Forbes: The Heart Under Heat: Why Climate Change Matters To Me (and You) Today
January 19, 2026I spent my clinical career in the most extreme corner of medicine, heart and lung transplantation. At least weekly I’d cut out a failing heart and replace it with a healthy heart from someone who died tragically. Transplant is the last resort, a radical act when everything else has failed. That experience convinces you of one thing: prevention matters most. If we can keep hearts healthy and thereby delay or avoid the day when a transplant must even be considered, we save lives, but also years of vitality.
That lens of a career treating heart disease colors how I see the changing climate, the increase in extreme weather patterns, the hotter days we are all experiencing. Climate change, thus to me, is not abstract. It is a direct, measurable, and increasingly dangerous threat to the heart. Mine and yours and those of your children and your grandchildren. And the science is now overwhelming.