Climate Change: a Women’s Health Issue

[Dr. Amy Park]
I think that this topic and on all your efforts in this sphere is more timely than ever. Last year, 2023 was one of the hottest, I think the hottest year on record and it just felt like there was crisis after crisis; heat, rain, flooding, all the things. Can you tell us what's happening today in terms of climate change? What's going on?

[Dr. Jane Van Dis]
I can kind of speak to that. I follow these scientists every day. I'm somewhat addicted to the conversations that are going on. The really hard part for people to understand and I actually gave Grand Rounds on Friday at Southview down on Long Island, the Department of OBGYN there. I've said if there was a way that I could make every American understand what Six standard deviations from the mean means because that's how far off of normal our seas are right now.

As most people know, the seas have absorbed the majority of our carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution. I read Bill McKibben, I think it was back in 2018, that our land surface temperature, if the seas had not absorbed all of that excess CO2 and methane, would be 97°F hotter on land. Obviously, completely uninhabitable for almost all forms of life.

The idea is then that all of that energy has now gone into the oceans, which obviously comprise the majority of the surface area of the earth. Having said that, the oceans are sort of, I feel like the oceans are now talking back. Because for them to be Six standard deviations from the mean hotter than they normally would be means I think that we're in for a lot of rapid change.

Now there's a lot of debate going on as to whether or not we're in an accelerated period, which is to say we're not going in a linear fashion as the models had predicted that there's an aberration and an acceleration of heating and change. You'll see the climate scientists debate that, but I've actually read a couple of papers now that seem pretty convincing that we are in an accelerated phase.

What that means is that all the models are a little bit off. For instance, when we saw the COP and we saw people talking about 1.5°C as, like, "Hey, we better not cross that." Well, we crossed it in 2023. I believe we're at 1.78°C above normal, above pre-industrial 1850 means.

I guess I feel like I still see in print a lot that people say, "Well, if we can stay under 1.5," and it's like, "Well, people, I'm not sure that we're ever going to see 1.5 again." We are in an El Nino and so that has affected a lot of the heat and a lot of the aberrations that we're seeing.

Having said that, some of the scientists are saying we're past 1.5 and we are going to pass 2 by 2030. That's a very different world than the one we're living in now because at 2°C, that's when we start to see some of the tipping points kick in where we have accelerated loss of sea ice, so accelerated sea level rise.

Right now, you hear people talk about sea level rise and they'll be like, "Oh, it's just a couple of centimeters a year," but if you talk to the people in Portland, Maine over the weekend, where there was 14 feet above the normal sea level due to the high tide plus the storm, they're absolutely saying that this is a new normal.

Amy, I can't actually answer your question because the fact is that we've left the Goldilocks Zone. We've left the zone that humans have evolved in over the last tens of thousands of years. We are in a new normal and we should expect that we are going to see continued aberrations like the one that we saw this week. Where the weakness of the polar vortex has allowed arctic air to go down to Dallas so that they had, it was 14 degrees in Dallas yesterday, so that's a new normal.

These atmospheric rivers and these hurricanes that sort of circle and stay in the same place like Hurricane Harvey did. Every single possible weather event I feel like is seen at a greater degree, a greater proportion. The proportionality has absolutely changed. We'll see. Like I said, it's a new normal and we're never going back.

[Dr. Amy Park]
I know it's interesting because you alluded to two things earlier in your intro that I think about all the time is my older son was also born in 2008. There's a lot of youth these days who do not want to have children because they don't want to bring their children into the environmental impact of having kids, bringing them into this environment. It's definitely become more of a thing. The other thing I was thinking of is I just remember Equilibrium Magazine had this article from, I think it was like sometime in the spring or summer of last year and it was like, "Is climate safe for climate refugees like yourself?"

Yes. To your point, a Great Lakes town and inland and, yes, of course, we have some pretty extreme weather, but not as extreme and dangerous as the wildfires, especially as in California.

