patterns are going to be critically important because the urban heat island. And so the process is bringing in these other factors also important so that there is a richer understanding of different possibilities, which of course then leads you to different possible solutions, which is what we're all looking for.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

So you said you're one of the people thinking about this. I think you're probably being a bit modest here. You are one of the lead authors on a special report that the UN just released about, I believe it's overshoot. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 6:38

In 2015, the world signed the Paris Agreement. And the Paris Agreement goal was to keep warming at two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial with the aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. And that agreement then led to an IPCC special report on answering the question for policymakers of what difference does it make if the global mean surface temperature is 1.5 versus 2? So that came out and was quite influential in thinking about the emissions commitments, reduction commitments that countries were making. As we've gone along, the emission greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced, but not to the extent and at the rate that is needed to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. And when one looks at the climate models, I'm not a climatologist, I rely on my colleagues to do this. When one looks at the models, there's now no pathways to keep global mean surface temperature below 1.5 degrees. And the report then articulates this: that the world will exceed 1.5 degrees, probably fairly quickly. And that puts us in a different pathway. The focus has been on let's keep focusing on emission reductions to keep warming below 1.5. We're going to exceed 1.5. So the what's what's next is overshoot pathways of acknowledging there will be an exceedance, that because of the inertia in the climate system, after the exceedance, there'll be a plateau. When from perspectives of humans, it will be difficult to see that there's any impact of emission reductions on global mean surface temperature. Plateau will last several decades. And then eventually global mean surface temperature will come down and there'll be stabilization. So the overshoot pathways just make it clear that we're on a somewhat different trajectory. The goal is still the same to reduce global mean surface temperature at least down to 1.5. And one of the questions that is coming up now is, of course, the goal 1.5. In the Paris Agreement, there was, based on research at the time, there was the assumption that 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial would be relatively safe. And I think many parts of the world would say right now we're over 1.4 degrees above pre-industrial. That doesn't look very safe.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

And when you look at the heat waves, the floods, the droughts that are going on, the question then is what could be the goal, the long-term goal? 1.5 maybe too high.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Yeah. And I think so this is starting to get into the territory, I think, where a lot of your work um is important, which is how are we gonna live not in this world, but in the world, you know, not to sound too dramatic, but like the world that's coming, right? Like how how do we live in this future world that is just not what we're used to? Um and obviously your focus is on health. There's so many there's so many offshoots of this, and I'll I'll kind of let you talk to some of them, but I think people think of just like heat, right? But that's just you've touched on it already, that's just one aspect. You have like heat waves, floods, disease. Like disease is something I really did not think about. Um vector-borne diseases, I think you call them. Um, can you kind of go through some of those big overarching ones and maybe maybe some of the ones that people don't consider as much?

SPEAKER_01 10:46

I would be happy to. For those of us in health, when we look at the broad range of risks with a changing climate, you're right, there's a whole category of extreme weather and climate events. In addition to the heat waves, the floods, the droughts, there's wildfires. And we've seen dramatic wildfires in many parts of the world this year. Very real risk for our health from breathing wildfire smoke. Vector-borne diseases are diseases that are carried by mosquitoes and ticks primarily. Malaria in Africa, dengue in many parts of the world.

unknown 11:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

But there's other diseases that also are carried by the same mosquito. There's hundreds of vector-borne diseases that could be affected by changing temperature and precipitation patterns. There are a range of other kinds of infectious diseases, diarrheal diseases, for example. It can be water or foodborne diseases. There's also the safety and security of our water and our food supplies. Undernutrition is a critical factor in many parts of the world and is getting worse because of climate change. There's respiratory diseases. Spring comes sooner, fall starts later, there's a lot more pollen, and there's more allergies and more asthma. And then there's all the other potential consequences when you think in the longer term, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is not going to stop sea level rise. It's going to continue for a century or more. What does that mean for coastal communities and relocation? And thinking about what needs to be done for our coastal communities and how that will be managed is going to be really very challenging, shall we say. So when you look across this, there's a very broad range of health risks. And all of those will be affected directly or indirectly by overshoot. We talked briefly about the exceedance. It would be excellent if that exceedance could be kept as low as possible. That also means the plateau will be as short as possible. But during that plateau, there is a possibility that ecosystems could be lost because of the pressure of the higher temperature changing precipitation patterns. That also will have consequences for things like vector-borne diseases, because mosquitoes have particular habitats they like to live in. And those could be, there could be more of those, there could be less of those. And understanding how this could play out in the health context is a critical research topic because the research has focused on looking at what could happen with increases in global mean surface temperature without thinking through decades of a plateau. For health, it'll mean more heat-related morbidity and mortality. We know there's limits that physiologically humans have to tolerate heat. It's the other impacts and how they could be shifting in the overshoot pathways and then look at the health consequences.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Let's go a little bit into heat. I think obviously they're all important, but I think a lot of people can imagine heat is just conceptualize it really easily, no matter kind of where you live. Can you talk about what that actually does to the human body? I think sometimes we take that for granted, like how that actually harms us.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

