It Might Get Messy

Ooh. My respiratory infrastructure is INTENSELY sensitive to cold. Molly was coming up from D.C. for supper, and I wanted to make a couple of seriously luscious pizzas. Needed a run to the grocery store for fresh basil, cheeses, pepperoni, and other pie-construction necessities. So I fortified myself with a dose of dilaudid, grabbed a roll of paper towels for the car, and headed out. 

Parked maybe 100 meters from the store door. When I got inside, I had to take three or four minutes to hunch over my cart, cough up some semi-gelid mucous, and relax the cramping muscles in my chest. Same routine when I got back out to the car. At least at this end I had the benefits of Molly Hatchet wailing on Flirting With Disaster and the rush of hot air from the vents with the temperature set on Deep Fat Fry.

Anyway. This is the first winter in a long time here in the Mid-Atlantic region (as we like to think of ourselves, when we’re in a geographically expansive mood) that has lived up to its billing. We’ve had snow on the ground for weeks, ponds are frozen over, and a long sequence of Canadian cold fronts has kept air temperatures well below long-term averages.

And of course this has unhinged the idiots at Fox “News”. Chris Wallace interrupted his routine reading of scripts from which all words of three or more syllables have been stricken to give a folksy commentary on climate change. He concludes that a global warming “case is difficult to make when the eastern half of the country is in the grips of a brutal winter” [2]. It’s hard to believe that, in the 21st century, with the information resources available via the World Wide Web, an entire communications organization like Fox can’t come to grips with the reality that the United States isn’t conflated as the world at large. And that the concepts of “weather” and “climate” actually reflect differing scales of environmental conditions. 

Anyway. This simple-minded debate playing out on my laptop monitor reminded me to remind you that I think the entire climate change issue is being pursued down a long, straight, but ultimately dead-end path. Earth’s climate changes constantly, and it has always done so. Many factors impact climate, and the mix of parameters generating climate conditions at any one moment shifts and reshuffles and burps out new conditions for the next moment. Sometimes climate is controlled by geological forces, like volcanoes and continental drift. Sometimes it’s controlled by astronomy, via solar flares, sunspots, and proximity to asteroids with potential to devastate the biosphere at any moment. Biology plays an enormous role in the long, slow dance of climate conditions. The mixture of gasses in the atmosphere reflects photosynthesis, respiration, decomposition, and carbon storage.

Human beings are integral and dominant components of the present-day biosphere. It seems that we are now driving the climate car, having taken an off-ramp from the solar conditions that would otherwise have spun us into a long period of cooling. The net effect of our collective activities has established conditions for long-term warming of the biosphere.

And here’s where I think the entire climate change debate is focused on the wrong question. Climate always changes. Whether or not human activity is controlling climate, as opposed to solar conditions or geological processes is largely irrelevant. The real question is “are climate changes now underway likely to have good or bad outcomes for biology on earth”? 

And the answer is surprising. In simplest terms, a warmer earth is a better earth. Biological productivity and biodiversity are tightly and positively correlated with long-term temperatures. Warming, especially if accompanied by increases in atmospheric loading of limiting plant fuel carbon dioxide, will increase global biomass. At the same time, biodiversity will be unshackled and evolutionary processes will explode, yielding enormous numbers of new and novel organisms. If this seems counterintuitive, given the apocalyptic forecasts of environmental organizations and academia, fire up a thought experiment. Where is biological productivity high—in the frozen wastes of the polar landscapes, or between the tropics? Where is biodiversity high—on the arctic tundra, where you can count the vertebrate species on your fingers and toes, or in the equatorial forests, grasslands, and oceans? What happened biologically and socially in the last period of climate cooling—the “Little Ice Age” that rocked the planet from the 1500s to the 1800s? What happened was massive disruption of human populations, hammered by starvation and disease, and setbacks in ecosystem conditions that the biosphere is still recovering from. 

Yes, it’s true that people living at sea level are going to have a nasty time as water levels rise. And it’s also true that so-called “tropical” diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness will proliferate. But overall, as the biosphere warms, human and ecological entities will be released from climate constraints and prosper. Where did our fossil fuels—coal, petroleum, natural gas—come from? They came from the frantic productivity and biodiversity of a world warmed in the so-called “carboniferous” period. 

Anyway. What does all this have to do with cancer, the nominal subject of this weekly bloviation? Simply this: the universe is complicated. Patterns and processes are often counter-intuitive. We have to think, and think expansively, before we act. 

The National Cancer Institute publishes an annual report updating the status of cancer as a global phenomenon. This year’s report [the link is in reference [1] below] demonstrates that cancer deaths are falling worldwide, due largely to successful efforts to reduce tobacco use. However, it also shows that “comorbidities”—noncancer illnesses afflicting cancer patients—play a large role in determining cancer outcomes. In simplest terms, if you are diabetic, or have cardiovascular problems, or a host of other relatively common health problems, your cancer is going to be more severe and treatment is more likely to fail. Death rates are higher in people with multiple illnesses superimposed on their cancers. 

From a public health perspective, this brings us neatly back to close the circle where we started on this rather rambling essay. Two lessons: 1) cancer is a lot more complicated when other illnesses are present; and 2) a healthier biosphere will make cancer less important as a cause of death, and easier to manage from a treatment perspective. 

During the Little Ice Age, people were chronically ill all the time, all over the world. When bubonic and pneumonic plague squidged out of western Asia and challenged human physiologies in Europe, the combined effects of residual diseases (due to poor nutrition, exposure, and social proximity driven by the cooler climate) and Yersinia plagues were catastrophic. 

A warmer earth is a better earth. And a warmer earth will make cancer less of a problem. So move out of that riverfront cottage and get to higher ground. Then embrace the global warming. 

As always, I thank you all for being here. Without you, I would not be here. To enjoy this great, snowy winter. And the warmer world just past this snowy winter. Rock On, everybody!!!

Notes

[1] http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/newsfromnci/2013/ReportNationDec2013Release

[2] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/16/3297871/fox-news-discusses-climate-change-insanity-ensues/#