Scientists No Longer Staying in the Background as They Fight to Get Pollution and Climate Change Addressed

In many countries around the world, we have seen physicians enter the political arena. The public’s confidence in the family doctor, or specialist, has made this career transition an acceptable norm. But scientists doing pure research have seldom entered the political arena, or publicly voiced their opinions to try and influence public debate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that opinion not backed by peer-reviewed data creates confusion for the public. But for climate change and pollution, both the medical and scientific communities express an overwhelming common opinion whether here in Canada or elsewhere in the world.

Ivan Semeniuk, a science reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, writes in today’s edition about the effects of traffic on air pollution and health citing a new report from CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. The published report is a compilation of nearly 1,200 research papers produced between 2015 and 2020. Semeniuk quotes Jane McArthur, one of the co-authors who states, “What’s striking is the sheer volume of evidence that links exposure to traffic-related air pollution with adverse health outcomes.”

Canada’s population is overwhelmingly urban with more than 80% of us living in cities. The CAPE report tells us that as a consequence a third of us live within 250 metres (825 feet) of traffic-related air pollution. Dr. Samantha Green, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto points out that this proximity is “affecting every single system in the body and affecting the entire population.” Dr. Green describes traffic-related air pollution as a burden on the healthcare system. She comments, “Problems like this just cannot be tackled at the individual level. If an individual is concerned about this issue, then they need to demand that their politicians take action.”

So what are the risks to the general public? The list is long and includes:

• respiratory diseases and infections such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
  and bronchitis;
• cardiovascular diseases including hypertension and heart attacks;
• neurocognitive and neurodegenerative diseases including neurodevelopmental effects on fetuses;
• adverse birth outcomes, congenital abnormalities, infertility, and eclampsia;
• cancers of which the most prevalent are lung cancer, leukemia, and breast cancer;
• diabetes;
• obesity;
• skin conditions such as atopic and non-atopic eczema;
• mental health issues including anxiety and depression, noise-related stress, insomnia, and sleep disturbance;
• elevated mortality rates.

In tackling transportation-caused air pollution, CAPE has come out of the closet after years of quietly trying to influence health policy decision-makers through its environmental advocacy. The CAPE I remembered from twenty years ago would never have been so vocal or upfront about its concerns. But today it got above-the-fold coverage on page three of a Canadian national newspaper.

Doctors as Activists

On Easter weekend I attended a meeting of a coalition of climate-change activists, chaired by Dr. Mili Roy, Co-chair of CAPE in Ontario. With Earth Day this coming weekend, and in light of the most recent IPCC reports on climate change, the meeting focused on action to empower citizens to voice their concerns to political leaders about the urgent need for a healthy and environmentally sustainable future. One of the goals of what is called the Ontario Climate Emergency Campaign is to get citizens, businesses, and politicians to sign on to a climate pledge whose mission is to encourage “everyone to participate to empower change” through the massive transformation of our way of living to make it sustainable with nature and to demand of government that it act to get us there.

In addressing transportation pollution, CAPE’s report asks of government to:

1. adopt pollution prevention and control policies for vehicles.
2. increase transportation infrastructure to support walking and cycling.
3. mandate effective air filtration and ventilation systems for indoor residential and public spaces.
4. expand urban green space and vegetation barriers in high-traffic zones
5. encourage individuals to use personal protective equipment and increased dietary antioxidant intake to prevent air-pollution-related diseases.

It is hoped that the CAPE report isn’t just a one-day news cycle event but evidence of a more activist medical and scientific community making increasing efforts to educate the public and shame politicians into acting on existential issues.

Scientists as Activists

Chelsea Harvey, of E&E News, wrote an article that was republished on April 11th in Scientific American entitled “Scientists Risk Arrest to Demand Climate Action.” It describes a growing international movement called Scientist Rebellion whose members are activist scientists. In recent weeks some of them got arrested at a demonstration in front of the White House in Washington, DC.

Scientist Rebellion’s demands are for “faster, stronger climate action from world governments and an end to the burning of fossil fuels.” The movement started among scientists in Europe but is now in the United States and Canada. Recent demonstrations were held in cities around the world proclaiming “1.5 Celsius is dead. Climate revolution now!”

Activist scientists used to be rare. When Albert Einstein was urged by fellow physicists in the academic and research community in August of 1939, to write President Roosevelt a month before World War Two broke out in Europe, it was a first. The scientists wanted him to advocate for the U.S. to beat Nazi Germany in building an atomic bomb. The letter at the time was kept quiet.

Since then, there have been few acts within the scientific community as bold as that letter. That’s because many scientists believe that to be true to their field, protests and political advocacy are terrible ideas. Many are so reluctant to express an opinion publicly that they balk at watchdog efforts by Retraction Watch and the Center for Scientific Integrity focused on rooting out bad published scientific research. The reluctant scientists see opinion as being contradictory to the pure pursuit of hypotheses tested and proved or disproved.

But some are flipping the script. When the Flint, Michigan, lead in the water crisis remained buried by city politicians, it was a group of scientists from Virginia Tech that alerted the public. They launched a crowdfunding campaign for residents to buy lead filters to remove it from drinking water. And then went further by openly publishing their findings of lead contamination in the city’s water supply. These actions produced pushback from a prominent water engineer at Berkeley, David Sedlak, who wrote an editorial in the journal Environmental Science & Technology entitled “Crossing the Imaginary Line.” In it he described the Virginia Tech scientists as having jeopardized the fundamentals of basic scientific research in their advocacy. Sedlak noted that they weren’t the only offenders citing people like James Hansen whose activism on greenhouse gas emissions alerted much of the world to the coming climate change crisis.

So are we better off with the script having been flipped as scientists act less and less as neutral bystanders?

In the Scientific American article, Peter Kalmus of NASA is quoted stating, “It makes no sense for scientists to stay silent when their science informs them of existential risk from a clear and present danger that’s mounting very, very rapidly.”

Earth Day Again – Will This Day Be Different?

Tomorrow is Earth Day. The theme is “Invest in our planet.” In exhorting all of us to make the investment the Earth Day site talks about the business, political and personal responsibility to preserve and protect our health, our families, and our livelihoods. CAPE’s report demonstrates that health and the environment are linked directly and impacted by destructive human activity. Scientist Rebellion is bringing us the same message from an increasingly activist academic and research community. Can governments and industries continue to ignore those in medicine and other scientific disciplines as they have ignored youth groups fighting against climate change?