to the White House.

Welcome, too, to those who are viewing our event today

on the web via livestream.

>> Male Speaker: Is that mic on?

(inaudible)

>> Bob Simon: Yes, it is.

>> Male Speaker: Okay (inaudible).

>> Bob Simon: Yes, it's on.

>> Male Speaker: Okay.

>> Bob Simon: We're glad that all of you are able

to share in the event today.

Today we're pleased to discuss a major new

scientific assessment that has been completed on the

impacts of climate change on human

health in the United States.

This report has been three years in the making and

its scientific assessment of what is known about the

impacts of climate change on human health and the degree

of confidence that one can have in that knowledge is a

significant contribution to the science on this subject.

Today's introduction and discussion of this new

report will begin with a conversation between

Dr. John Holdren and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

Dr. John P. Holdren is the President Obama's

Science and Technology Advisor and the

Senate-confirmed director of the White House

Office of Science and Technology Policy.

In this capacity he's responsible for the

administration's National Science and Technology

Council which oversees the U.S. Global Change Research

Program which produced today's report.

His involvement today is only appropriate as he is a

leading climate expert.

Prior to being appointed as the President's science

advisor, Dr. Holdren spent most of his career as a

faculty member at the University of California,

Berkeley and Harvard, leading into disciplinary

programs focused on energy and technology and policy,

environmental change, nuclear arms control and

non-proliferation, and science and

technology policy.

Gina McCarthy is administrator of the U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency,

appointed by President Obama in 2009 as the assistant

administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation.

She has been a leading advocate for common sense

strategies to protect public health and environment.

Previously Administrator McCarthy served as

commissioner of the Connecticut Department of

Environmental Protection.

During her career which spans over 30 years she has

worked at both the state and local level on critical

environmental issues and has helped to coordinate

policies on economic growth, energy, transportation,

and the environment.

Please join me in welcoming them both to the stage to

start our discussion this afternoon.

(applause)

>> John Holdren: Well, thank you, Bob,

and thanks to all of you for being here today.

It's a pleasure to be up here with my friend and

colleague Gina McCarthy to talk about the new

scientific assessment of climate change and its

impacts on human health in the United States.

If not a whole of government effort,

this was certainly a much of government effort with eight

departments and agencies involved,

over 100 scientists.

The leadership of the study came from EPA, from HHS,

from NOAA, all under the auspices,

as Bob Simon has already mentioned, of the U.S.

Global Change Research Program and it really

demonstrates I think the capacity of the

U.S. Global Change Research Program not only to fund

research on aspects of global environmental change,

but to convene experts from across the government

to combine their knowledge, to assess critically what

is out there in the literature, and then to

build on that with new analyses, new assessments,

as this particular study has done.

Before we get into the details of this new

assessment and hear from some of the authors and hear

some more from Administrator McCarthy about EPA's

perspective on this work, I want to start by providing

just a little bit of context in terms of what we actually

know about climate change.

Interestingly enough, understanding that

increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon

dioxide would influence the Earth's climate goes back

to the middle of the 1800s.

Some people imagine that this is a new idea;

it is not a new idea; it was recognized by farseeing

scientists in the middle 1800s and the era in which

the scientific community began to take on board

that this was not just a theoretical problem,

but a real problem in the real world,

really began in the late '50s, early 1960s.

So we've got basically 50 years of increasingly

intense study of the climate change issue and those five

decades and more of intensive observation,

monitoring, analysis, have led to the establishment of

I would say five crucial facts that are indeed today

established beyond reasonable doubt.

The first of those is that the Earth's climate is

changing at a pace and in a pattern that is not

explainable by our well-understood,

natural influences on climate.

Climate has been changing of course for millennia under a

variety of natural influences.

Those are reasonably well-understood;

they do not explain what we have been seeing

in recent decades.

A second fact is that what does indeed explain what we

have been seeing is the buildup of atmospheric

carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases and

particles resulting from human activities,

primarily the combustion of fossil fuels and

land use change.

The third fact established beyond reasonable doubt is

that climate change is already causing harm to

people, to economies, and to ecosystems in many parts of

the world and we'll come back to that,

of course in the U.S.

context, in a minute.

