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.
Photo: Reuters
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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS