Fevered
Why a Hotter Planet Will Hurt Our Health -- and how we can save ourselves
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Beyond images of emaciated polar bears and drought-cracked lakes, there remains a major part of climate change's impact that the media has neglected: how our health will suffer from higher temperatures and extreme weather. From spiraling rates of asthma and allergies and spikes in heatstroke-related deaths to swarms of invasive insects carrying diseases like dengue or West Nile and increases in heart and lung disease and cancer, the effect of rising temperatures on human health will be far-reaching, and is more imminent than we think.
In Fevered, award-winning journalist Linda Marsa blends compelling narrative with cutting-edge science to explore the changes in Earth's increasingly fragile support system and provide a blueprint—a "medical Manhattan Project"—detailing what we need to do to protect ourselves from this imminent medical meltdown. In the tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Marsa sounds the alarm on a subject that has largely been ignored by governments and policy makers, and persuasively argues why preparedness for the health effects of climate change is the most critical issue affecting our survival in the coming century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thus far, most nations don't appear to have hit the threshold of alarm about climate change needed to convince policymakers to offer more than platitudes and empty promises. In her latest book, investigative journalist Marsa (Prescription for Profits: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business), a contributing editor at Discover, drives home the personal implications of global warming, hoping to inspire change by showing how global warming affects health, resulting in rising rates of asthma, allergies, heart and lung disease, and cancer. Marsa focuses on the primary dangers connected to warming: the poleward creep of tropical disease ranges, declining air quality, heat stroke, increased frequency of extreme weather, and the risk of agricultural collapse. The author draws from real-world examples, including the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and more recent disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, to illustrate the hazardous world we are headed toward. All is not doom and gloom, however, as the author also supplies suggestions for mitigating actions that governments could take. Although at times Marsa seems to sail too close to the wind in her drive to inspire action, the rigor of the anthropogenic climate-change model seems unassailable to those in the reality-based community and the need for concrete action undeniable.
