Our Warming World Is Dangerous For Human Health
Deaths caused by excessive heat could increase by 370% by the end of the century if the world continues warming at the pace it’s currently on, a new report has found. The sobering findings are one of many in the latest Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, the eighth version of a report on the health impacts of climate change compiled by dozens of research institutions and US agencies. People are now exposed to “twice as many heat wave days” versus two decades ago. The report finds that if warming rises to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100—a path we are almost certain to overshoot—524.9 million additional people will be exposed to food insecurity. In the US, 2022 saw an 88% increase in heat-related deaths in older adults versus the early 2000s. “Every heat-related death in my mind is avoidable,” Dr. Renee Salas, a senior author of the study and an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told NBC. “And it is on us within the health sector to protect those people while simultaneously working upstream to get to the root cause and to transition away from fossil fuels.”
(New York Times $, NBC, AP, Reuters, Axios, ABC, Grist, CNN, NPR, MedPage)
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