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Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Hurt Our Health -- And How We Can Save Ourselves
Beyond images of emaciated polar bears and drought-cracked lakes, there remains a major part of climate change’s impact that the media has neglected: how our health will suffer from higher temperatures and extreme weather. From spiraling rates of asthma and allergies and spikes in heatstroke-related deaths to swarms of invasive insects carrying diseases like dengue or West Nile and increases in heart and lung disease and cancer, the effect of rising temperatures on human health will be far-reaching, and is more imminent than we think.
Award-winning journalist Linda Marsa blends compelling narrative with cutting-edge science to explore the changes in Earth’s increasingly fragile support system and provide a blueprint—a “medical Manhattan Project”—detailing what we need to do to protect ourselves from this imminent medical meltdown. In the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Marsa sounds the alarm on a subject that has largely been ignored by governments and policy makers, and persuasively argues why preparedness for the health effects of climate change is the most critical issue affecting our survival in the coming century.
Award-winning journalist Linda Marsa blends compelling narrative with cutting-edge science to explore the changes in Earth’s increasingly fragile support system and provide a blueprint—a “medical Manhattan Project”—detailing what we need to do to protect ourselves from this imminent medical meltdown. In the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Marsa sounds the alarm on a subject that has largely been ignored by governments and policy makers, and persuasively argues why preparedness for the health effects of climate change is the most critical issue affecting our survival in the coming century.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published August 6, 2013
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August 21, 2025
As the planet gets hotter, we’ll live sicker and die quicker.All change is a matter of degrees. Up or down, a bit here, a bit there. And in time, with persistence, you really have something. In the Broadway and later film musical, Pajama Game, the cast sings of the accumulating impact of a small change, in this case literal small change. And so it is with global warming. A fraction of a degree here and there, and what with adding that small bit over and over, the overall amount grows significantly. When we think of warming, we tend to think of what is going into the air, water and land right now. When the fact is that we have been making carbon deposits into our environment for a long time, and are beginning to see the result of that. If you will allow another dip into our musical theater history, the show Mary Poppins offers a lesson on the value of compound interest. In the case of our planet however, the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank in question has grown far too large, its holdings are increasingly comprised of toxic assets and it threatens us all with more than just a fiscal meltdown.
The author with a ring-tailed lemur in Sarasota, Florida
Global Warming is a hot topic. When we think of the medical impact of global warming it is usually in terms of coping with personal temperature management, keeping cool in the hot weather. We might think of shrinking polar caps, maybe rising sea levels, more energetic hurricanes and the like. But there are very concrete health impacts that might not be so obvious. What if the breeding season of disease-vector mosquitoes were to be extended? More mosquitoes = more illness. One effect of shifting weather patterns brought on by warming is desertification. Dust storms increase in frequency and severity. While one may think of dust storms as a health threat due to the danger of airborne particulates making their way inside our bodies, such storms also carry fungus spores, and the diseases they can cause. There are many such effects we can look forward to as the short-term focus of corporate and political leaders ensures that our long term is hotter and in need of medical attention. In projecting the likely result of any ongoing situation, the devil is in the details, and the author has collected enough of the pesky horned guys together to raise the global temperature even more.
Science writer Linda Marsa, whose previous book, Prescription for Profits, addressed the impact of corporate culture on medical research, has offered compelling details about how a warming planet will, hell, is already affecting our health. A lot of what she reports will surprise you. I am no stranger to the subject, and found that I was being regularly alarmed at what I had not known or suspected.
