The climate emergency is being caused by humans burning coal, petroleum and methane gas for electricity and heating and cooling buildings. When burned, they produce enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, which is a powerful heat-trapping gas. The earth is heated by the sun’s rays, which used to radiate back out to space. Carbon dioxide doesn’t let the sun’s heat dissipate that way, keeping it on earth. We can stop this global heating by getting our electricity and heat/ air conditioning from wind, water, solar and battery sources instead. Scotland, an industrialized country, now gets all its electricity from renewables. Germany gets 40-45 percent of its electricity from renewables. In the US, only 20 percent of our electricity is renewable, and a big chunk of that is hydroelectric, which we have had for nearly a century. So we just haven’t made much progress in this country on a problem that is a thousand times more threatening than Russia or the Middle East or Covid-19.

The scientists conclude that the climate emergency has caused significant damage to the world’s ecosystems, whether on land or in the oceans. Some of this damage is now irreversible.

Further, the damage is greater than estimated in previous reports. Things are getting worse and worse. Because of greater heat at the equator, “Approximately half of the species assessed globally [which number in the tens of thousands] have shifted polewards or, on land, also to higher elevations.”

The US Republican Party may not believe in the menace of the climate emergency, but the animals are far less dumb. They are fleeing for the hills, literally. (Note that I have used “literally” correctly here.)

That 50% of the tens of thousands of species surveyed by the iPCC have moved toward the poles to get away from the increasing extremes of heat is a remarkable, and alarming statistic.

In many habitats, where they did not or could not move away fast enough to escape the impact of the climate emergency, hundreds of species have been lost in local environments. They were killed off by extremes of heat and experienced mass die-offs on land and in the sea. In the oceans, the kelp forests that shelter much marine life have started dying off, followed by the marine life that used to live in them Where species have been lost from all the ecosystems they inhabit, they have become extinct.

Losing species is irreversible. Once they are gone, you can’t get them back. They may have been building blocks in an ecosystem or they may have had unique nutritional or medicinal properties that could have benefited humanity. They’re gone. Other irreversible changes are the loss of ice mass in Greenland and the Antarctic, threatening the collapse of ice sheets that hold back ginormous glaciers that will raise sea level substantially if they plop in.

If we act really quickly and decisively, we may be able to stop more species from dying off and may be able to stop some gargantuan glaciers from plopping in and wiping out Miami Beach and Lower Manhattan. But we can’t get back the species we have already lost to the climate emergency, and we can’t make the oceans go back down. Well, not for maybe 100,000 years.

The scientists write,

“Unavoidable sea level rise will bring cascading and compounding impacts resulting in losses of coastal ecosystems and ecosystem services, groundwater salinisation, flooding and damages to coastal infrastructure that cascade into risks to livelihoods, settlements, health, well-being, food and water security, and cultural values in the near to long- term (high confidence).”

Contrary to what that loony Trump says, sea level rise does not give you more ocean front property. It just changes where the ocean front starts, moving it inland. People who own land along the coast will lose it.

If the land you own is on a relatively low-lying island, you may lose the whole island: “Climate change is contributing to humanitarian crises where climate hazards interact with high vulnerability (high confidence). Climate and weather extremes are increasingly driving displacement in all regions (high confidence), with small island states disproportionately affected (high confidence). ”

There is really bad news for people who like to eat food. The scientists conclude, “Climate change will increasingly put pressure on food production and access, especially in vulnerable regions, undermining food security and nutrition.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization says, “A person is food insecure when they lack regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life.”

That’s bad. And it is becoming more common because of the climate emergency. How?

The scientists explain,

“Increases in frequency, intensity and severity of droughts, floods and heatwaves, and continued sea level rise will increase risks to food security (high confidence) in vulnerable regions from moderate to high between 1.5°C and 2°C global warming level, with no or low levels of adaptation (medium confidence). At 2°C or higher global warming level in the mid-term, food security risks due to climate change will be more severe, leading to malnutrition and micro-nutrient deficiencies, concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Central and South America and Small Islands (high confidence).”

There is also bad news for people who like to drink water.

