American optimism for the future is being challenged by cheerless forecasts in major new studies released on Tuesday.
One, from the American Medical Association (AMA), addresses an alarming decline in U.S. life expectancy for young and mid-life adults, reports the Washington Post.
The other, from the United Nations, says humanity is headed toward climate catastrophe spurred by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and resulting global warming, the New York Times reports. The world’s two biggest polluters, the U.S. and China, both saw their carbon footprints expand last year.
Both newspapers use the word “bleak” to describe the reports’ findings.
The AMA study of six decades of American mortality data was “hailed by outside researchers for its comprehensive treatment of a still-enigmatic trend: the reversal of historical patterns in longevity,” the Post says.
“Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has seen increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people ages 25 to 64, who should be in the prime of their lives, while other wealthy nations have generally experienced continued progress in extending longevity.”
The highest “relative jump in death rates” — 29% — was seen among young adults, ages 25-34.
“It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven Woolf, of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong,” Woolf said.
Woolf cites no single cause, but they include the opioid epidemic, widespread obesity, rising suicide rates, alcohol-related liver disease, even “distracted driving from cellphones.”
The pattern crosses the gender line, with women “succumbing to diseases once far more common among men, even as men continue to die in greater absolute numbers.”
“About a third of the estimated 33,000 ‘excess deaths’that the study says occurred since 2010 were in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana,” the Post says, while New Hampshire is the state with the biggest percentage rise in death rates among working-age people in this decade: 23.3%.
Turning to the climate, the UN Environment Program reports that global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 1.5% every year over the last decade, the Times says.
“To stay within relatively safe limits,” it warns, “emissions must decline sharply” — by 7.6% every year between now and 2030.
A separate report issued Monday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that “emissions of three major greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — have all swelled in the atmosphere since the mid-18th century.”
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, most of the world’s countries pledged to cut back such emissions, but President Trump has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the deal — and, says the Times, other countries are also “headed in the wrong direction.”
Canada and Norway, for example, are among countries that plan “to reduce emissions at home while expanding fossil-fuel production for sale abroad.”
“The world’s biggest polluters are nowhere near where they should be to draw down their emissions at a time when the human toll of climate change is near impossible to ignore,” the Times concludes.