Superstorm Sandy
Elements of warming that will affect our health include wider extremes and gyrations in weather,
Hot air holds more water, so we will have more torrential rains, more ferocious hurricanes, and, conversely, more dry spells as a result of heat-induced changes in rainfall patterns. Rising temperatures could trigger pestilence, drought-induced food shortages, raging firestorms, massive migrations, political instability, and wars, even the return of the bubonic plague…In the near future, millions might perish and millions more might be sickened by the litany of medical conditions caused or exacerbated by living in a rapidly warming world: heart disease, asthma, severe respiratory infections, heatstroke, and suicidal despair.faster global spreading of disease with the growth of global access and increasing interconnectivity,
The explosion of international travel on a hotter, wetter planet—more than 60 million Americans travel abroad every year, and an equal number visit the United States—has created the perfect conditions for the increased transmission of lethal pathogens from the tropics to industrialized nations. Hitchhiking parasites and infected individuals carting microbes that can be passed on by mosquitoes can now go anywhere in the world in less than 24 Hours and deliver reservoirs of malaria, dengue, or chikungunya fever, a particularly nasty infection that causes arthritis-like joint pain, to newly temperate regions…These two factors—global movement and changing global weather—are what enabled the West Nile virus to become entrenched in North America.assaults by air pollution on our ability to breathe,
One component of pollution, diesel fumes, delivers a double whammy for health. The diesel exhaust emitted by factories and big rigs not only damages the lungs, but also manes an excellent transport system for fungal spores, which proliferate in hotter, carbon-enriched environments. They attach themselves like glue to the tiny diesel particles, which scatter them in the wind in a “nasty synergy,” to use a phrase coined by the late Dr. Paul Epstein, a pioneer in environmental health at Harvard. The fungi lurking inside the spores can be lethal… [causing Valley Fever]
By By Quinn Dombrowski
persistent exposure to hotter temperatures,
After 48 hours of constant exposure to temperatures in excess of 90°F, the body’s defenses start to break down. Consequently, the swiftness of the public health system’s response to heat-related illnesses can literally mean the difference between life and death.and the stress of exploding demand on existing infrastructure:
[re New Orleans post Katrina]…the mental health care infrastructure—which had been inadequate before—was virtually nonexistent at a time when the need couldn’t possibly have been greater. At one point there were only 22 psychiatrists in a city of 200,000. Within a year after Katrina, five doctors became so despondent they took their own lives. “It wasn’t just the destitute poor who had no hope, but professional people who didn’t leave New Orleans and who stayed in the middle of it.It would be easy to look at all the dark sides of our current warming crisis and start looking for a convenient bridge from which to end it all. But wait. There is plenty more between the covers of Marsa’s report. In fact, she goes into some detail about actions that can be taken. Progress is already being made to reduce our carbon footprint, particularly via smart urbanization. She also shows how we can learn from pioneers in confronting the impact of warming, folks in the Netherlands and Australia specifically, who are learning the lessons of coping at the bleeding edge of climatic change.
I do not have any gripes about Fevered. Well, ok, maybe a very small and irrelevant one. I am of the opinion that most written work is made more palatable with a dose of humor. I know most of you are not exactly looking for comic relief in a book on global warming, and that is where I happily concede that this is a purely personal bias, and probably needs to be ignored. But the book could have used a smile or two, maybe a Far Side comic, something. But really, feel free to ignore the man behind this paragraph.
Marsa is a seasoned pro who has done her homework and whose experience as a popular science writer is on full display here. Which is a long way of saying that is it an easy-to-read book, rich with information, without being dumbed down.
It is probably the case that folks who are of the rightist persuasion would not bother picking up any book on global warming that did not feature conspiracies and reassurance that nothing is really wrong. Why confuse ideology with facts? But that leaves two thirds of us. For readers with minimal familiarity with warming, Fevered is a good introduction. The audience that will gain the most from the book, I suspect, consists of those of us who have read and studied enough to know just how bloody real this event is, and can always uses some more specifics, both for use in fending off zombie hordes of deniers and in thinking about where public resources should best be directed to cope with the impact.
Hopefully we can apply some heat of our own, get fired up and light a match under the appropriate representatives, senators, mayors, governors, council members and CEOs. Along with us they share responsibility, to a large degree.
Global Warming – It’s hee-er!
Review first posted - August 26, 2013
Published - August 6, 2013
This book was received via GR's First Reads program, just so's ya know
==============================EXTRA STUFF
The author’s website. There is one video in particular that sums up her expectations for the future, in the blog page of the site
Wiki on Valley Fever
It is hard to find an example more directly relevant to Marsa’s thesis than this one, Pollution Costs California Hospitals Millions of Dollars by Gina-Marie Cheeseman - March 23rd, 2010
The September, 2013 issue of National Geographic is focused on Rising Seas. This is MUST READ material, very accessible, very alarming.
Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries by Justin Gillis - March 22, 2016 - in the Science section of the New York Times
July 28, 2017 - NY Times - It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter. - by Nadia Popovich and Adam Pearce
August 6, 2017 - by the NY Times - Europe Swelters Under a Heat Wave Called ‘Lucifer’
August 7, 2017 - Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report - by Lisa Friedman
August 7, 2017 - In case you have not spotted the link, Henry B added this one in comment #43 (At least it is is #43 as this is entered), to the report that is generating such interest. - Final Draft of the Climate Science Special Report
February 16, 2019 - Yeah, it really is that bad - NY Times - Time to Panic - by David Wallace-Wells
January 16, 2014
There are growing number of books being released about climate change and this one addresses its impacts on individual health and the public systems designed to address those impacts.
Guess what? They're insufficient. Author Linda Marsa has travelled far and wide in gathering information from places where climate change is already wreaking death and destruction, spurring desperate attempts at adaptation.
In line with recent reports (2013-14) suggesting the impacts of climate change may confront all of us sooner than expected, Marsa gathers up a string of evidence that will scare the wits out of you, that special American citizen who believes in causes, effects, and the evidence linking them.
The author's focus is on the need to build a strong public health infrastructure able to cope with the widespread effects of climate change. Marsa asserts that because many of the perils associated with global warming are generally predictable, it is possible to design or adapt buildings and communities to be more resilient.
Strategies for creating a nonpolluting, clean-energy future can also improve public health.
A chapter entitled “Fever Pitch” examines the relationship between rising temperatures and the persistent and greater diffusion of diseases beyond their typical geographical distribution. Essentially, shorter, warmer winters aren't killing these things off and they actually grow stronger when they survive.
“Fevered” looks at the way global warming impacts air quality. “Rising temperatures will make bad air even more dangerous,” writes Marsa, “cooking up a witches' brew of pollutants that will sear the delicate tissue lining the lungs and aggravate an astonishing array of other health issues ranging from heart disease, to lung cancer, to dementia.”
“The Hot Zone” portends the more frequent occurrence of death by heat wave, characterized here as large tragedies going under-reported, because the dead can't always be linked directly to the heat, even though they were killed by existing ailments the extreme conditions triggered.
Chicago, France, Russia, Philadelphia, all have recent and ghastly stories related here.
“Health Care on Life Support” dissects the collapse of public health infrastructure in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and what came after, which was more of the same.
Marsa reports, nonetheless, that The Crescent City became something of testing ground for federal policies aimed at “disaster-proofing” healthcare there.
For example, patient records are now kept electronically, and New Orleans is also part of a federally funded pilot program that stores this information in a central information exchange, efficiencies that might have saved lives in the hurricane's wake.
The chapter entitled, “Running on Empty,” covers the dangers of malnutrition, examining the case of actress Audrey Hepburn, who endured starvation as a Dutch citizen during World War II, before transitioning to the topic of agriculture's increasing difficulty in cultivating a hotter planet.
A lot of that difficulty comes down to water – here she looks at the situation in the American southwest where the Colorado River no longer reaches its natural delta, wrung dry by a growing population.
Circumstances in Australia, which is at the forefront of climate change impact, involve “catastrophes of biblical proportions; unleashed killer heatwaves, agricultural collapse, bushfires of unimaginable ferocity and hastened species extinction.”
Drought has wiped out entire agricultural communities, and it is possible “vast portions” of the country's northern regions could be submerged by rising seas, rain storms and flooding
Because of its unique vulnerability, Australia has become a living laboratory for adaptation to a warmer world. Marsa makes a trip down there. The country's system of water consumption control offer a preview of what we'll be seeing everywhere someday, or sooner.
“Holding Back The Waters” returns to New Orleans, documents efforts at retooling water management and flood control systems in a sustainable way and reverses the environmental degradation that made Katrina worse than it needed to be.
Also covered are the problems in south Florida and the apparently borrowed time the city of Miami is living on, as sea level rises to threaten the lowing lying community and its freshwater supply sources.
It's not all darkness. There are strategies not only for adapting health care systems to a warmer world, but also for developing sustainable cities as a matter of public health. By way of example, Marsa sheds light on the Orange County Water Authority's pioneering to reuse wastewater for potable purposes.
New York, covered in a fulsome network of mass transit, and characterized by vertical lifestyles, is held up as an example of the good way to live, although the fact you need to be rich to reside there is not mentioned.