The scientists point out that half of us on this globe already face thirst: “Roughly half of the world’s population currently experience severe water scarcity for at least some part of the year due to climatic and non-climatic drivers.”

In some places, access to water is on the decline because we are altering our climate. Forest watersheds are in danger. Massive forest fires are producing organic material that is washed into ponds and lakes, causing them to “brown.” Browning reduces water quality and makes the water taste bad. But for some, the problems are even more dire:

” In most regions with dry or Mediterranean subtropical climates, climate change reduces renewable surface water and groundwater resources significantly (Doell et al., 2015). In northeast Spain, reduced precipitation and vegetation cover under a high emissions scenario of a 3.5ºC temperature increase could reduce drinking water supplies by half by 2100 (Bangash et al., 2013).”

Reduce drinking water by half.

The scientists underline that our fate is in our hands. We can swing into action on an emergency basis and stop using fossil fuels, and if we do that, the earth will stop getting hotter almost immediately. They are not describing an inevitably bleak future. They are giving us a choice between that and getting off our duffs and doing something to prevent it.

If the world (by which I mean you and me, dear reader) does not swing into prompt action to deal with the climate emergency, some 3.5 billion people are going to end up living in places where it is unbearably hot by 2070. And likely a lot of them will have to leave for somewhere else.

By swing into action I mean ceasing to drive gasoline-powered cars and ceasing to use coal to generate electricity, and ceasing to farm in high-carbon ways (all things, by the way, that we know how to do, and relatively cheaply. If you own your home and plan to be in it at least 10 years, put solar panels on the roof and save yourself a lot of money. If you need a car to commute and are looking to buy, make your next one electric and get over your irrational range anxiety. The new ones go 200-250 miles on a charge and the average trip is 5 miles; and they are coming down in price, and you still get a $7500 Federal tax rebate plus whatever your state offers. Obviously some of my readers can’t do these things this year with the job losses and bad economies, but they can vote for politicians who will put in pro-green policies).

The year 2070 sounds like a long way away. It isn’t. For one thing, these changes are gradual and are taking effect now and will accelerate ten years and twenty years from now until they hit a crescendo in 50 years. For another, science fiction writers have long made the point that setting a story twenty years in the future, say 2040, makes it sound distant, but a point twenty years in the past is not considered nearly as far away (indeed, for older people it seems like yesterday). Fifty years ago was 1970: it was the first Earth Day, the Beatles released their last album, “Let it Be,” the al-Assads came to power in Syria, the US Environmental Protection Agency came into being, and PBS began broadcasting. Sure, for those not yet born it sounds like ancient history but it is recognizably our world, and so to will 2070 be.

For the past 10,000 years, during which human civilization developed, temperatures had been relatively stable and parts per million of carbon dioxide fluctuated in a narrow range, in the 200s. We have now hit 410 ppm of carbon dioxide, which is already dooming us to a much greater average temperature. But if we go on like this we will reach a point where the greenhouse gases are so concentrated that they make the whole world tropical, melt all land ice and cause sea level to rise so we will lose thirty percent of the earth’s land mass. The last time that happened, there were also mega-storms. Swedish archeologists found evidence, at a time of very high CO2 concentrations tens of millions of years ago, of a hurricane over that land that was relatively stationary and lasted 10,000 years. In other words, we are capable of producing conditions under which human civilization as we know it would be extremely difficult to maintain.

These outcomes would take thousands of years to come to pass. What will happen in only 5 decades, though, if we don’t stop putting out carbon dioxide tout de suite, is that some 20% of the earth will be to hot to live on.

Right now, the band of unbearably hot regions is very narrow and this scalding temperatures only affect 0.8 percent the world’s land surface, as with Saudi Arabia’s vast “Empty Quarter” desert. But in 50 years, when today’s twenty-year-olds are 70, the percentage of the earth affected will be about one fifth. And three and a half billion people live in that band.

h/t PNAS.

The way I read this map, the northern parts of South America and then Central America and Mexico will be hard hit, along with the Sahel in Africa, and then you have India and Pakistan, some of Southeast Asia, and Australia. If we figure people will likely vote with their feet and go north, and thinking about North America, I’d start studying Spanish, Mayan, Quechua and Portuguese if I were you.

