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Climate change, healthy ageing and the health crisis: is wisdom the link?

Several major societal challenges are under serious consideration by many groups, including The Physiological Society. Climate change, healthy ageing and the impact of a sedentary lifestyle on health have been the subject of much debate, including separate editorials in Experimental Physiology. In this editorial, the common causation and connections between these areas are considered. Homo sapiens (Latin: ‘wise man’) has become the dominant species on Earth, with its members using their complex brains and consequent ‘wisdom’, or intellect, to migrate from their African homeland 300,000 years ago to all areas of the planet. This migration was achieved by largely technological and behavioural adaptations to climatic challenges, rather than physiological acclimatization. Although thermally related physiological and anatomical differences can be observed in humans from different parts of the globe, they are minor in comparison to those seen in other animals (e.g., fur, blubber, morphological and biochemical changes). Humans followed a more technological route; the oldest building made by hominids (in Tanzania) was a windbreak constructed by Australopithecus ∼3.25 million years ago. More than 1 million years ago, Homo erectus was building huts from stones, branches and furs. Clothing might have been used by humans 120,000 years ago. Amongst other things, these technological adaptations provided shelter and helped to recreate the same microclimatic temperature (33C next to the skin) as would have been experienced in East Africa (Tipton et al., 2007) (even today, anyone at rest who reports feeling thermally comfortable is likely to have amean skin temperature very close to 33C). This technological approach, founded on intellect, has been ‘successful’; it has underpinned an exponential explosion in the number of humans on the planet: from one billion in 1804, to two billion in 1927, to three billion in 1960 and another billion every 12–14 years since, reaching an anticipated 8 billion in November 2022. But problems arise from a reliance on technology. The first is vulnerability when it fails (e.g., when the cruise liner sinks and tropical, non-coldadapted elderly humans find themselves in cold conditions). We see tens of thousands of excess deaths occurring in summer and winter, during cold snaps and summer heat waves. The European heat wave of 2003 might have killed >70,000 people (Robine et al., 2008). In the UK, we regularly see 10,000 excess deaths over a winter (Office for National Statistics, 2021).