Writes Marsa: “Sylvan paradises like Vermont, where you don't have to wait until farmers' market day to buy locally grown, produce, may intuitively seem like places where sustainable living would be much easier than in urban areas. But the reality it quite different. Because the population is so spread out, Vermonters use nearly four times as much gasoline as New Yorkers, and six times as much as Manhattan residents. Ironically, on just about every other barometer, Green Mountain State residents turn out to be the resource hogs: They have larger carbon footprints, guzzle more water, dump more garbage, and consume quadruple the amount of electricity as the average New Yorker. In other words, the seductive allure of rural life is simply wrongheaded at a time when the world's population is surging toward eight billion and roughly 80 percent of Americans live in cities.”
“New York,” Marsa writes, “developed as a city before the advent of the automobile, so it is compact and dense. To become more like New York, the rest of us are going to have to undo the half century's worth of damage to our health and the social fabric of our lives that resulted when we became a car-centric society and suburban sprawl became a way of life.”
But New York may be just as car-centric as any city out there. Robert Caro's “The Power Broker” painfully documented the efforts of a man who never drove a car, Robert Moses, to bind the city up in ribbons of “parkway.”
One of the few people able to thwart him was Jane Jacobs, the urbanist who extolled the dense city neighborhood as a place of social health and economic vitality.
“Fevered” is progeny of Jacobs' own books. Her vision was of a sustainable city before that term became a byword for future survival. Marsa's work links the loss of high-density, transit-served urban villages with the sprawl that characterizes most development over the past half century.
Marsa's contribution is to take the ideas Jacobs propounded in her books beyond the concerns of neighborhoods and microeconomics and link them to the causes of climate change, and the health of the people in those neighborhoods hopefully driving those economies.
The author asserts that the universal and modern dependence on individual, motorized transportation is responsible for a series of direct health hazards ranging from lung disease and obesity, and indirect impacts such as global warming.
Marsa echoes Al Gore's call for a Marshal Plan to fight global warming in his “Earth in Balance” with her own call for a medical Marshall Plan that would recapture the spirit of cooperation that arose with WW II's outbreak.
“We must become that country again,” she pleads.
Guess what? They're insufficient. Author Linda Marsa has travelled far and wide in gathering information from places where climate change is already wreaking death and destruction, spurring desperate attempts at adaptation.
In line with recent reports (2013-14) suggesting the impacts of climate change may confront all of us sooner than expected, Marsa gathers up a string of evidence that will scare the wits out of you, that special American citizen who believes in causes, effects, and the evidence linking them.
The author's focus is on the need to build a strong public health infrastructure able to cope with the widespread effects of climate change. Marsa asserts that because many of the perils associated with global warming are generally predictable, it is possible to design or adapt buildings and communities to be more resilient.
Strategies for creating a nonpolluting, clean-energy future can also improve public health.
A chapter entitled “Fever Pitch” examines the relationship between rising temperatures and the persistent and greater diffusion of diseases beyond their typical geographical distribution. Essentially, shorter, warmer winters aren't killing these things off and they actually grow stronger when they survive.
“Fevered” looks at the way global warming impacts air quality. “Rising temperatures will make bad air even more dangerous,” writes Marsa, “cooking up a witches' brew of pollutants that will sear the delicate tissue lining the lungs and aggravate an astonishing array of other health issues ranging from heart disease, to lung cancer, to dementia.”
“The Hot Zone” portends the more frequent occurrence of death by heat wave, characterized here as large tragedies going under-reported, because the dead can't always be linked directly to the heat, even though they were killed by existing ailments the extreme conditions triggered.
Chicago, France, Russia, Philadelphia, all have recent and ghastly stories related here.
“Health Care on Life Support” dissects the collapse of public health infrastructure in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and what came after, which was more of the same.
Marsa reports, nonetheless, that The Crescent City became something of testing ground for federal policies aimed at “disaster-proofing” healthcare there.
For example, patient records are now kept electronically, and New Orleans is also part of a federally funded pilot program that stores this information in a central information exchange, efficiencies that might have saved lives in the hurricane's wake.
The chapter entitled, “Running on Empty,” covers the dangers of malnutrition, examining the case of actress Audrey Hepburn, who endured starvation as a Dutch citizen during World War II, before transitioning to the topic of agriculture's increasing difficulty in cultivating a hotter planet.
A lot of that difficulty comes down to water – here she looks at the situation in the American southwest where the Colorado River no longer reaches its natural delta, wrung dry by a growing population.
Circumstances in Australia, which is at the forefront of climate change impact, involve “catastrophes of biblical proportions; unleashed killer heatwaves, agricultural collapse, bushfires of unimaginable ferocity and hastened species extinction.”