So here is the irony. Donald J. Trump is the most anti-immigrant president we’ve had since the 1910s and 1920s. He talks dirty about immigrants (many of whom are the essential service workers during the coronavirus pandemic that we keep lauding as heroes). He is trying to stop legal immigration. He doesn’t want those people here.

But Trump is also the most pro-carbon president we’ve ever had. He actually wants to revive the failing coal industry! Coal is the most dangerous and most CO2-intensive fossil fuel. Just stopping the burning of coal in and of itself, throughout the world, would affect emissions dramatically. Trump wants to increase it. He also tried to remove mileage requirements from automobiles, encourage 12 miles a gallon gas guzzlers. Trump is doing everything he can to sabotage the earth.

So here’s the thing. You can’t have it both ways. Either you can mount a Manhattan project to stop global heating, or you can stop migration. You can’t pursue both pro-carbon and anti-immigration policies successfully at the same time. Visions of fortress America have their limits–the US and Canada have enormous coast lines and desperate people will find a way– ask Europe.

I personally think our current immigration rate is fine, and helps the country avoid the crisis of greying that Japan and Italy are facing (who is going to pay for social security for the next generation?) But even I wonder what would happen to the social fabric if the PNAS scenario eventuates and you had potentially hundreds of millions of people on the move.

The solution is simple. Put in a lot of industrial-grade wind and solar, go to electric vehicles, farm more sustainably, find replacements for cement, etc. We know what needs to be done, we have the technology to do it, and we would actually save money by doing it. What we lack is the sense of urgency and the political will. That too is in our own hands.

——–

Bonus video:

How Climate Changes Drives Migration To The U.S. | NBC News

There are so many stories flying around about the horrors already being wrought by climate change, you’re probably struggling to keep up.

The warnings have been there for decades but still there are those who deny it. So perhaps it’s timely to look at how climate change is affecting you, by wrecking some of the things you love.

1. Not the holiday you hoped for

We often choose holiday destinations with weather in mind. Sadly, climate change may see your usual destinations become less inviting, and maybe even disappear entirely.

But there’s more to think about than your favourite beach retreat being drowned, or the Great Barrier Reef decaying before you see it.

Now we have to worry that “extreme weather events pose significant risks to travellers”. The warnings here range from travel disruption, such as delayed flights due to storms, through to severe danger from getting caught in cyclones, floods or snowstorms.

Simply getting where you need to go could become an adventure holiday itself, but not a fun one.

2. Last chance to see some wildlife

There are more and more examples of animals falling victim to climate-change induced extreme weather events, such as the horror of mass “cremations” of koalas in the path of recent Australian bush fires or bats dropping dead during heatwaves.

On top of that, news of the latest climate-related animal extinctions are becoming as common as reports of politicians doing nothing about it.

3. History and heritage at risk

The Italian city of Venice recently experienced its worst flooding since the mid 1960s, and the local mayor clearly connected this with climate change.

Aside from the human calamity unfolding there, we are seeing one of Europe’s most amazing and unique cities and a World Heritage site devastated before our eyes.

Climate change threatens more than 13,000 archaeological sites in North America alone if sea levels rise by 1m. That goes up to more than 30,000 sites if sea levels rise by 5m.

UNESCO is worried that climate change also threatens underwater heritage sites, such as ruins and shipwrecks. For example, rising salinity and warming waters increases ship-worm populations that consume wooden shipwrecks in the Baltic sea.

4. Taking the piste

Warming temperatures have already had negative impacts on the US snow sports industry since at least 2001.

In Australia, ski resorts are expected to see significant drops in snow fall by 2040 and, as temperatures warm, they will be unable to compensate for this by snow-making, because it doesn’t work if ambient temperatures are too high.

Perhaps recent efforts to make artificial snow will give us a few more years on the slopes, but I’m not holding my breath.

5. Too hot for sport and exercise

It’s not just snow sports that will be affected. As temperatures warm, simply being outside in some parts of the world will not only be less pleasant, but more harmful, causing greater risk of heat stress doing any sport or exercise.

That also means lower incentives for – and greater difficult in undertaking – incidental exercise, such as walking to the bus stop.