[Dr. Alexandra Melnyk]
You have water and that's going to be a resource that's going to be in high, high demand. The New York Times has done some incredible reporting on the nation's aquifers and what a dangerous state that they are in. Actually, what's so fascinating is the satellites are taking photographs using magnetic imaging to determine how much water is in US aquifers. To me, that technology obviously is just so fascinating that you could take a picture from the sky and see underneath the rock and the earth. The fact of the matter is that there are places, like Arizona, like the Southwest, that are looking at a future where water will be the most valuable resource.

[Dr. Jane Van Dis]
I feel like it really comes home when you realize that 12% of all global oil is made into plastic. Plastic, our society runs on it. There's so many things. Obviously, we as doctors use plastic all the time. Medical care wouldn't happen. How would we deliver blood? How would we draw a lab with a syringe? Everything around us in the medical field is plastic. Our society absolutely runs on it.

It is important to note that the fossil fuel producers recognized that plastic was a great place to continue to make investments and push technology back in the '70s. This is when obviously they knew the impacts that their product was going to have on human health. Their own researchers like Big Tobacco knew that we were in for a world of hurt.

Having said that, I wonder if you guys remember. I just had this core memory unlocked the other day when I remembered that there were times when we'd go to a vending machine and the soda was in a bottle, was in a glass. Now if you said that to a kid, they'd be like, "What?" Yes, you can see some sodas once in a while, some of the specialty sodas, especially in glass, but our whole society has pivoted to plastic.

What that has meant, unfortunately, is that plastic is now polluting our bodies such that the American Cancer Institute said our babies are being born pre-polluted. In my grand rounds, I have a slide dedicated to the fact that three studies came out in 2023, all of which showed that these placentas that had been tested were positive for microplastics.

Overwhelmingly, this was polyvinyl chloride and PET, the plastic that you see in the plastic water bottles. The plastics are crossing the placenta, but maybe they're crossing the blood-brain barrier as nanoplastics, too. Now we have studies showing that there is plastic basically in every organ in the body. When plastics cross into the brain, they are being linked to dementia. When plastics cross into other parts of the body, they're linked to cancers and autoimmune problems.

The problem is that the plastic water bottle that you drink out of has 10,000 other chemicals in it that haven't been approved by, say, the FDA or the EPA. There's a lot of exposure that we don't even know about. Then what happens, obviously, is that those plastics are breaking down. There was a study you guys probably saw published just this week showing that in one liter of water bottle, there were potentially 250,000 particles of nanoplastic.

Nanoplastic basically is small enough to cross every barrier in our body. It's interesting. I'm giving a talk at the library here in my town at the end of the month. I really want to have some more practical information, less academic. I just started this book about plastic. Interestingly enough, tonight I just finished the chapter on what the author terms petroplankton. This is plankton, which is a huge component of the ocean ecology and the ocean sea life. Plankton obviously are one of the backbones of all marine life.

Well, the plankton are uploading all this plastic into their bodies. He was talking about how he doesn't refer to them as plankton. He refers to them as petroplankton. The fact is that the phthalates are a key component of a lot of plastics. They make the plastics pliable. All of the catheter tubing, all the blood bags, all the gloves that we use in medicine, those all have phthalates in them.

Unfortunately, those phthalates have been associated with significant reproductive harm, and have been related to endocrine disruptions such as infertility, early puberty. There was a New York Times article this week saying, like, Why is the age of puberty, why does it keep getting lower and lower?" I'm like, "We know why. We know why. It's due to these phthalates. It's due to these plastics." It's affecting the birth weight of our babies. It's affecting whether our babies will be born with congenital anomalies.

They did a study showing the feces of a newborn versus the feces of a grown adult. The feces of the newborn had 20 times the concentration of plastics than the adult did. That's due to the body surface area to volume ratio of the infant compared to the adult. To be sure, the American Cancer Institute is right, our babies are being born pre-polluted.