Climate Change An Imminent Health Risk, White House Reports

A new report released by the White House warns that climate change is an imminent and growing threat to public health, and that extreme heat will kill around 27,000 US residents per year by 2100.

A science advisor to the Obama administration by the name of John Holdren commented on the report at a recent press conference, noting that extreme heat waves will make outdoor work periodically “impossible:”

“People who work outdoors will be unable to control their body temperature and will die. This is a really, really big deal.”

The report — titled “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment,” and put together by the US Global Change Research Program — notes that anthropogenic climate change will lead to growing air pollution levels, expanding waterborne illness prevalence, the expansion of toxin presence in the US food supply, and the weakening and overburdening of healthcare infrastructure.