Drought has wiped out entire agricultural communities, and it is possible “vast portions” of the country's northern regions could be submerged by rising seas, rain storms and flooding
Because of its unique vulnerability, Australia has become a living laboratory for adaptation to a warmer world. Marsa makes a trip down there. The country's system of water consumption control offer a preview of what we'll be seeing everywhere someday, or sooner.
“Holding Back The Waters” returns to New Orleans, documents efforts at retooling water management and flood control systems in a sustainable way and reverses the environmental degradation that made Katrina worse than it needed to be.
Also covered are the problems in south Florida and the apparently borrowed time the city of Miami is living on, as sea level rises to threaten the lowing lying community and its freshwater supply sources.
It's not all darkness. There are strategies not only for adapting health care systems to a warmer world, but also for developing sustainable cities as a matter of public health. By way of example, Marsa sheds light on the Orange County Water Authority's pioneering to reuse wastewater for potable purposes.
New York, covered in a fulsome network of mass transit, and characterized by vertical lifestyles, is held up as an example of the good way to live, although the fact you need to be rich to reside there is not mentioned.
Writes Marsa: “Sylvan paradises like Vermont, where you don't have to wait until farmers' market day to buy locally grown, produce, may intuitively seem like places where sustainable living would be much easier than in urban areas. But the reality it quite different. Because the population is so spread out, Vermonters use nearly four times as much gasoline as New Yorkers, and six times as much as Manhattan residents. Ironically, on just about every other barometer, Green Mountain State residents turn out to be the resource hogs: They have larger carbon footprints, guzzle more water, dump more garbage, and consume quadruple the amount of electricity as the average New Yorker. In other words, the seductive allure of rural life is simply wrongheaded at a time when the world's population is surging toward eight billion and roughly 80 percent of Americans live in cities.”
“New York,” Marsa writes, “developed as a city before the advent of the automobile, so it is compact and dense. To become more like New York, the rest of us are going to have to undo the half century's worth of damage to our health and the social fabric of our lives that resulted when we became a car-centric society and suburban sprawl became a way of life.”
But New York may be just as car-centric as any city out there. Robert Caro's “The Power Broker” painfully documented the efforts of a man who never drove a car, Robert Moses, to bind the city up in ribbons of “parkway.”
One of the few people able to thwart him was Jane Jacobs, the urbanist who extolled the dense city neighborhood as a place of social health and economic vitality.
“Fevered” is progeny of Jacobs' own books. Her vision was of a sustainable city before that term became a byword for future survival. Marsa's work links the loss of high-density, transit-served urban villages with the sprawl that characterizes most development over the past half century.
Marsa's contribution is to take the ideas Jacobs propounded in her books beyond the concerns of neighborhoods and microeconomics and link them to the causes of climate change, and the health of the people in those neighborhoods hopefully driving those economies.
The author asserts that the universal and modern dependence on individual, motorized transportation is responsible for a series of direct health hazards ranging from lung disease and obesity, and indirect impacts such as global warming.
Marsa echoes Al Gore's call for a Marshal Plan to fight global warming in his “Earth in Balance” with her own call for a medical Marshall Plan that would recapture the spirit of cooperation that arose with WW II's outbreak.
“We must become that country again,” she pleads.
January 1, 2020
Some of the information in this book is outdated; the book was published in 2013. That said, this is THE most approachable, readable book about climate change that I have yet encountered. The author's perspective is this: conditions that impact the earth also impact YOU, starting now, and those impacts are going to accumulate over time and present significant danger to YOU. This is why YOU must read this book.
Marsa is the bomb about weaving facts together, including cutting-edge science, history, and today's headlines. She divides the book into sections, each of which is can be stand-alone. This makes it possible to approach this topic in manageable ways, as opposed to "things are terrible and I can't do anything about it so why should I scare myself reading this book?"
Marsa also makes clear that the 1% will not escape future hardships. This issue should be the one issue that unites us above all others. Because this book was written 6 years ago, we are already encountering headlines about climate-driven migrations (Indonesian islands are vanishing under rising seas and a million people need to be moved), the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses (mosquitoes are moving into Scandinavia for the first time), alarming rates of habitat destruction that are already supporting higher temperatures (2019 bushfires in Australia and temperatures over 40C in every region of Australia), interruption of basic services to Americans (withholding access to electricity in California while massive fires rage in 2019), contaminated public water supplies in US cities (Flint and Newark, among the first), and the list continues.
