How climate change is increasing our vulnerability to chemical pollution

from Joe Romm's blog, http://climateprogress.org (Joe Romm? U.S. News & World Report call Joe Romm "one of the most influential energy and environmental policymakers in the Obama era"

"I trust Joe Romm on climate" — Paul Krugman, New York Times)

Cloudy with a chance of toxics: How climate change is increasing our vulnerability to chemical pollution

December 3, 2009

"...At a November 19 briefing in Washington, researchers from the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment, representatives of the American Medical Association and American Public Health Association detailed the likely negative health effects of global warming. These are conditions, reported Paul Epstein, Associate Director of the Harvard center, to which children, the elderly, and poor are especially vulnerable.

Rising temperatures, ozone and sulfur dioxide levels, along with particulate and other pollutants released by forest fires, will create conditions that are expected to increase rates of hospitalization for respiratory diseases, among them pneumonia, asthma, and chronic lung disease...

...our reliance on fossil fuels has helped make petrochemicals the foundation for the overwhelming majority of our synthetic materials – manufactured substances that go into everything from computers to cosmetics. And petrochemicals have particularly problematic environmental and health impacts. To begin stem this tide, as we begin to shift away from fossil fuels and create new materials – alternatives to those with adverse environmental and health impacts – among the questions we must ask to help ensure new materials’ safety must be: how a substance behaves biologically – its impact on living cells – and how it behaves physically, including its possible contribution to the impacts of climate change."