There's a lot of misperceptions about heat. It flows into a humans' distorted risk perception, shall we say, in many areas. Physiologically, we're all designed to function within a pretty, I wouldn't say a narrow temperature range, because humans live in all kinds of environments. They live, from my perspective, in impossible environments. I don't know how people survive in some environments, but they do. But physiologically, the focus is on our core body temperature. And that core body temperature needs to stay within a pretty narrow range to protect our cells and our organs. We're just, humans are designed. We've evolved that way. And so when people live in these more extreme environments, there are modifications to our infrastructure. There's modifications to our clothing. You can look at cultures all around the world and see quite a few differences in how people function on a day-to-day basis. Part of that is to protect our core body temperature. And when we're in situations where our core body temperature starts to increase, we have behavioral mechanisms and physiological mechanisms that work to try and keep that core body temperature where it should be. Behaviorally, I live in a place with lots of water. People go find someplace by the water. We've got lots of forests, lots of parks, you go find someplace you can sit and cool down. Physiologically, there's a range of mechanisms, up to and including sweating. But if we continue in this hot environment and we don't get sufficient relief from these responses, our core body temperature starts to rise. And as it increases over several to many hours, eventually you start heating your internal cells and organs. When looking at mortality after a heat wave, about half of that mortality is from cardiovascular causes. And ultimately, our organs will be affected to the point where we can experience heat stroke, which has a very high fatality rate. And people who survive often have lifelong consequences. So we know that there's actual limits to our survivability in very hot environments. We need to take into account there's also the livability. Can you live in a place that's hot? It's not so hot that you can't survive it, but it might be too hot for agriculture, for example. It might be too hot for our water systems. And so thinking about the livability and survivability in higher temperatures is something that a number of groups are taking on and trying to articulate more clearly because the difference in survivability between people depends on a range of factors, including age, physical fitness, um, the urban heat island, and being able to identify those more precisely, means that then communities are better able to develop the response part of early warning systems.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

I'm glad you mentioned the early warning systems, and we'll come back to that. Um what this kind of makes me think of um as we start to get these blistering heat waves or you know these summer heats, you know, part of the show we talk about politics, right? And I think it's difficult to talk about climate change and not talk about politics. And you know, there's gonna be a lot of people on the left that will immediately start saying, okay, you know, it's hot because see, this climate change is real. You know, this this wouldn't happen without climate change, etc. Then we're gonna have the people on the right that are, you know, oh, it's this is part of the cycle. Um, you know, it's oh you know, we've always had heat waves, things like that. Um I've heard you talk about this idea of detection and attribution. Um, and I know uh this has been a um a subject uh part of climate science for a long time. Can you explain how do we know that a heat wave is actually caused from climate change versus you know um part of the quote unquote normal cycles, et cetera? Can you can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Detection and attribution is a set of sophisticated statistical tools to answer that question. It does exactly what the name implies. The first is can you detect whether there's a change in a trend? So when you look at the long-term temperature records, can you detect a change? If the answer is yes, then there are tools to determine the extent to which climate change contributed to that change in temperatures. At this moment, there's quite a few climatologists who say there's no heat wave that's not being affected by climate change. That does not mean 100% of that heat wave is because of climate change. That heat waves have always occurred, they will always continue to occur. The question is the temperatures within those heat waves. There's been a number of instances over the last few years where using these methods, climatologists will conclude that some heat waves are virtually impossible without climate change. There was a heat wave several years ago in the Scandinavian countries, and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute determined using methods that frankly I don't understand, but using these sophisticated methods, that the return period, how often you would expect those temperatures, would be once every three million years, which frankly, my brain has a pretty tough time figuring out what a one in three million year event looks like. There was an event in Japan where the Japan meteorological, I think it's this agency, said it could never have happened without climate change. We are increasingly seeing events that are essentially impossible without climate change. But less than that, we're seeing events where it's very clear that climate change increased the temperature of the event. The event still would have happened, but they wouldn't, the temperatures would not have been so hot. And this goes back to the discussion around survivability. Heat stroke, because as you increase that temperature, more and more people are at risk. And we do know there's a long list of kinds of groups that are at much higher risk with these high temperatures. And you're just putting more people at higher risk for a heart attack, for heat stroke, for other kind of catastrophic health outcome.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