The fourth fundamental fact is that that harm will

continue to grow for some time to come,

both because of the time lags and inertia built into

the Earth's climate system, but also the inertia in

civilization's energy system.

We are not able to transform civilization's

energy system overnight.

The fifth insight, and this is very important,

is that the amount of harm to be expected going forward

will be much smaller if society takes aggressive,

effective action to limit the amount of harm than if

we don't; big difference in the expected consequences

based on the action that we do or do not take.

The recent observed and measured changes in climate

around the world include a multi-decade increase in the

global average surface air temperature,

but they are not limited to that.

That's what most people talk about,

how many degrees warming have we seen,

how many will we see, but in fact the changes also

include increased temperatures in the ocean,

a decline in Arctic sea ice extent,

accelerated sea level rise, increased moisture in the

atmosphere accompanied by an increase in torrential

downpours and associated flooding,

increased numbers of extremely hot

days, and in some regions increases in drought,

wildfire, and unusually powerful storms.

The reality of those changes and the conclusion that

human influence on climate is the principal culprit

rest on an enormous number of measurements and

observations made by thousands of scientists at

tens of thousands of locations around the world,

recorded in an enormous number of peer-reviewed

publications and reviews of reviews of reviews of the

scientific validity of that body of work.

The key findings, the findings that I have just

summarized, have been endorsed by every major

National Academy of Sciences in the world,

including those of China, India, Russia, Brazil,

as well as that of the United States,

have been endorsed by nearly every U.S.

scientific professional society,

by the World Meteorological Organization,

by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change, and by our own "Third National Climate

Assessment" which we released just two years ago.

Those changes have a broad range of impacts across many

sectors of American society in virtually every region of

the United States, as the "Third National Climate

Assessment" documented, but now in the new report we

have a fresh assessment of the impact of these changes

on an aspect of human well-being whose importance

everybody understands: that is human health.

The assessment that we are releasing today is based on

review and analysis of over 1, 800 peer-reviewed

publications, but also an overlay

of additional study, analysis,

modeling, and conclusions that in turn have been

reviewed -- peer-reviewed by the National Academy of

Sciences, among others.

So, Gina, let me turn to you as the head of the EPA and

ask you what kinds of impacts are we seeing from

climate change as recorded in this study that concern

you from a public health perspective?

>> Gina McCarthy: Well, John, thank you for

the introduction.

I was going to say happy National Public Health Week,

but it sounds kind of like I shouldn't do that, but --

(laughter)

-- it's not -- it's not unhappy

news, because for the first time we really -- this

document provides a really comprehensive scientific

foundation that will tell us what the damages,

what the concerns are with public health and climate in

a way that it can feed into policy folks,

feed into government entities, NGOs,

individuals who really want to know what the future is

going to look like, what we're already seeing in

terms of impacts, and what we might do to mitigate and

adapt to those impacts, but this is the first time

I think in history we've been able to really look at this

and show that it's not just about polar bears and

melting ice caps.

>> Male Speaker: Yeah.

>> Gina McCarthy: It's about our kids;

it's about families; it's about our future;

it's about what our core value is and what

we do to meet our moral responsibility to our kids

in that future.

So this is a really great document to sink

your teeth into.

While you won't be reading happy news,

if knowledge is power, we need it and that's what we

have here for the first time and, John, I want

to thank you for all of your leadership with the

team and also the folks at EPA, because

I can remember in 2013 when EPA was putting

out our "Climate Indicators" report,

the one indicator that was the weakest was

the one that I wanted to be the strongest,

which was the public health indicators and we're all

sitting there, scratching our heads,

saying "How come you can talk about precipitation,

intense storms, sea level rise" -- you know,

we could talk about a lot of those things,

but quantify none of the public health impacts

directly and so it's been a remarkable journey over the

past two years to actually get this science under our

belt in a way that even the National Academies have

reviewed and provided input on.

So it's a -- it's a -- it's a great thing and frankly it

is a wakeup call, because there are a number of

impacts that we are seeing here that we're already

feeling and a number of impacts so that you can

virtually see that every human being in every part of

the United States is impacted now by climate and

will get increasingly impacted if we do not take

action now to try to reduce those impacts.

So we're talking about everything from impacting

our food, our water, our air,

and our weather and if that's not enough,

it's probably impacting how happy you are every day and

what your mental health status is.