6. Pay more for your coffee

As the climate changes, your coffee hits will probably become rarer and more expensive, too.

A report by the Climate Institute in 2016 suggested coffee production could drop by 50% by 2050.

Given how rapidly negative climate predictions have been updated in the three years since, this might now be considered optimistic. Yikes.

7. You and your family’s health

As the climate changes, the health of your children, your parents and your grandparents will be at greater risk through increases in air pollution, heatwaves and other factors.

It can be heartening to see the strong, intelligent and positive action being taken by the world’s youth in response to the lack of climate action by many governments.

But the fact this is a result of literal, existential crises becoming a normal part of every day life for young people is utterly horrifying.

8. Home, sweet home

The recent bush fires in Australia and the United States reveal how dramatic and destructive the effects climate change can be to where you live. Hundreds of houses have already burned down in Australia this fire season.

Fires are getting more frequent and more ferocious. The seasonal windows where we safely used controlled burning to clear bushfire fuel are shrinking. It’s not only harder to fight fires when they happen, it’s becoming harder to prevent them as well.

Fires aren’t the only threat to homes. All around the planet, more and more houses are being destroyed by rising seas and increasingly wild storms, all thanks to climate change.

9. Not the wine, please!

Still not convinced climate change is wrecking things you love? What if I told you it’s even coming for your wine.

Less water, soil degradation and higher temperatures earlier in the season all lead to dramatic negative effects on grapes and wine-making.

One small upside is that disruption to traditional wine growing regions is creating opportunities to develop new wine growing areas. But there is no reason to believe these areas will maintain stable grape growing conditions as climate change progresses.

So, what now?

It’s easy to be sad. But to change our trajectory, it’s better to be mad. In the words of that great English singer songwriter John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), “anger is an energy”.

So maybe use this list as motivation to think, talk and act. Use it as fuel to make small, large or a combinationof changes.

Share your concerns, share your solutions, and do this relentlessly.

What’s happening right now is huge, overwhelming, and also inevitable without concerted action. There’s no sugar-coating it: climate change is wrecking the things we love. Time to step it up a notch.

Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A public opinion poll on German foreign policy carried out by the Koerber Foundation for its annual Berlin Forum has a bombshell finding:

Germans are more disturbed about Trump and see relations with him as a bigger challenge than relations with North Korea, Russia, or than the Syrian Civil War. Only immigration is seen as a slightly more difficult challenge by Germans than dealing with The Orange One. Coming just after Trump in the degree of challenge he represents to Germany is Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan.

When asked which country was most or second most important to Germany, nearly two thirds or 63% said France.

The US came trailing after with only a plurality at 43%.

Emmanuel Macron is more important to Germans than Trump, and seen in a positive light while Trump is seen as an obstacle at an obstacle course.

But even more striking, the Germans are so over the British, who are pulling out of the European Union. Germans think Russia (11%) and China (7%) are both more important to their nation than Britain (6%).

Not only is France more important than the US in the eyes of these German respondents, but 90% want *more* cooperation with France. 78% want more cooperation with *Russia*. (So the Germans are just like Trump himself?) And 69% want more cooperation with China.

Only 61% want more cooperation with the United States under Trump, and fully 34% actively want *less* cooperation with Washington.

It’s official. Trump is the skunk at the party.

52% of Germans think the relationship between the US and Germany is “somewhat bad.”

Remember I said that Erdogan comes second after Trump as a challenge for Germany? Well, some 74% want to end accession talks about Turkey joining the European Union. They want to end any special relationship with Ankara over the way Erdogan has been behaving. And remember, they find Trump more of a challenge than they do Erdogan.

Germans overwhelmingly see their security future as entangled with a joint European Union security force; only 9% see it as connected to the United States. If Trump was trying to make NATO hated in Europe, he appears to have succeeded.

Germans don’t want a big foreign policy role. But they do think they have a role to play in the Middle East.

The most important conflict where people think Germany should be actively promoting a resolution is ISIL (46%). But 21% want to help resolve the outstanding issues in the Syrian civil war, and 15% want to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Via

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

German police use water cannons on political protesters

A mysterious kidney disease is striking down labourers across the world and climate change is making it worse. Jane Palmer meets the doctors who are trying to understand it and stop it.