And it it reminds me of something I've been thinking about a lot, which is the concept of thresholds. I think a lot of people don't, maybe it's just me, um, really think about what that means, the concept of a threshold, right? Like you can survive a lot, whether it's a whether it's a product, whether it's uh a building, whether it's the human body, but there is a threshold when you surpass it, it breaks. And obviously for humans it'd be we can survive a lot of heat, but there's a threshold where you're gonna have a heat stroke, or you may die. And and and the concept is you can't just come back from it. Right. And that's kind of the danger of what sounds like sometimes a small number, like we've talked about 1.5 degrees, two degrees, like what sometimes doesn't sound like that big of a difference breaks the threshold, and that's why it can cause so much damage, whether to property, to our economies, to the human body.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Exactly right. You can look at uh a good example could be flood zones. We're all familiar with flood zones and the focus on this is how much you can tolerate so many feet above the normal floodplain, and so many feet plus one foot causes catastrophic damage, is a great example of a threshold that people see on the news on a unfortunately a fairly regular basis.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

If you are, please take a moment to share the episode with a friend or someone else that you think would enjoy it. In addition, if you'd like to show support, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. I'd really appreciate it. Okay, back to the show. So something I thought was really interesting, um, just going back to the health aspect, is I watched your TED talk about carbon dioxide, and we're like, we're just talking about climate change, and this is actually a little a little different, but it's it's just an example of I don't know, like um there's so many things we just haven't thought of yet, and we just do not know um how things what what touches what because everything is so interconnected. Uh I'll let you talk about it, but how carbon is affecting diets. Um, can you can you touch on on some of the work you've done there?

SPEAKER_01 25:12

I'll step back. And all of the plants in the plant kingdom have photosynthetic pathways by which they bring in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, break it into carbon and oxygen, and use the carbon to grow. There's only a very limited number of pathways. The most common pathway is shared across 85% of the plant kingdom. So 85% use this one particular pathway. The biochemical characteristics of that pathway mean that these plants are called C3 plants. It just says this is the photosynthetic pathway that's used.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

And that includes potato, rice, which together are I I think close to 50% of all the calories consumed around the world. But barley, potatoes, trees, grasses, 85% of what you see. And for these plants, based on field experiments, where there were fields of wheat or fields of rice that were broken into plots. And each plot then had carbon dioxide levels expected towards the end of the century, blown over the plants. You then harvest the plants, you analyze the plants. And for wheat and rice, when you look at those analyses, the protein comes down about 10%.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Sorry, did I just want to jump in here and say like this isn't just a um like a hypothetical. You had actually you guys had rice fields, I think, in China or Japan or something. And you put And wheat fields. And you put carbon dioxide, like pumped it over. Um so I I think it's it's helpful for people to kind of visualize that. Like this is a real experiment. Right. Um sorry, carry on.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

No, that's great. No, I'm gl- I'm glad you clarified that because these were real experiments.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

And the the results were protein concentrations came down about 10%. Uh the B vitamins came down about 30%. And when you think of wheat and rice and how they're a staple for so many people that don't have a lot of resources. And that's within the US, that's within all countries around the world, that the poor populations tend to eat a lot more carbohydrates. And these experiments showed that the nutritional quality of the food declined significantly. A 10% reduction in protein is a very large reduction. E-vitamins, as I said, about 30%. Micronutrients through a slightly different pathway declined about 5%, which also sounds really quite small. But there's something like 700 million people in the world who are food insecure. And there's 1.5 billion that have micronutrient deficiencies. There's over a billion women and girls who have iron deficiency anemia. And so reducing those micronutrients, the zinc, the iron, the lithium, other kinds of micronutrients, will have significant impacts on the health and well-being of populations.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

