Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, the producer of Public Health on Call. Today, I talk with Dr. John

Grutman, an environmental epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins

Bloomberg School of Public Health, about climate disruption and infrastructure in the context

of recent catastrophic events, the history of how we got here, and why there are reasons

for optimism. Let's listen. John Grutman, thanks so much for joining us today.

This summer, we've seen some devastating and deadly events related to climate disruption and infrastructure.

We've got the record heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, the tragic collapse of the condo building in Miami, floods in Europe, rock slide in India.

It feels like these things have happened in rapid succession and in places we may not have associated with climate change.

How do we get here?

No, that's, I mean, that's a terrific question.

And actually, I think I'd like to give a little bit of a perspective of how we've evolved to the point that all of these things

seem to be coming together at the same time. And much of this traces back to how energy

and transportation developed in the industrialized societies of our planet, starting over 200 years ago.

As you know, Baltimore was one of the hubs of the beginning of the railroad industry in North America.

And at that time, the steam engine was being developed,

...