(The Guardian) Extreme Temperatures Kill 5 Million People A Year With Heat-Related Deaths Rising, Study Finds

The Guardian - Donna Lu | Lisa Cox

More people died of cold than heat in past 20 years but climate change is shifting the balance

The sun rises over Melbourne on a scorching day. Deaths linked to hot temperatures are on the rise, a global study has found. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP

More than 5 million people die each year globally because of excessively hot or cold conditions, a 20-year study has found – and heat-related deaths are on the rise.

The study involving dozens of scientists around the world found that 9.4% of global deaths each year are attributable to heat or cold exposure, equivalent to 74 extra deaths per 100,000 people.

It’s prompted calls for better housing insulation and more solar-powered air conditioning, as well as warnings that climate change will increase temperature-linked deaths in the future.

Researchers analysed mortality and weather data from 750 locations in 43 countries between 2000 and 2019, and found the average daily temperature in these locations increased by 0.26C per decade.

The study found more people had died of cold than heat over the two-decade period. But heat-related deaths were increasing, while cold-linked deaths were dropping.

Australia demands world heritage experts visit Great Barrier Reef ahead of ‘in danger’ list decision.  Read more

Monash University’s Prof Yuming Guo, one of the study’s lead researchers, said this trend would continue because of climate change, and total mortality rates may go up.

“In the future, cold-related mortality should continue to decrease, but because the heat-related mortality will continue to increase, that means there will be a break point,” Guo said.

He said in Europe there had already been an overall increase in the rate of deaths associated with temperatures.

“If we don’t take any action to mitigate climate change … more deaths will be caused.”

The study, published in the journal the Lancet Planetary Health, took into account the differing optimal temperatures for people living in different regions.

“Populations have the ability to adapt to local weather,” said Guo.

The highest heat-related excess death rate was in eastern Europe, while sub-Saharan Africa had the highest mortality rate linked to cold temperatures.

Prof Adrian Barnett from the Queensland University of Technology, who was not involved in the study, said heart attacks, cardiac arrests and strokes increase in both extremely cold and hot conditions.

“People particularly at risk are people who have some kind of pre-existing heart and lung condition,” he said.

Populations are well adapted to the climates where they live, in terms of their housing, clothing and behaviour, Barnett said. “Hot countries have fewer heat deaths, but that’s likely to change.”

Barnett said mitigation strategies such as better housing insulation and off-grid solar-powered air conditioning – which would work even during power outages – should be considered.

Human-induced global heating ‘causes over a third of heat deaths’.  Read more

The findings come as a separate analysis by the Global Climate and Health Alliance ranked Australia equal last out of 66 countries for efforts to include human health concerns in their climate commitments.

Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Norway and Iceland all received a score of zero out of 15 on the report card as countries that failed to even mention human health in their nationally determined contributions.

The organisation also examined what countries were doing to strengthen their health systems for the burdens caused by the climate crisis, how much extra funding these policies received, and to what extent countries acknowledged that reaching net zero emiFssions would have co-benefits for human health.

The European Union was also near the bottom, with a score of one out of 15, while the US and the UK received scores of 6 and 7 respectively. Costa Rica was ranked highest, scoring 13 out of 15.

In May, more than 60 health groups, including the Australian Medical Association and Hesta Super Fund, called on the Morrison government to prioritise health in Australia’s climate goals under the Paris agreement.

“This scorecard shows that Australia is again at the bottom of the pack when it comes to taking the health effects of climate change seriously,” said Fiona Armstrong, the executive director of Australia’s Climate and Health Alliance.

“The prime minister must both act to reduce emissions, and prioritise health in our international climate commitments before COP26 to protect our health.”

Links

• (SMH) ‘Climate Change Is Killing People’: Global Warming Blamed For Record Heat
• World ‘must step up preparations for extreme heat’
• Temperatures rising
• Climate crisis: record ocean heat in 2020 supercharged extreme weather
• Rising levels of carbon dioxide increasing extreme weather events in Australia, report finds
• Climate change made Siberian heatwave 600 times more likely – study
• Climate emergency: 2019 was second hottest year on record
• Australia's extreme heat is sign of things to come, scientists warn
• Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019
• Deadly heat is killing Americans: A decade of inaction on climate puts lives at risk
• The Global Climate and Health Alliance

(SMH) ‘Climate Change Is Killing People’: Global Warming Blamed For Record Heat

Sydney Morning Herald - Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

Washington DC: The deadly heat wave that roasted the Pacific north-west and western Canada in the last two weeks was found to be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.

An international team of 27 scientists calculated that climate change increased chances of the extreme heat occurring by at least 150 times, but likely much more.

The study, not yet peer reviewed, said that before the industrial era, the region’s late June record-breaking heat was the type that would not have happened in human civilisation. And even in today’s warming world, it said, the heat was a once-in-a-millennium event.

A wildfire burns above the Fraser River Valley near Lytton, British Columbia, Canada, on Friday, July 2, 2021. Credit: Bloomberg

But that once-in-a-millennium event would likely occur every five to 10 years once the world warms another 0.8 degrees, said the study from World Weather Attribution.

That much warming could be 40 or 50 years away if carbon pollution continues at its current pace, one study author said.

This type of extreme heat “would go from essentially virtually impossible to relatively commonplace,” said study co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist. “That is a huge change.”