More people dying during child labor, more children stunted, right? Things like that.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

More exactly right. And so this is a huge challenge the world is facing because there's not obvious ways to fix that easily. The advice, of course, is the advice that people have been getting for years about eating a nutrient-dense diet, eating a variety of foods. And that hasn't gone anywhere near as well as it should have. When one looks at the number of people in the U.S. eating an adequate diet, it's a pretty small percentage of the population. And it's even worse, of course, in low resource settings.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Well, that may not be true again in this in this changing world.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

And if I could add to that, at the same time, the plants have more carbohydrates in them. And when one paper about this came out, I recall a newspaper headline in the United Kingdom, where, of course, there's newspapers that have, shall we say, more sensational headlines.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

And the headline was our junk food is getting junkier.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

So along with the gift of trapping heat on the earth, um, carbon is also just making our food shittier, essentially.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Pretty much. And it's not just for us. There's some studies of, for example, grass-fed cattle. And they grass, which is one of the kinds of plants that are being affected. And it looks as if they are becoming increasingly stressed. One of the hypotheses is the stress is because they're not getting the nutrition that they used to get from the grass. So it's it's everybody that eats plants is being affected.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

So um let's kind of pivot to some of the what we can do about some of this, uh, some of the solutions here. So um before we get into some of the things like you've talked about early warning systems and stuff, I heard a talk you were or I heard an example you were giving about how everything, this concept of everything just touches so many other things. And to be able to predict it is almost impossible because so much of what happens is you really have to be there, like the importance of like local knowledge and things like that. Um you you talked about how a crop failing in Moscow led to riots in Egypt. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_01 31:46

I've now forgotten the year, and I apologize for that, but probably around 2005, 2006, in that range, there were massive heat waves around Moscow. Russia is a significant grower and exporter of wheat. And the timing of the heat wave meant it affected the wheat crop strongly. One place at the time that Moscow that Russia exported wheat to was Egypt. And in Egypt, bread is a critical component of the diet. And the government subsidizes the wheat so that the bread is not as expensive as a normal market price. And yes, there were riots in Cairo because the government had to raise the price of wheat, because they had to buy more expensive wheat from other regions to make up for the wheat they couldn't buy from Moscow. And it is an example of what in science are called teleconnections. That what happens in this place is not completely because of this place, but because of the interconnectedness of our lives and our markets.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up because I think one of the goals of the show is trying to figure out what which problems can the market solve and you know which ones can't it. And, you know, it's it's hard to differentiate sometimes. But something we talked about with uh professor of economics Elizabeth Hoffman was ex the concept of externalities, which is there's a transaction if you you know you're selling me something and I I purchase it, an externality is something that affects somebody else that had nothing to do with our transaction, right? And I think that's a really important thing for people to remember. This isn't just like if you don't like carbon, stop buying it, right? It's not it's not that simple. It's you know, this this is affecting all these people, especially for like for like the US to think about, like it's affecting the entire world, and you know, um it it doesn't just affect your state or your country or whatever. This is a global issue, and um but some of the solutions can also be adapted everywhere. So um can you talk about so you there's a kind of the two buckets, there's adaptation and um mitigation. And I know there's probably some false distinctions there, but can you talk a little bit about that? And then and then we can go into early warning systems.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

At their core, mitigation just means reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And at its core, adaptation is about preparing for and managing the risks that we're facing. Adaptation over the decades has received less attention, it's receiving more attention today because you just open any social media you follow, and there's no community that's prepared for the extreme events that they're experiencing. And that means a whole range of things, but being explicit about how because of climate change, the extremes are shifting. And we can use that information proactively to help increase the resilience and sustainability of communities if we are explicit that we need to take into account our changing environment as well as our changing socioeconomics.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

So early warning systems, is that when so there's a heat wave coming to your air area? Um a heat wave near you, and you're trying to alert the public, right? Is am I getting that right? Is that what it is?