By 10 am in the sugarcane fields outside the town of Tierra Blanca in El Salvador, the mercury is already pushing 31°C. The workers arrived at dawn: men and women, young and old, wearing thick jeans, long-sleeved shirts and face scarves to prevent being scorched by the sun’s rays. They are moving quickly between rows of cane, bending, reaching, clipping and trimming in preparation for harvesting the crop in the weeks to come. In the scant shade, old Pepsi and Fanta bottles full of water swing from tree branches, untouched. Gulping only the thick air, the workers won’t stop until noon, when their shift is over.

A graveyard in San Marcos Lempa, El Salvado © Brett Gundlock/Boreal Collective

Among them is 25-year-old Jesús Linares. His dream, he explains in English, was to be a language teacher, but like many Salvadoran children he went to work to help support his parents and siblings. Aged eight, he learned to hide in the towering canes whenever the police sought out underage workers; since then, he’s tended sugarcane from dawn to noon and then pigs until dusk. In the evenings, he tries to listen to English audio programmes or read a language book, but for the last year he’s been too tired to concentrate. So tired, in fact, that a few months ago he visited the Tierra Blanca clinic. Blood tests revealed that Linares was in the early stages of chronic kidney disease.

It’s a familiar story here in the Bajo Lempa region, where recent studies suggest that up to 25 per cent of its nearly 20,000 inhabitants have chronic kidney disease. Across El Salvador, kidney failure is the leading cause of hospital deaths in adults. But while chronic kidney disease is most commonly caused by hypertension and diabetes, two-thirds of patients in Bajo Lempa don’t have either of those conditions, and the cause of their illness remains uncertain.

Scientists have identified certain key themes. The majority of people with the unexplained disease are men, and it strikes predominantly in hot, humid regions where people are engaged in strenuous outdoor labour: farming, fishing or construction work. Dehydration, which seems an obvious factor, causes acute kidney disease that is easily reversed by drinking water, rather than this chronic form. This has left two burning questions: what causes this new form of kidney disease, and will it be likely to spread as the world gets warmer?

Meanwhile, in El Salvador over the last two decades, more and more patients have arrived at clinics and hospitals, often taxing them to their limit. Many people, unable to get treatment, simply return to their homes to die.

“This is really a silent massacre,” says Ramón García-Trabanino, a Salvadoran kidney specialist.

You don’t feel any kind of pain, but you feel like you are slowly decaying We lose one or two people from this region every week. It’s poverty, not the disease, that kills them.

Richard J Johnson, a kidney specialist at the University of Colorado, helped organise the World Congress of Nephrology in Canada in 2011. There, he learned about the strange new form of chronic kidney disease spreading through Central America. Researchers from various countries were beginning to get together and discuss the evidence. Like others, Johnson began to think about possible causes.

His own research was focused on the sugar fructose – identifying its role in obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease. When a person eats fructose, the liver bears most of the brunt, but some of the sugar eventually ends up in the kidney. With each meal, fructose enters the kidney tubules, where it is metabolised into uric acid and causes oxidative stress, both of which can damage the kidney.

At first, Johnson thought people in the sugarcane fields could be eating so much of the plant itself that they were generating high levels of uric acid and oxidative stress in their kidneys. But, he calculated, even sucking on sugarcane all day wouldn’t produce enough fructose to cause disease. Then he discovered that, under certain conditions, the body processes regular carbohydrates to make its own fructose. And one of the triggers of this deadly alchemy is simple dehydration.

Until that point, nephrologists had thought that dehydration could only cause acute kidney injury, but Johnson’s findings put a new spin on the role of insufficient water intake. Could dehydration day in, day out be causing continuous fructose overproduction that, in turn, could be leading to long-term kidney damage?

Johnson took his theory to the lab, where his team put mice in chambers and exposed them to hours of heat at a stretch. One group of mice was allowed to drink unlimited water throughout the experience, while a second group had water only in the evenings. Within five weeks the mice with a restricted water intake developed chronic kidney disease. During the day, loss of salt and water caused the mice to produce high levels of fructose, and crystals of uric acid would sometimes form as water levels dropped in their urine. When the scientists disabled the gene that metabolises fructose and repeated the experiment, neither group developed chronic kidney disease.

