Enviromedics by Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach is a book about the impact of climate

change on human health. The authors are doctors relaying their experience of the dangers of

climate change and how it could affect humans in all corners of the globe in the future. In this

review I provide three claims from this book and evaluate the evidence provided.

The authors claim that climate change is not necessarily just “global warming,” but is

much better described by the term “climate energization,” a term which implies that our planet is

not getting warmer, but more energized, and a more energized planet is also more unpredictable.

The authors argue that this energy also provides “fuel” for storms, citing Typhoon Haiyan (2013)

and Hurricane Patricia (2015), two of the most powerful storms in recorded history as proof of

this.

However this energy is not only used as fuel for tropical storms but is also converted into

heat, causing many health problems for people all around the world. One of the most obvious

problems of rising temperatures is an increase in heat-related illness. Heatstroke can permanently

disable and kill a person very easily, especially the very young or very old, and people who have

no access to a way to cool themselves. Yet as the climate becomes more energized, more drastic

heat waves such as the one in 2003 are projected to become one hundredfold more likely by

2040, resulting in many more deaths from heat related illness annually.

A final piece of evidence the author provided as to the dangers of an ever energizing

planet is the spread of newly hospitable habitats for tropical insect vectors and the diseases they

carry. Diseases such as Malaria and West Nile Virus, transmitted by mosquitoes, were thought to

have been eradicated in many areas of the world, but due to increasing temperatures we are

seeing an increase in mosquito populations directly correlating with an increase in vector borne

diseases in many countries around the globe. In addition, we have observed the spread of Lyme

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disease, a disease which, in the past was originating entirely from the Northeast and upper

Midwest of the United States spreading further North into Canada, where in years past it was

much too cold for ticks to live there.

I find that the authors’ evidence for the dangers of climate energization to be somewhat

inconsistent. While the authors do provide compelling evidence for the matters of the increase in

heat related deaths and the spread of habitable areas for disease vector such as mosquitoes and

ticks, citing research showing an increased amount of deaths due to these two things, there is a

distinct lack of evidence for a few other issues here, such as their theory that energization

provides more fuel for storms. While they do illustrate well that storms come with a slew of

problems such as floods and spread of disease, they do not do well in showing how climate

energization causes an increase in the power or amount of storms.

The presence of a cascading effect causing detriment to human health is another

argument the authors make. The authors’ argue that while many of the problems that are

commonly associated with climate change are indeed an issue, but many times we fail to

recognize that these individual issues cascade into many more problems.

For example, the authors’ state that as air temperatures rise around the world, the

temperatures of the oceans rise, leading to the melting and thinning of Arctic Sea Ice, and

decreasing the snow cover of the Northern Hemisphere. Due to the albedo refractive effect the

darker colored surface reflects less sunlight than lightly colored snow, accelerating the energy-

uptake and warming of these darker surfaces, leading to ever-increasing amounts of heat

globally.

Another argument the authors make in regards to the cascading effect is that many people

who already suffer from pre-existing conditions such as asthma will find that their problem

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which is easily manageable with access to modern medicines will soon compound into worse

problems with the increase in air pollution. The authors’ attribute the rise in air pollution to being

almost as if people in heavily populated areas with little regulation for factories and other areas

which produce high amounts of pollutants to breathing in cigarette smoke every second of the

day.

Much like their evidence with climate energization, I do find this to be inconsistent.

While they provide solid evidence for the compounding effect of warming and the albedo

refractive effect, citing the NOAA centers for Environmental Information. I feel as if they do not

provide enough evidence as to the issues people with pre-existing conditions will experience due

to climate change. Much of the evidence they have provided is anecdotal in nature and not

backed by empirical evidence.

A final claim made by the authors is that climate change will result in a drastic loss of

resources for humans. A very strong point is made in the matter of food security in this book.

The authors’ state that as our environment becomes increasingly unpredictable due to

climate change, so does our food supply. Extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and

higher temperatures not only provide the predictable outcome of wiping out crops and other food

sources, but also disturb very fickle ecosystems. Our food supply can be disturbed in many ways

that are not often obvious however, such as allowing invasive species or foreign fungi in, which

may lead to drastic food shortages, as soon in the Irish potato famine of the 1840’s due to the

fungal strain Phytophthora Infestans, a fungus which still causes $6 billion in crop damage

annually in the United States. If a flood or some other drastic event caused this fungus to be

somehow carried to another area of the world where it was not present, it would devastate the

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local food economy, driving prices through the roof and causing many of the world’s least well

off to starve.

This is the strongest claim made in Enviromedics in my opinion, the authors’ provide

very compelling evidence for this claim. Citing not only the Irish potato famine but also the

rising temperatures and lowering pH levels of our oceans, resulting in the bleaching of our

planet’s coral reefs, and when the coral reefs die, we lose a vast majority of our ocean life, which

for 20% of the world, is their major source of food.

In this paper, I have provided three claims from the book Enviromedics, and evaluated

the evidence associated with each. I believe while this book does have a few discrepancies, it is

still a very valuable source of information on the effects of climate change on human health.