SPEAKER_01 35:59

From my perspective, that's half of it.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

That yes, we do need to know when extreme weather is coming our way. Equally important, we have to know what to do about it. Having my local broadcast meteorologist tell me it's hot often is not terribly informative. I've figured out it's really hot. What do I do? And for people who are particularly vulnerable, many communities, for example, set up cooling shelters. Where I've where are they? How do you get there? If it's really hot, do you walk to take the bus in the heat and wait for the bus? What if you have pets at home? Do you take your pets with you? When the Pacific Northwest experienced the heat dome five years ago, it was extremely hot at night. The nighttime temperatures would have been records during the day, which meant people couldn't cool off at night. So you've got a cooling shelter. Do you take your pets? What are you going to do if you're going to stay overnight? Do you take your medications? There's lots of very practical questions about what to do specifically. And as you said earlier, you need to focus this on the particular community. Maricopa County, uh, Phoenix has got an outstanding heat wave early warning and response system. They investigate all heat deaths that occur during a heat wave. About half of their heat deaths are in the unhoused. And so they've got specific programs for reaching out to the unhoused to protect them during these periods of very high temperatures.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Can you help, can you help us visualize what that is? Like what are they doing right? How do how are they communicating with people? Like, are they just using existing channels? Like, like, like you said, like TV or like what what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 37:56

They're using every channel they can. A critically important channel is when developing or annually reviewing your your heat wave early warning and response system, is you connect with the trusted voices for particular communities. There's lots of research showing that in the United States, of course, there's red-lined districts, and the redlining was done in the 1930s. Those communities are still hotter today than the surrounding areas. Who's the trusted voices for the redlined communities? You want to reach out and make sure that you have those trusted voices engaged, whether those voices are part of non-governmental organizations, whether it's the department within the city structure that oversees the facilities for older citizens. There's different terms in different places, but basically you want to have all of those groups engaged so that everybody can give the same message. And there's lots of opportunities. For example, pharmacists know every prescription drug every single one of us takes. Many of those prescription drugs reduce the ability of your body to sweat. Having your pharmacists say, and, right, as they give you the prescription, and you need to know this. And so all of those avenues are really important. Some people don't watch the broadcast meteorologists anymore. So you look at the online, you look at LinkedIn, you look at a whole range of other ways of reaching out to people. And the effective systems are doing that and helping reduce mortality in those communities.

SPEAKER_00 39:45

So when people hear early warning systems, they shouldn't imagine like this fancy piece of equipment or technology. It's more, you know, it might be how do you set up a process to where, you know, your reverend reaches out to a couple people in that community, or the, you know, the local doctor has some people that they contact, or things like that using existing really hyper-local trusted sources, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:13

And in some places there's text messaging from healthcare providers, other places there's not. It's what do you have in place that you can use and build on to ensure that it's not just that people are aware of the temperature, but they know what to do about it.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:35

And this gets to a point we talked about earlier about risk perception. One of the real challenges here is that a natural part of the aging process is that people become less well able to tell if they're getting into trouble with the heat. There's a study from quite a few years ago and took advantage of four heat waves in the US, did non-random surveys of adults over the age of 65 who are at higher risk. 90% of the people knew there was a heat wave. I think it was something like 75% could say one thing, at least one thing that people at higher risk, i.e., people like themselves should do. 50% did anything because I'm not at risk. And there is this challenge of getting over this barrier of people don't think they're at risk. Somebody else is at risk. It's not me. I'm healthier. Right. I take better care of myself and helping people understand no, there's an awful lot of us who are at risk and all of us need to take action.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Yeah. And you've also talked about stress testing these systems, right? Um so that you know when the next heat wave comes or whatever weather event, you know that you have a plan. What what does that look like? Or what do you mean by stress testing?

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Stress testing, certainly for the for your listeners who are in finance, understand bank stress testing. In the military, it's called war gaming. It's the same concepts of acknowledging that human beings are really pretty poor at imagining the future. And this is a way to create a tabletop exercise. You bring together a group of people from city disaster risk management, from NGOs, from others, and give them a situation in the future and provide it in a fair amount of detail of it's this particular date in this location. You've got a description of what the population would look like. You can do the demographic profile, you can think about how urbanization could have changed, you can think about in-migration, out-migration. So you've got a description of what that area looks like. And then you impose an event, in this case, a heat wave. And you know that you've designed the event so that it's going to be extremely difficult to manage, which isn't the point. The point is if you had that today, what would you do? What connections should you make? And are there memorandum of understanding that should be put in place? Are there different activities than what you're doing now to think about in the future and then start planning and implementing those before an event happens like that?

