Years from now, you may find yourself gulping down antihistamine pills before winter has ended as plants start spewing pollen earlier and earlier.
Keep DEET close by because you'll likely see more mosquitoes. Outbreaks of West Nile Virus may hit more often.
In your backyard and along the trails, you may see more poison ivy than ever, and it may give you a rash that's itchier and nastier than you can remember. Ticks carrying Lyme disease may be hopping around as never before.
Scientists say all of these projected phenomena share one root cause: global warming.
Warming temperatures don't just cause Antarctica's ice shelves to collapse. They force you to deal with a host of
viruses, diseases, insects and animals that you've never seen in your backyards before. And that creates "daunting" challenges for public health, said Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Health experts are growing concerned about the impact of climate change on the human body. Three Harvard scientists gathered last
week for a conference at the university in hopes of helping people understand how harmful greenhouse gases tip the balance of ecosystems -- and how fast disastrous scenarios may be approaching. The forum was hosted by the Center for Health and the Global Environment and the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Though no single event
alone proves climate change -- and scientists continue to debate exactly what the future holds -- you'd have to believe changes are on the way by just looking at the way it rains and snows, said Michael McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies with Harvard's Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, who joined Epstein on the panel.
"Do you expect increases of precipitation in the future? That's an important question," McElroy said.
That's because the evaporation
of ocean water is responsible for most precipitation. Increased greenhouse gases -- chemical compounds such as carbon dioxide that absorb heat from sunlight reflecting back toward space and trap it in the atmosphere -- make oceans warmer, which in turn enhance evaporation, fueling downpours and sequences of storms, according to Climate Change Futures. Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions, published in 2005 by the Center for Health and the Global Environment.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that the climate will warm by 2.5 degrees to 10 degrees over the next century. That means we may see a number of severe hurricanes and 100-year floods, along with heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. Epstein said New Englanders will see more Nor'easters. As Greenland ice melts and more rain falls at high latitudes, that creates a sharper contrast of temperatures with the warming tropical Atlantic seas.
Floods and droughts both promote outbreaks of water-borne diseases like malaria and the West Nile Virus. West Nile swarms around nutrient-rich water in city storm catch basins during droughts, and warm temperatures and droughts accelerate maturation of the virus in mosquitoes, according to Climate Change Futures.
Ticks will survive better and grow faster as winters become warmer, helping to transmit Lyme disease. Several studies have shown that increasing carbon dioxide and temperatures stimulate plants' reproductive efforts, prompting the spring pollen season to start earlier every year. A double amount of ambient carbon dioxide can cause ragweed to produce up to 61 percent more pollen.
In 2004, an outbreak of vibrio parahaemolyticus -- the leading cause of seafood-associated gastroenteritis in the U.S. -- on cruise ships traveling along Alaska's coast was linked to oysters raised in warming oceans, said panelist Mary Wilson, associate professor in the Department of Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health.
And back in New England, the wooly adelgid, an aphidlike bug, is infesting and killing eastern hemlock trees. The bug has migrated north into Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and is now threatening the forests of Vermont and Maine.
But wherever you may live, you can't escape the consequences of global warming. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster for China, which needed fossil oil from the Gulf for its industries, McElroy said. Droughts in a remote region can spike the food price here in the U.S., too.
Since the mid-1970s, the average global surface temperature has risen 1 degree. Winters are warming at twice the rate of overall global warming, Epstein said.
With so much happening so fast, the scientists say we all must do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"I really feel it's time to move on and think about realistic alternatives to the carbon economy," McElroy said.
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