Marsa shows us some ways to mitigate future hardships, the hope that fueled my race through this book. Unfortunately, political changes in the US in 2016 have led to the REMOVAL of strategies for future protections and removed the US from several international efforts to address conditions which will kill us.
In 2020, an election year, read this book as if your life depends upon the information inside. Because it does.
Marsa is the bomb about weaving facts together, including cutting-edge science, history, and today's headlines. She divides the book into sections, each of which is can be stand-alone. This makes it possible to approach this topic in manageable ways, as opposed to "things are terrible and I can't do anything about it so why should I scare myself reading this book?"
Marsa also makes clear that the 1% will not escape future hardships. This issue should be the one issue that unites us above all others. Because this book was written 6 years ago, we are already encountering headlines about climate-driven migrations (Indonesian islands are vanishing under rising seas and a million people need to be moved), the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses (mosquitoes are moving into Scandinavia for the first time), alarming rates of habitat destruction that are already supporting higher temperatures (2019 bushfires in Australia and temperatures over 40C in every region of Australia), interruption of basic services to Americans (withholding access to electricity in California while massive fires rage in 2019), contaminated public water supplies in US cities (Flint and Newark, among the first), and the list continues.
Marsa shows us some ways to mitigate future hardships, the hope that fueled my race through this book. Unfortunately, political changes in the US in 2016 have led to the REMOVAL of strategies for future protections and removed the US from several international efforts to address conditions which will kill us.
In 2020, an election year, read this book as if your life depends upon the information inside. Because it does.
October 20, 2021
Climate Change is a threat multiplier. Climate Change is making droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, and extreme weather worse. Sea level rise caused by climate change and coastal erosion is threatening coastal communities. Climate change is expanding the tropics and therefore tropical diseases. Climate change together with unsustainable agricultural practices is threatening our food supply. Climate change together with a growing population is threating our fresh water supply. Climate change is not creating many new problems, but it is making existing problems much worse, and threatening our progress in mitigating problems. Climate change is probably best seen as a “threat multiplier”, which is a term the military likes to use. This book is focused on the effects of climate change in conjunction with other environmental problems and the effects all of this will have on our health. She is painting a dark picture, but she is also discussing solutions and ways to adapt that inspires hope.
It turned out that I have a number of minor personal connections to the book, which made it more fun to read. She is writing about the Hanta Virus epidemic 1993 (New Mexico, four corners). I was a grad student working at Sandia National Laboratory (New Mexico) that summer. I was working on a project using robots to clean up toxic waste sites. I got some sort of pneumonia like lung disease that left me with permanent scarring on my lungs. I went to the doctor a bit too late. No doctor suspected the Hanta virus, but they suspected valley fever, which she writes about elsewhere in the book. She writes a lot about Hurricane Katrina and the levies in and around New Orleans. Right before the covid-19 pandemic we visited New Orleans and we toured the city and the levies. She writes about the devastation in Queensland and Brisbane, which we visited in 2005 before I knew about climate change being a problem.
I found her discussion on urban sprawl quite interesting. Unlike European cities, most American cities are built for cars. You can’t get anywhere without a car. This leads to higher CO2 emissions, lack of exercise and obesity, isolation, dangerous traffic, empty and boring inner cities, and depression. As someone who has lived in and experienced both kinds of cities, I can certainly attest to the accuracy of that. I don’t think Americans are aware of what they’ve lost in this regard.
To some this book may seem a bit unfocused if you expected it to be only about the effects of climate change. However, climate change, or a hotter planet, is the major element among a range of problems that our lifestyles are causing. She is presenting our predicament using narratives that focuses on people and places around the world. It was a way of discussing the effects of climate change that was new to me, and I found it interesting. It was well written and for the most part interesting reading. Therefore, I give it five stars.
It turned out that I have a number of minor personal connections to the book, which made it more fun to read. She is writing about the Hanta Virus epidemic 1993 (New Mexico, four corners). I was a grad student working at Sandia National Laboratory (New Mexico) that summer. I was working on a project using robots to clean up toxic waste sites. I got some sort of pneumonia like lung disease that left me with permanent scarring on my lungs. I went to the doctor a bit too late. No doctor suspected the Hanta virus, but they suspected valley fever, which she writes about elsewhere in the book. She writes a lot about Hurricane Katrina and the levies in and around New Orleans. Right before the covid-19 pandemic we visited New Orleans and we toured the city and the levies. She writes about the devastation in Queensland and Brisbane, which we visited in 2005 before I knew about climate change being a problem.
