Close to Home: Climate change made my son sick

Scientists can’t say this, so I will: my 2-year-old son caught pneumonia from climate change.

Before you write me off as crazy or ignorant, I spent six years studying science. I worked on two international climate research projects and taught undergrads about climate change. I’m aware that correlation is not causation. I often remind people that the plural of anecdote is not data.

And yet as we confront increasing, unprecedented climate crises we must move faster and further than science alone can carry us. We need to arrive at common-sense conclusions in real time. We must draw on the human power of inference precisely because of the gulf between scientific research and current lived experience. And we can’t advance solutions to climate change without first humanizing climate trends.

Put another way, we aren’t moving urgently on climate solutions because there aren’t enough people linking climate trends to what actually matters to us as human beings. There’s a persistent gap between the best available data and what actually drives change — whether that’s a change in perspective, a change in personal behavior or a change in policy.

It’s past time to close that gap. We have arrived at a point in history in which climate impacts are no longer theoretical. They’re not something that will happen to someone, somewhere, sometime in the future. They’re not just the stuff of complex models and foreboding forecasts. Today’s climate impacts are personal and individual. We must be willing to identify them when we experience them, because personal impacts are a key driver of change.

Humans don’t respond emotionally to probabilities and trends. We don’t even respond emotionally to statistics about death — which logic would suggest should be a highly motivating factor. It isn’t data that convinces an anti-vaccination advocate to accept a vaccine; it’s the death or severe illness of a loved one.

It wasn’t decades of statistics on police shootings disproportionately impacting Black Americans that triggered a national Black Lives Matter movement — although it set the stage and informed the work of the activists and advocates who supported the movement Still, it was the death of George Floyd that brought people to the streets.

In 2015, it wasn’t the international news coverage of unprecedented numbers of Syrian refugees that broke hearts and triggered an outpouring of international concern, support and donations. It was the photo of toddler Alan Kurdi, a refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean. Intense personal tragedy is more likely to catalyze change than sociological data.

When we are able to see ourselves — or our brothers, our sisters, our mothers, our fathers, our children, our friends — reflected in crisis, we are moved. Our perspective shifts. This in turn may trigger a shift in our personal behavior. And if enough people shift, we can witness rapid change to local, national, or international policies.

Let’s go back to pneumonia for a moment. When presented with the results of a cross-sectional study on 30,315 children in China that concludes that increased PM 2.5 — fine particulate matter in the air — triggers an uptick of pediatric hospital admissions due to pneumonia and other respiratory complaints, would you change your behavior? On the other hand, what lengths would you go to in order to protect your own child from a weeklong fever, long wakeful nights, coughs that wrack his little body and tears that run from his eyes?

Chances are, you would do more to avoid the latter than to address the former. Which brings me to how my 2-year-old son caught pneumonia from climate change.

A week before the start of school, our entire family came down with a non-COVID summer cold. Right around the time that we were recovering, local air quality took a turn for the worse. PM 2.5 skyrocketed. On the day after it peaked, my son woke up with a fever.

At first, we thought it was a resurgence of the summer cold. But after he woke with a fever four days in a row — after his wet, hacking cough became unmistakable, after he would lay limply in my arms, asking only, “Mama, would you take care of me?” — we took him to urgent care. He waited three hours to see a doctor due to unusually high demand for same-day care. And then he was diagnosed with pneumonia.

It took days for him to bounce back. But thanks to good health care access, health insurance and antibiotics, my son is on the mend. He’s back to tagging along with his big sisters and wreaking havoc on the house. But not all families will be so lucky. Globally, a child dies of pneumonia every 39 seconds, and pneumonia accounts for 15% of deaths of children under the age of 5.

Scientists would agree that climate change is contributing to increased frequency and severity of wildfires. Scientists would agree that particulate matter caused by wildfires contributes to increased cases of pediatric pneumonia (among other respiratory ills.) But the problem is that science can’t definitively assert that climate change caused my son’s pneumonia. It can only tell us that climate change makes catastrophic wildfires more likely, which makes poor air quality more likely, which makes pediatric pneumonia more likely.

So we need to take it upon ourselves to make the leap of logic. Our warming planet is sickening our children. And as a mother, with all of my mama bear love and instinct, I wholeheartedly believe that if my son had clean air to breathe, he wouldn’t have developed pneumonia.

In our unfolding climate crisis, there has been no single tragedy that has captured the world’s attention and catalyzed urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But maybe the collective experience of climate survivors — sickened children, flooded neighborhoods, incinerated homes and businesses — can galvanize action, if we are willing to frame our personal experiences in terms of climate change.

And that’s why I’m ready to say climate change caused my son’s pneumonia. It’s why I’m willing to assert that climate change caused me to evacuate from my home twice within a 12-month span (Kincade and Walbridge fires).

And most of all, it’s why I’m saying this: We need to do everything we can to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire to keep our children safe and healthy. That includes home hardening, vegetation management, resilient power grids and stopping the root cause — carbon emissions.

Lynda Hopkins is chairwoman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.

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