SPEAKER_00 43:37

So in the US, who who do you imagine it, you know, obviously everybody in government should be figuring out their area, right? Um but it are do you imagine this is like an exercise for mayors or or governors or city councils or for all of the above and more. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:56

And it's the experience around the world. With early warning and response systems is when you have very high level of engagement. When you have the mayor, when you have the governor, when you have others engaged, it creates the political mandate to take these kinds of exercises seriously and to have the opportunity to think through an event before it happens. Six years ago, if I was going to design a stress test about heat for the Pacific Northwest, I would have come up with something like the heat dome. And obviously that was extremely challenging. That all of the levels of governance in Washington, Oregon, and in British Columbia really stepped forward and did everything that they could. And I'm sure that they prevented a lot of deaths by doing so. At the same time, in Seattle, our emergency departments were close to being overwhelmed and ran into questions that they hadn't confronted before. There were calls about the heat every few minutes. There's so many people coming in, they're doing triage of who's going to go where. And one of the emergency departments just about ran out of ice because you need the ice to help bring down people's core body temperature. And so the question I'll ask my students or when I talk about this publicly is what's your supply chain for ice? And how can you get ice in really, really quickly? And the answer was the kitchen, because the kitchen has a lot of ice. And at the moment, there was the question, and they figured it out. But it's nice to be able to do this in an exercise, sitting around a table and recognizing that there are lots of assets that you can draw on and you can figure out how to access those assets before you have to do it in an emergency situation.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

Absolutely. And it's it's also not just a hypothetical, right? Like this is this is preparing for something that we know cities and states and regions are gonna have to reckon with. You I think you mentioned, was it Britain that had a a pretty good one? Am I remembering that right? Okay. Can you what are they doing? What are they doing right that other people could replicate?

SPEAKER_01 46:33

They set up their system a long time ago, so they've got a lot of experience, which always helps. They have extensive documentation of that. They've engaged essentially all levels. I work on health. I often use a very dense table from an earlier version of their guidance. That if you're a local health authority, these are the things you have to do. If you're a regional health authority, and so they go down and they've worked with all these groups to understand what it is that needs to be done and how to organize to be more effective. But even with an effective early warning system that's been demonstrated to save lives, there's a document that came out recently, I believe it was for May and June of this year. Uh, the UK experienced five, five heat waves this summer. And there were more than 2,000 excess deaths that even with the system, the temperatures were so extreme, they weren't prepared for those very high temperatures they experienced. And now they will modify their system. They meet twice a year to talk about their system, bring the different actors together, and they'll take this into account to modify the system for next year.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

Yeah. And it it reminds me of something you said you do in your in your uh courses, which is you you touched on it earlier. You're not a climatologist. You bring in other experts and they do they do um courses or sessions in your in your classrooms, right? Uh they do. Bringing that into government, right? Like we don't have to you don't have to do it by yourself. You can bring in experts. Um, you can bring in Christy E bye and she'll tell you what to do.

SPEAKER_01 48:25

I won't tell you what to do. I can tell you I can tell you the risks that you're facing because what you're going to do is going to depend on that local context and the solutions at the local scale may be different than what are being done at other scales. But helping people frame the question often is helpful for looking at the answer.

SPEAKER_00 48:51

I'm sure you get this a lot, but I want you to kind of break it down into different audiences when I say what can people do or what should people do, right? So maybe some people are listening that are very, very passionate, career oriented, and they they want to have a career that helps maybe helps research climate change or combat it or et cetera. And then, you know, just kind of your average Joe that you know they know as much as they hear on the news about about climate and what they can do in their everyday lives.