I found her discussion on urban sprawl quite interesting. Unlike European cities, most American cities are built for cars. You can’t get anywhere without a car. This leads to higher CO2 emissions, lack of exercise and obesity, isolation, dangerous traffic, empty and boring inner cities, and depression. As someone who has lived in and experienced both kinds of cities, I can certainly attest to the accuracy of that. I don’t think Americans are aware of what they’ve lost in this regard.
To some this book may seem a bit unfocused if you expected it to be only about the effects of climate change. However, climate change, or a hotter planet, is the major element among a range of problems that our lifestyles are causing. She is presenting our predicament using narratives that focuses on people and places around the world. It was a way of discussing the effects of climate change that was new to me, and I found it interesting. It was well written and for the most part interesting reading. Therefore, I give it five stars.
July 21, 2022
XXXXX
A BOOK ESPECIALLY RELEVANT TO TODAY THAT HAS THE FOLLOWING WARNING: AS THE PLANET GETS HOTTER, WE'LL LIVE SICKER AND DIE YOUNGER
XXXXX
"As I began to research this book and initiated conversations with dozens of climate scientists, geologists, and atmospheric physicists, I learned that the [U.S.] Midwest and the [U.S.] Southern Plains are likely to tip into desert once again as temperatures continue their inexorable climb.
Gripping through the gripping and poignant oral histories of the survivors of the 1930s' Dust Bowl, it hit me that the bleak physical, psychological, and emotional assaults on their daily lives might offer a glimpse of what our future could hold.
These stories also provide a disturbing preview of the impending deterioration of our physical health amid the growing deprivations, changes in ecosystems, and increasingly harsh weather that result from the careless dumping of billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."
The above quote (in italics) comes from the beginning of this extremely well-written book by Linda Marsa. She is an investigative journalist who has covered medicine, health, and science for more than two decades.
The title and subtitle of this book gives the impression that this book ONLY deals with the important subject of how a hotter planet will hurt our health. It certainly examines this. But it also gives more information detailing, quite well, the effects of climate change in the past and what that may mean for our future.
The hallmark of this book is that it depends on interviews with people. These people include scientists and public health doctors from all over the world. Aussies on climate change's front lines. Physicians, nurses, and firefighters in New Orleans who experienced Hurricane Katrina. Green activists in New York (where super storm Sandy occurred) and green activists from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Environmental justice advocates in California.
The result of all of this is quite an informative book. In fact, I would say it's probably the best non-technical book I have read on climate change.
Finally, in the last chapter, Marsa makes the case that our fate is not sealed due to climate change. We can decrease it's severity but only if we act NOW.
In conclusion, this is a must-read for anyone who cares about humanity's future!!
XXXXX
(2013; acknowledgements; introduction; eight chapters; main narrative 215 pages; notes; biography; index)
XXXXX
A BOOK ESPECIALLY RELEVANT TO TODAY THAT HAS THE FOLLOWING WARNING: AS THE PLANET GETS HOTTER, WE'LL LIVE SICKER AND DIE YOUNGER
XXXXX
"As I began to research this book and initiated conversations with dozens of climate scientists, geologists, and atmospheric physicists, I learned that the [U.S.] Midwest and the [U.S.] Southern Plains are likely to tip into desert once again as temperatures continue their inexorable climb.
Gripping through the gripping and poignant oral histories of the survivors of the 1930s' Dust Bowl, it hit me that the bleak physical, psychological, and emotional assaults on their daily lives might offer a glimpse of what our future could hold.
These stories also provide a disturbing preview of the impending deterioration of our physical health amid the growing deprivations, changes in ecosystems, and increasingly harsh weather that result from the careless dumping of billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."
The above quote (in italics) comes from the beginning of this extremely well-written book by Linda Marsa. She is an investigative journalist who has covered medicine, health, and science for more than two decades.
The title and subtitle of this book gives the impression that this book ONLY deals with the important subject of how a hotter planet will hurt our health. It certainly examines this. But it also gives more information detailing, quite well, the effects of climate change in the past and what that may mean for our future.
