The Wabash doctor who waged a decades-long and ultimately successful battle against smoking sees climate change as an exponentially greater threat to global public health.
“This is one of the grand challenges in the history of humanity,” says Dr. Stephen Jay ’63, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Indiana University– Purdue University at Indianapolis. “The science on climate change is really, really compelling.” He notes disturbing similarities between the “doubt propaganda” put forth by tobacco manufacturers in the 1960s and the tactics of naysayers on the human causes of climate change.
“Evidence of global climate change is all around us,” says Jay, who recently helped lead the data-driven effort to shut down a coal-burning power plant in Indianapolis due to its impact on the health of residents in the area. “My wife and I were riding our bikes in the Everglades and we saw firsthand evidence of climate change. We saw water running across trails that had previously been dry forever. We’re seeing the tremendous intrusion of saltwater into the ecosystems in South Florida.
“Americans are already suffering from the impacts of climate change. In the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska, you find people struggling to survive on what remains of their island being engulfed by that sea.”
In Louisiana, Jay notes, the Isle de Jean Charles band of Biloxi- Chitimacha-Choctaw people have become America’s first official refugees of climate change, granted $48 million to re-settle on higher ground after their homeland was increasingly submerged.
“Six-thousand miles from there in the Middle East a sustained drought is partially responsible for the mass migration of people from that region to Europe,” Jay continues. “Climate change has been called a ‘threat multiplier.’ Everything else being equal, climate change is responsible for the destabilization of groups of people, and that spells problems for all of us.
“We are the first generation to fully understand the implications of what’s happening. And we are, according to the best and brightest of 70,000 climate scientists worldwide, the last generation that can do something about it.”