Johnson took these results to a meeting of the Program on Health and Work in Central America, or SALTRA, in Costa Rica in 2012, where they caught the attention of García-Trabanino: “I was astonished. His animal models were absolutely in line with our findings.”

The two collaborated to investigate the biochemical effects of dehydration on workers in the fields of El Salvador. Levels of uric acid started high in the morning and increased throughout the day. “Some patients just had sheets of uric acid crystals in their urine,” Johnson says.

From these studies, Johnson believes that heat stress and dehydration drive the production of fructose and vasopressin, which also damages the kidney. However, he believes that another mechanism may also play a part in the epidemic: rehydration with sugary drinks. Frequently, not trusting the quality of local drinking water, workers drink sodas and soft drinks, and experimental evidence suggests that doing so can lead to even more kidney damage.

“At this stage, that heat stress and dehydration might be causing this problem is still a hypothesis,” Johnson admits. “Although it is a strong one.”

They went out because they were expecting it to be a relatively normal day and they got hit

Each month, in the blistering afternoon heat, men sporting cowboy hats or baseball caps and women wearing short frilly aprons over their dresses gather at the Centro Cultural Monseñor Romero in Tierra Blanca. Seated in a shady area next to a garden overgrown with tropical plants, the 40-odd throng hold bottles of water provided for the occasion.

On a makeshift table, a volunteer nurse straps the inflatable cuff of a blood pressure monitor on thick arms, skinny arms, arms hardened by years of labour, wrinkled arms softened by old age. Amid the ministrations, raising his voice to drown out the chaos and laughter of children learning traditional dances nearby, Julio Miranda, the imposing leader of the Emergency Social Fund for Health, takes centre stage: “If you want to tell your experience, it will bring benefit to the community,” he says.

One by one, men and women stand to tell their stories. As they talk, heads nod in assent, some ask questions. But in true El Salvadoran style, despite the gravity of the accounts, good-humoured jibes prevail alongside the murmurs of empathy.

For Santos Coreas, an emaciated 57-year-old man who has worked in the fields since his teenage years, the money he receives from his sons working in the USA is the difference between life and death. It pays for his weekly haemodialysis, although that still falls short of the recommended three-times-a-week regime. His wife quickly interjects: “We can’t afford more; we do what we can.”

In El Salvador, social security benefits cover health costs for only a quarter of the population. Private, military and teachers’ schemes cover a further 5 per cent, and the Ministry of Health provides public healthcare to the remaining 70 per cent, according to García-Trabanino. From 2004 to 2013, in this area, 271 patients reached end-stage renal disease, the point at which the only options are dialysis or death. Only a third of them received any type of dialysis, a quarter of these relying on El Salvador’s largest source of income: relatives sending money home from abroad.

Of the 235 patients who relied on the public health system, many didn’t have access to dialysis or were afraid of outdated techniques that are associated with a high death toll. Transport costs to and from the city for treatment often proved beyond their means, too. Only 12 of these people were alive one year after diagnosis.

“You need dialysis or transplantation or you die, and we lose one or two people from this region every week,” García-Trabanino says. “It’s poverty, not the disease, that kills them.”

But dialysis isn’t the only line of defence if you can act early enough. For Rogelio Sánchez, a bout of gastroenteritis more than 10 years ago indirectly saved his life. Blood tests revealed his kidneys were in the early stages of chronic disease and, since then, medication has stopped the disease from progressing.

Sánchez has come to the meeting today with one of his four sons, Henry, a doe-eyed and healthy-looking boy who appears much younger than his 23 years. Five years ago, Henry started to feel sick and blood tests revealed that he also had the new form of chronic kidney disease. García-Trabanino, who is a volunteer physician at the meetings, prescribed a drug to boost his potassium levels, along with potassium and calcium supplements, and advised Henry to seriously reduce his football playing, avoid sun exposure and drink lots of water. Like his father, Henry now has the disease under control.

