Opinion: Climate Change Is Dangerous to Your Health
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Mark Kessel and Rick Elbaum argue that while governments focus on COVID-19 and environmental disasters, they are neglecting the profound public health crisis triggered by climate change. The World Health Organization forecasts 250,000 additional climate-related deaths annually between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. Despite these dire predictions from the WHO and CDC, coordinated global action addressing climate’s health dimension remains woefully inadequate.
The authors detail both obvious threats—air pollution, extreme heat, disease vector expansion—and hidden dangers like mental health deterioration, maternal complications, and stress-related disorders. They call for a UN-coordinated response modeled on the COVID-19 ACT Accelerator, urging governments, NGOs, and health organizations to prioritize climate health with the same urgency shown during the pandemic. Meeting the Paris Agreement’s air quality goals alone could save one million lives yearly by 2050, yet political will remains absent.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Staggering Mortality Projections
WHO predicts 250,000 additional annual deaths from 2030-2050 due to climate-driven malnutrition, disease, and extreme heat.
Beyond Physical Illness
Climate change triggers mental health crises including anxiety, PTSD, elevated suicide rates, and complications in maternal and infant health.
Inadequate Policy Response
Despite medical journals and WHO warnings, governments lack coordinated action plans specifically targeting climate’s health impacts.
Vulnerable Populations Suffer Most
Pregnant women face 8% higher preterm birth risk per 10°F increase; disadvantaged groups bear disproportionate climate health burdens.
Paris Agreement Health Benefits
Meeting air pollution reduction targets could save one million lives annually by 2050—yet implementation remains insufficient.
Economic Costs Hidden
US climate-related healthcare costs already reach $820 billion annually, yet no agency systematically tracks global public health expenditures.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Climate Health Crisis Demands Global Action
The central thesis argues that climate change represents an underappreciated public health emergency requiring coordinated international response comparable to COVID-19 mobilization. While governments acknowledge environmental disasters, they systematically ignore climate’s profound health impacts—from disease proliferation and mental health deterioration to maternal complications—leaving vulnerable populations unprotected and medical systems unprepared for the escalating crisis.
Purpose
Advocacy for Policy Reform
Kessel and Elbaum advocate forcefully for immediate institutional action, calling on the UN General Assembly, WHO, FDA, and CDC to establish joint task forces addressing climate health impacts. Their purpose is persuasive: to transform public awareness, demand government accountability, and redirect political attention from environmental damage to human health consequences—specifically urging creation of tracking mechanisms for global health costs and coordinated research initiatives.
Structure
Problem Exposition → Evidence Accumulation → Solution Prescription
The article opens by contrasting COVID-19 attention with climate health neglect, then systematically catalogs health impacts from obvious (air pollution, heat stress) to hidden (mental health, maternal complications). It builds urgency through WHO mortality projections and economic data ($820 billion US healthcare costs), before concluding with concrete proposals: UN leadership, international task forces modeled on ACT Accelerator, and mandatory health cost tracking systems.
Tone
Urgent, Critical & Evidence-Based
The authors employ an urgent, admonishing tone expressing frustration at governmental inaction while maintaining scientific credibility through WHO, CDC, and IPCC citations. They balance alarm—”insidious dangers,” “brewing crisis,” “looming emergency”—with measured proposals grounded in institutional frameworks. The tone criticizes political failures while remaining constructive, offering specific roadmaps rather than mere condemnation, and explicitly invoking pandemic response as proof that coordinated action is achievable.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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Proceeding in a gradual, subtle way but with harmful effects; operating or proceeding inconspicuously but with grave effect.
“The insidious dangers of climate change extend far beyond visible disasters.”
Acutely distressing or disturbing; causing extreme suffering, anguish, or torment that leaves a lasting emotional impact.
“Harrowing photographs of disaster-stricken areas show suffering inhabitants but miss diffuse processes set in motion by climate change.”
To waste something, especially money or time, in a reckless and foolish manner; to miss an opportunity through carelessness.
“The current pandemic squanders the opportunity to garner the public’s attention for this looming, longer-term emergency.”
Loud and clear; powerfully and inspiringly clear in quality, often used to describe a call to action that demands attention.
“There needs to be a clarion call to confront the health problems that climate change is driving.”
To combine or unite multiple elements to form one organization, structure, or body; to merge different parts into a unified whole.
“The ACT Accelerator’s goal was to amalgamate expertise from around the world to invent, build, and share solutions.”
To be necessary, proper, or advantageous for someone to do something; to be a duty or responsibility that one should undertake.
“It behooves an international organization to start tracking the global cost of not addressing the health impact of climate change.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, governments and media have completely ignored climate change as a health issue.
2According to the WHO projections cited in the article, how many additional deaths per year does climate change threaten to cause between 2030 and 2050?
3Which sentence best supports the claim that climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable populations?
4Evaluate these statements about the article’s proposed solutions:
The authors propose modeling climate health response on the COVID-19 ACT Accelerator partnership.
The article suggests that current healthcare systems are adequately tracking climate-related health costs.
The authors call for the UN General Assembly to challenge member states on climate health inaction.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5Based on the article’s argument structure and tone, what can be inferred about why the authors emphasize that pregnant women face increased risks from heat waves?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
The article identifies a comprehensive range of health impacts including respiratory problems from air pollution, heat stroke and cardiovascular disorders from extreme temperatures, waterborne diseases and respiratory infections from precipitation fluctuations, vector-borne diseases like Lyme and West Nile Virus from geographic expansion of disease carriers, mental health issues including anxiety and PTSD from natural disasters, and maternal complications like preterm birth and low birth weight from heat waves.
The authors view COVID-19 as a distraction because it ‘squanders the opportunity to garner the public’s attention for this looming, longer-term emergency’ of climate health impacts. However, they also see it as an opportunity because the pandemic demonstrated that global cooperation and rapid institutional mobilization—like the ACT Accelerator partnership—are achievable when the world recognizes a health crisis, providing a proven model that could be adapted for climate health coordination.
The $820 billion represents the estimated annual climate-related healthcare costs in the United States alone, according to a May 2021 report. The authors emphasize this figure is ‘likely to be too conservative’ given the difficulty of calculating such expenditures, and they use it to demonstrate how the economic burden remains hidden because no agency currently tracks these costs systematically. They argue that quantifying these expenses in ‘dollars-and-cents data’ could help mobilize global attention if the human cost seems too abstract.
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This article is classified as Advanced level due to its sophisticated policy advocacy framework, technical vocabulary including terms like ‘epidemiological,’ ‘amalgamate,’ and ‘insidious,’ complex argumentative structure integrating WHO and CDC data with institutional reform proposals, and nuanced reasoning requiring readers to distinguish between different types of governmental failures and evaluate proposed multi-organizational solutions across international frameworks.
The authors’ credentials establish their authority to comment on global health policy and environmental regulation. Kessel’s role chairing the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics—an international health diagnostics organization—provides expertise in global health infrastructure and institutional coordination, while Elbaum’s environmental and energy law background from NYU Law School demonstrates legal and regulatory knowledge necessary for evaluating policy frameworks, lending credibility to their proposals for institutional reform and international cooperation mechanisms.
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