Research warns global warming over more than 1 in 3 heat-related deaths News of Climate Change

More than a third of global warming deaths each year are due to global warming, according to a recent study to calculate the human cost of climate change.

Scientists say it’s just part of the overall toll of climate change – even more people are dying from global warming from other extreme weather like storms, floods and droughts – and the number of heat deaths will increase exponentially as temperatures rise.

Dozens of researchers studying heat deaths in 732 cities around the world from 1991 to 2018 estimated that 37 percent of human-caused warming was caused by higher temperatures, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

That’s about 9,700 people a year from those cities, but that’s a lot more worldwide, according to the study’s lead author.

“These are truly preventable heat-related deaths. It’s something that affects us directly,” said Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The highest percentages of heat deaths caused by climate change were in South American cities.

Vicedo-Cabrera pointed to southern Europe and southern Asia as another point to achieve heat deaths associated with climate change.

The researchers found that Sao Paulo (Brazil) has the highest number of climate-related heat deaths, averaging 239 per year.

“Negative” health effects

About 35% of heat deaths in the United States can be attributed to climate change. That’s a total of more than 1,100 deaths a year in about 200 U.S. cities in the U.S., surpassing 141 in New York. Honolulu accounted for the largest share of heat deaths attributable to climate change, at 82%.

The scientists used death data from decades in 732 cities to determine how the death rate in each city changes with temperature and how the heat-death curves change from city to city. Vicedo-Cabrera said some cities are better suited than others to the heat because of the air conditioning, cultural factors and environmental conditions.

The researchers then took the observed temperatures and compared them to 10 computer models that simulate a world without climate change. The difference is human-induced warming.

By applying this scientifically accepted technique to individualized heat-death curves in 732 cities, scientists calculated more heat-deaths as a result of climate change.

“People continue to demand proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This recognition study directly answers this question using epidemiological methods of the state of science, and the amount of data the authors have accumulated for analysis is impressive,” said Jonathan Patz, Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin. directors of.

Patz, who was not part of the study, said that rather than in the future, he was one of the first to determine heat deaths related to climate change.

“Climate change is not something of a distant future,” lead author Antonio Gasparrini, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at London’s Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP news agency.

“We can already measure the negative impacts on health, in addition to the known environmental and ecological effects,” Gasparrini said.

Scientists have warned that deadly heat waves that could have occurred a century before climate change began could occur much more frequently in the middle of the century.

It measures the extent to which the field of attribution of the climate sciences is growing, for example, the intensity of the typhoon, the duration of the drought, or the destruction of storm surges has increased as a result of global warming.

But few studies have attempted to do the same for human health, said Dan Mitchell, a researcher at the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol.

“This change in thinking is key … for global leaders to understand the risks,” he said in a comment on Nature Climate Change.