Editor's Note
Enduring the Weather
My father was a weather junkie. Not content with a daily dose of weather news from television or the newspaper, he got his fix from weather radios scattered throughout the house that would give him the latest report directly from the weather service. As a private pilot, he relied on accurate weather forecasts and would sample aviation forecasts online or by phone. Usually, this was not enough, so he would go to his mainline, a private weather forecaster with whom he had a personal connection for 40 years, exchanging holiday gifts as well as weather information.
His phone calls to us in Minnesota frequently started with questions about the weather, and he was apoplectic over its severity. When I described a 10-below day, the pain in his voice was palpable. For weather could truly make him ill. A rainy day at the lake infused him with almost debilitating gloom. Despite living in Chicago all his life, he never accepted that winter was an inevitable result of latitude and the rotation of the Earth. From October to April, he would come in from outside grumbling and miserable, complaining that this weather would be the death of him.
For Minnesotans, the concept of lethal weather is not foreign. In winter, we hear about dangerous wind chills. In summer, we head to the northeast corner of our basement when the weather sirens go off. To the winter averse, our pageant of seasons is a euphemism concocted by chambers of commerce to lure the unsuspecting northward. Our ability to tolerate extreme weather is part of our identity, a rugged façade that declares to those short-sleeved softies in 70-and-sunny climes, “we can endure.” And endure most of us do. But as Jeanne Mettner notes in her feature, our cold can claim victims who arrive in ERs needing medical attention for frostbite, hypothermia, and worse (p. 24). Cold days are short days, and recent research suggests that legions of sun-starved Minnesotans are walking around with undiagnosed vitamin D deficiency (p. 43). Clearly, there are risks to living in our climate.
Most agree, however, that our climate is changing, although not quickly enough to stem the yearly migration of snowbirds to Arizona and Florida. As winters become milder and ice caps melt, disease patterns alter when animal vectors such as birds and insects change their behavior. Minnesota will not soon turn tropical, but our medical community is likely to see diseases previously restricted to the southern United States and physicians around the globe will see the health effects of climate change-induced drought and deluge (p. 35). Climate change is truly a medical issue.
Never a believer in global warming and thus unlikely to believe that Minnesota could change its climatic stripes, my father, if alive, would surely still be finding excuses not to visit us in the dangerous chasm between October and May. He did eventually find his way out of Chicago’s cold, spending his final 10 winters in southwest Florida, luxuriating in the 90-degree heat with relentless humidity and enjoying a good healthy sweat.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief Dr. Meyer can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org