by Extreme heat is a murderer and its impact is far, much more deadly than the human climate crisis supercharges temperatures caused by humans, according to a new study that estimates the global warming the number of deaths in the recent European heat wave tripled.
For more than a week the temperatures were in many parts of Europe over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Tourist attractions closed, forest fires tore through different countries and people struggled to cope with a continent where air conditioning is rare.
The result was deadly. It is estimated that thousands of people have lost their lives, according to a first research study of its kind, published on Wednesday.
A team of researchers, led by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, looked at 10 days of extreme heat between 23 June and 2 July in 12 European cities, including London, Paris, Athens, Madrid and Rome.
They used historical weather data to calculate how intense the heat would have been if people had not burned fossil fuels and had heated the world with 1.3 degrees Celsius. They found climate change that Europe made heat wave 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 7.2 Fahrenheit) hotter.
The scientists then used research into the relationship between heat and daily dead to estimate how many people lost their lives.
They discovered that around 2,300 people died of heat in the 12 cities for ten days, about 1500 more than would have died in a world without climate change. In other words, global heating was responsible for 65% of the total death toll.
“The results show how relatively small in the most popular temperatures can cause huge increases in death,” the authors of the study wrote.
Heat has a particularly harmful impact on people with underlying health problems, such as heart conditions, diabetes and breathing problems.
People older than 65 were the most affected, accounting for 88% of the surplus deaths, according to the analysis. But warmth can be deadly for everyone. Nearly 200 of the estimated deaths in the 12 cities belonged to the age of 20 to 65.
Climate change was responsible for the vast majority of the heat asterfalls in some cities. In Madrid it was good for about 90% of the estimated heat golf, the analysis showed.
The focus of the study on 12 cities only makes it a snapshot of the True Heat Wave Death Tol about the continent, which researchers estimate that it could be up to tens of thousands of people.
“Heatgoots do not leave any trace of destruction such as forest fires or storms,” said Ben Clarke, a study author and a researcher at Imperial College London. “Their effects are usually invisible but quietly devastating – a change of only 2 or 3 degrees Celsius can mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people.”
The world must stop burning fossil fuels in order to prevent heat waves from becoming more hotter and fatal and cities must adjust urgently, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “Shifting to renewable energy, building cities that are resistant to extreme heat and protecting the poorest and most vulnerable is absolutely essential,” she said.
Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the analysis, said: “Robust techniques used in this study, no doubt that climate change is already a deadly power in Europe.”
Richard Allan, a climate science professor at the University of Reading who was also not involved in the report, said that the study contributed to huge quantities of prove that climate change makes heat waves more intense, “which means that moderate heat becomes dangerous and record heat is unprecedented.”
It is not only heat that is assigned to hot world, Allan added. “If part of the world bakes and burns, another region can suffer intense rainfall and catastrophic floods.”
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