The hallmark of this book is that it depends on interviews with people. These people include scientists and public health doctors from all over the world. Aussies on climate change's front lines. Physicians, nurses, and firefighters in New Orleans who experienced Hurricane Katrina. Green activists in New York (where super storm Sandy occurred) and green activists from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Environmental justice advocates in California.
The result of all of this is quite an informative book. In fact, I would say it's probably the best non-technical book I have read on climate change.
Finally, in the last chapter, Marsa makes the case that our fate is not sealed due to climate change. We can decrease it's severity but only if we act NOW.
In conclusion, this is a must-read for anyone who cares about humanity's future!!
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(2013; acknowledgements; introduction; eight chapters; main narrative 215 pages; notes; biography; index)
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March 7, 2024
This book is very approachable for those less familiar with climate change and its implications for human health. I felt each chapter read like a mini documentary on a case study, and giving such examples and human testimonies drives the point home. That said, I didn’t love how absolutist the language was, and it felt like some claims glossed over ongoing debates in the field and lost some nuance that way. I also felt the author could’ve given more individual call to actions (as opposed to systemic ones) than just saying we need to act now.
April 29, 2021
Excellent book on the coming public health crises that we will face with global climate change. This book presents a significant amount of scientific background information but does so in a very easy to read manner. I’d love to see an updated version of this book as the original was written in 2013. So sad to know that more cities have not adopted proposed methods to help curb the potential damage to our planet, largely thanks to science deniers in our government.
March 7, 2019
Really eye opening book on the consequences we will see and already see because of climate change. This book leads you to many other books or documentaries that are super interesting as well.
January 6, 2020
profoundly significant
July 6, 2014
For those who want to know some of the impacts of global warming, this is a good book. Like many books of this genre it is more a warning and we need to stop everything now book - so not terribly realistic. That said, it does a good job of exploring the various impacts that we will see in our lifetime as well as in centuries to come and it did a great job of painting that picture. So I found other books to fill in the adaptation and realistic response gaps that were not provided for in this book.
< VENT ON >My only grievance is like many books of this genre, they got wrapped around the oil agenda axle (as designed). That is, the oil industry always knew the problem was real as shown in internal memos. Their only purpose in arguing was to stall. Who can resist pounding an idiot who hasn't bothered to check their facts? But by doing so you have engaged and stalled movement. And that was why the strategy was so successful and stalled things a decade as well as convinced some idiots. So when she engaged the argument in the books, she actually fell lock and step with what the oil industry wanted... as I am doing here bringing this all up - as I said a brilliant strategy built out of nothing. Anyway ... < VENT OFF>
All that said, it is still a good book to give context to the issues that face us and why moving north State side might be a good idea.
< VENT ON >My only grievance is like many books of this genre, they got wrapped around the oil agenda axle (as designed). That is, the oil industry always knew the problem was real as shown in internal memos. Their only purpose in arguing was to stall. Who can resist pounding an idiot who hasn't bothered to check their facts? But by doing so you have engaged and stalled movement. And that was why the strategy was so successful and stalled things a decade as well as convinced some idiots. So when she engaged the argument in the books, she actually fell lock and step with what the oil industry wanted... as I am doing here bringing this all up - as I said a brilliant strategy built out of nothing. Anyway ... < VENT OFF>
All that said, it is still a good book to give context to the issues that face us and why moving north State side might be a good idea.
April 8, 2014
Well written and referenced but sort of breathless. It really didn't cover health issues in depth as much as general issues from climate change. I didn't feel like I learned anything new here although I didn't realize dengue fever was so widespread in the southern US. In general this book does show the costs associated with changes caused by climate change and how we can be poorly prepared for dealing with the resultant public health issues.
March 11, 2014
Packed with a huge amount of research and site visits, it's a bracing look at an overheating world. The prose is a touch overheated too - it makes for an adventure story very often, but the danger and the agony are overhyped in journalistic fashion. I learned a lot though - and enjoyed the appreciation of a green New York at the close.
October 23, 2013
Truthfully I could not finish it. I just could not get into reading and I was looking forward to reading it.
December 13, 2013
The author attempts to lay out the consequences of climate change & its profound impact on out health. Interesting read.
September 4, 2013
Very informative!
November 30, 2014
Wake up, folks. Bad times are a coming.
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