In 2006, the Emergency Social Fund for Health started taking blood samples from all the locals. In 6,000 samplings since, they have found 1,500 people in various stages of the disease. Only 100 have died, and these were workers already in the final stage. For the others, early diagnosis and medication can keep end-stage disease at bay for decades. This requires funding, however. Unsupported by the government, the organisation relies on donations. But in recent years, the number of people who need such treatment has continued to rise.

We predict the kidney is going to be one of the prime targets as heat increases

For Johnson, a clue as to why the epidemic is escalating came from a disturbing occurrence during his research with García-Trabanino. One day, when the field researchers were measuring uric acid levels, only seven workers showed up for work. “But they all had uric acid crystals in their urine. All of them,” Johnson says. “It was bad news for these seven.”

Alarmed, he contacted the lead investigator of the study, who felt that the team should ignore the finding as so few workers had turned up that morning. “But I said that maybe this is the most interesting group, because 100 per cent of the workers got it that day.”

A graveyard in San Marcos Lempa, El Salvador © Brett Gundlock/Boreal Collective

He looked up the weather and found out that it had, in fact, been the hottest day of the year at the study location. “Suddenly a really, really big heatwave came in and the workers weren’t ready,” he says. “They went out because they were expecting it to be a relatively normal day and they got hit.”

Instead of his usual fare of nephrology and diabetes papers, Johnson began to pore over global maps of climate and solar radiation. The rise in average temperatures over the last few years in Central America had been incremental, but the number of extreme events had gone up disproportionately. “And, by gosh, the areas that have the highest solar radiation and heatwaves are overlapping the places right where the epidemics are.”

He contacted climate experts at the nearby National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. They verified and finessed his original discovery, and the team published an assessment report in May 2016, which suggested a connection between climate change and the epidemic. Johnson says it “may well be one of the first epidemics because of global warming”.

Climate change brings dire predictions of extreme weather and sea-level rise in the future, but it is affecting the world’s most vulnerable populations right now, he says. And although heat exposure can affect the body in many ways, our kidneys are in the first line of attack, as their role is to keep electrolytes within the normal range and blood volume stable. “We predict the kidney is going to be one of the prime targets as heat increases.”

Researchers currently classify the new form of chronic kidney disease as ‘climate-sensitive’, which means that climate is one ingredient contributing to the epidemic. As temperatures continue to rise, many such climate-sensitive diseases will become climate-driven, and monitoring and bringing attention to them will become even more crucial.

It starts as a little problem and it will grow and grow and grow

“Climate change is not like a new thing, it has been here for a long time,” says Emmanuel Jarquín, who has seen the impacts of rising temperatures on farmers in El Salvador. Already the country has had hotter summers and longer, drier winters. Coffee plantations, usually between 600 and 1,000 metres above sea level, where ideal cool conditions exist for the crop, have shrunk upwards towards the top of the hillsides. The heat has also increased the number of pests and droughts, and some farmers have begun to swap coffee for cocoa trees.

And while climate change isn’t the root cause of the new chronic kidney disease, it is making it a lot worse, he says. “It will hit the poor people harder. It starts as a little problem and it will grow and grow and grow.”

For the people of El Salvador, then, this is yet another life-threatening obstacle to overcome. Living under constant threat from earthquakes and volcanoes, but also gang violence, political unrest and poverty, they have developed a strong defence mechanism: a forceful loyalty to family, community and fellow countrymen. “Even taking into account the conditions we live in, we still believe in good things and we are fighters,” says Jarquín. “We always try to do good things, against all odds.”

For García-Trabanino, the towering volcanoes have come to symbolise what it means to be El Salvadoran: “I used to think we were stupid people when I was younger, to build under the volcanoes,” he says. “But then I realised they were everywhere.” But living underneath the volcanoes gives people both an appreciation of life – because they can die any day – and a sense of strength.

“We have survived the civil war, earthquakes and volcanoes, but El Salvadorans fight, and they will fight again.”

Author: Jane Palmer
Editor: Michael Regnier
Fact checker: Francine Almash
Copyeditor: Rob Reddick
Photographer: Brett Gundlock
Art director: Charlie Hall

This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.