Nearly five times more people are likely to die due to extreme heat in the coming decades, an international team of experts said yesterday, adding that without action on climate change the “health of humanity is at grave risk.”
Lethal heat was just one of the many ways the world’s increasing use of fossil fuels threatens human health, said The Lancet Countdown, a major annual assessment carried out by leading researchers and institutions.
More common droughts would put millions at risk of starving, mosquitoes spreading farther than ever before would take infectious diseases with them and health systems would struggle to cope with the burden, the researchers said.
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The assessment comes during what is expected to be the hottest year in human history — just last week, Europe’s climate monitor declared that last month was the warmest October on record.
Despite growing calls for global action, energy-related carbon emissions reached new highs last year, the Lancet Countdown report said, singling out still massive government subsidies and private bank investments into planet-heating fossil fuels.
Last year, people worldwide were exposed to an average of 86 days of life-threatening temperatures, the Lancet Countdown study found.
About 60 percent of those days were made more than twice as likely due to climate change, it said.
The number of people over 65 who died from heat rose by 85 percent from 1991-2000 to 2013-2022, it said.
Under a scenario in which the world warms by 2°C by the end of the century — it is currently on track for 2.7°C — annual heat-related deaths were projected to increase 370 percent by 2050. That marks a 4.7-fold increase.
Meanwhile, a heatwave that has settled over large parts of Brazil on Tuesday sent temperatures soaring in Rio de Janeiro to levels more akin to those in an oven.
Thermometers read 39°C but that did not convey the intensity of the heat, authorities said.
In Rio, it felt like 58.5°C. That was the “feels like” temperature, a measurement of how hot or cold it feels like on the skin, depending on humidity, temperature and wind speed.
It marked “the highest thermal sensation since the beginning of records” in 2014, the Rio Alerta system said.
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