SPEAKER_01 49:31

I ask a question that many of my students never figure out the answer to, which is in democratic societies, what's the most important thing you can do? And that's to vote. Vote for what's important for you and make sure that you do cast your vote and make make your voice heard. After that, it's there's a whole range of things we all can do. Some of them are relatively simple. Trying to use less fossil fuels when you do your errands, try to try to bunch them up instead of going out and back. Might require a little bit of planning to take a refrigerated bag with you if you're not going to do the grocery store last. But that'll save you money. There's all kinds of appliances now that as you replace your appliances are much more energy efficient. Some of them, particularly in Europe, you can buy appliances where you can turn them off completely. About 20% of the energy used by appliances is when they're in standby mode.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

Isn't that crazy? And so I have I haven't looked for years, but if you go into a big box store, there's all these stereo systems that are constantly displaying stuff. And yet you can buy some that turn off, and it's again, it saves you money. And so looking at ways that you yourself could make a few changes that would reduce your own energy consumption and reduce your energy bills. People right now, of course, are much more focused on this because of the price of gasoline. But that's soon going to be reflected in the price that we're going to have to pay for our utility bills. And obviously, in our own best interest to reduce that. I run the tree planting program. Well, I should look at climate change because as temperatures shift, the kinds of trees that are going to survive also are going to shift. Trees last for 50 years, we hope, sometimes more, sometimes less. What kind of trees would be good for 50 years from now? And those are just simple examples of bringing this into everyday thinking so that as we move into the future, we become more prepared. An example I give a lot, and I don't know about your community and my community, Seattle is just a sea of cranes. We are constantly building all kinds of stuff. Are we rebuilding for a hotter future? Are we developing, for example, programs where every building over a certain size has got a green roof, that every building under that has a white roof? Think about the orientation, thinking about there's new glass materials that are coming out that will let all the light in, but none of the heat. All kinds of practical questions. And the more that's taken up today, the better off we're going to be in the future because we'll be more prepared than if we don't think about it.

SPEAKER_00 52:58

I can't help but notice, and I'm sure you've gotten this a couple times, you're a very optimistic person for how much um, you know, risk that you see coming. What how do you stay optimistic?

SPEAKER_01 53:17

I tell everybody I'm a worried optimist. I have the privilege of working with people in communities around the world that are deeply engaged with climate change. And so I'm surrounded by people who have a similar passion for helping improve the future, my own future, the future of my kids, the future of my friends and family. And that I know puts me in a special category because I am surrounded by that. I do look at the risks, and you can look historically, there's been other periods where there's been risks, not necessarily worldwide, but I live for a while in the UK, and when you go around the UK, everybody likes to look at the half-timbered houses because they're so attractive to us. They're half-timbered because at one point the tree coverage in the UK because of the Industrial Revolution got down to about 5%. And they've come back from that. This is going to be more difficult to come back from, but it doesn't mean we can't do it. And you can look at all the inspiring examples of what individuals and communities have achieved. Another example I use a lot is one woman in the US changed all of our laws. And she did so when she started Mothers Against Drunk Driving because her child had been killed by a drunk driver. We have that ability individually and collectively to take up issues for which we have a lot of passion. And that has carried human societies forward over the centuries. The risks we're facing are very large. They're very challenging. And there's options that we all can take. And that are happening. One issue not covered well at all in the media is there's a range of businesses taking up these challenges. Again, I live in Seattle. Boeing is developing an electric airplane. That just sounds amazingly cool to me to have an electric airplane. And so there's all kinds of innovation going on. Yeah. Electric vehicles, economists claims the world's reached a tipping point on electric vehicles. There's no way back from that. There's so much change going on, and much of it is really positive. We need to accelerate it. We need to celebrate the advances that are being made and need to keep moving forward on it.

SPEAKER_00 56:08

Christy Eby is a professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health. She has contributed to multiple IPCC reports, including the 2007 report, when the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with former Vice President Al Gore. She has supported multiple countries in Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific in assessing their vulnerabilities and implementing adaptation policies and programs. If you're interested in some of Christie's work, you can find links in our show notes, including to the Substack Climate Cafe, which she writes with a handful of other scientists. Thank you for listening to Reasonable. If you'd like to submit a question or have a guest you'd like to appear on the show, you can email contact at reasonablepod.com. Again, that's contact at reasonablepod.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the show and leave a review on Apple or Spotify. And most importantly, share this episode with a friend. Thank you.