The study also found that in the Pacific north-west and Canada, climate change was responsible for about 2 degrees of the heat shock. Those few degrees make a big difference in human health, said study co-author Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Centre for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

“This study is telling us climate change is killing people,” said Ebi, who endured the blistering heat in Seattle. She said it will be many months before a death toll can be calculated from June’s blast of heat but it’s likely to be hundreds or thousands. “Heat is the number one weather-related killer of Americans.”

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Extreme weather

Hundreds of deaths as Canadian heatwave shatters records

In Oregon alone, the state medical examiner on Wednesday reported 116 deaths related to the heat wave.

The team of scientists used a well-established and credible method to search for climate change’s role in extreme weather, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

They logged observations of what happened and fed them into 21 computer models and ran numerous simulations. They then simulated a world without greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The difference between the two scenarios is the climate change portion.

“Without climate change this event would not have happened,” said study senior author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford.

Beachgoers on Kitsilano Beach during a heatwave in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Monday, June 28, 2021. Credit: Bloomberg

What made the north-west heat wave so remarkable is how much hotter it was than old records and what climate models had predicted.

Scientists say this hints that some kind of larger climate shift could be in play — and in places that they didn’t expect.

“Everybody is really worried about the implications of this event,” said study co-author Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a Dutch climate scientist. “This is something that nobody saw coming, that nobody thought possible. And we feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did. The big question for many people is: Could this also happen in a lot of places?”

The World Weather Attribution team does these quick analyses, which later get published in peer-reviewed journals. In the past, they have found similar large climate change effects in many heat waves, including ones in Europe and Siberia. But sometimes the team finds climate change wasn’t a factor, as they did in a Brazilian drought and a heat wave in India.

Six scientists who weren’t involved in the research said the quick study made sense and probably underestimated the extent of climate change’s role in the heat wave.

That’s because climate models used in the simulations usually underestimate how climate change alters the jet stream that parks “heat domes” over regions and causes some heat waves, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

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Superpower showdown

Power to change: Why the US and China must work together on the climate crisis

The models also underestimate how dry soil worsens heat because there is less water to evaporate, which feeds a vicious cycle of drought, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy.

The study hit home for University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn’t part of the research team.

“Victoria, which is known for its mild climate, felt more like Death Valley last week,” Weaver said. “I’ve been in a lot of hot places in the world, and this was the worst I’ve ever been in.

“But you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he added. “It’s going to get a lot worse.”

Links

• Western North American extreme heat virtually impossible without human-caused climate change
• World ‘must step up preparations for extreme heat’
• Temperatures rising
• Climate crisis: record ocean heat in 2020 supercharged extreme weather
• Rising levels of carbon dioxide increasing extreme weather events in Australia, report finds
• Climate change made Siberian heatwave 600 times more likely – study
• Australia's extreme heat is sign of things to come, scientists warn
• Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019
• Deadly heat is killing Americans: A decade of inaction on climate puts lives at risk

This Is Why We Should Stop Calling It Climate Change

Eudaimonia & Co - Umair Haque

The Words “Climate Change” May End Up Being The Biggest Lie Ever Told

Image Credit: Julia Manning

By now, you might heard the shocking, gruesome fact, that 300 people are dead…in Canada…from the heat. There’s a “heat dome” stretching over the Pacific Northwest, that’s made it nearly as hot as the hottest places on earth. Jacobabad, Pakistan claims that title — with average temperatures of 50ºC. Portland, Oregon hit 46ºC.

This is the brutal, startling reality of climate change.

Of..wait..what?

“Climate change”? The climate isn’t changing. It’s heating. Rapidly. Faster than at any point in hundreds of millions of years. It’s heating so fast that this is the stuff entire geotemporal boundaries are made of — “ages” in geological history. So fast that it’s shattering scientists’ worst predictions — and making reality look like a sci-fi movie, where scores of people die off in Canada because of sweltering heat.

It’s not “change” of some symmetrical, anodyne, innocuous kind. The planet isn’t getting cooler. It’s rapid, sudden, potentially runaway, already lethal, discontinuous transformation in one direction. It’s getting hotter, fast.

We should stop calling it “climate change.” Now, before you object, bear with me, and let’s investigate the history of the term.

We used to call it “global warming.” Not so long ago. The big we, as in, all of us, because that is what the norm was. That’s the term which dominated public discourse, and you’d read it in papers and books and articles. Not the seemingly anodyne “climate change.”

That was a far, far more accurate term. And that was the problem.

Here’s little factoid for you. Do you know who invented the term “climate change”? Frank Luntz. The Republican “strategist.” Why? Because “global warming” was dangerous. Because it was true. Too frightening. Too true. Too real. Too self-explanatory, powerful, and strong. It had to be Orwellianized. It had to memory-holed. Doublespeak had to be crafted — to create the impression that there was some “debate” on this topic.

Debate like what? Debate like: maybe the planet wasn’t just warming. Maybe the temperature and climate were just “changing.” Naturally. Not as a result of human influences. Not as a result of unbridled production, consumption, pollution. Maybe this was just something that happened according to the planet’s natural cycles and rhythms. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Doubt had to be manufactured. That’s why Luntz invented the term “climate change.”

Luntz rebranded global warming as “climate change” because it sounds far, far less dangerous, problematic, severe, worrisome. The usual network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets immediately — as if by design — began to use it. And the rest is history.

By now, all of us use a term that a Republican strategist came up with to make global warming sound less dangerous and wonder why we can’t fix the planet. There you are, probably, like a dummy, still using it. You’re using terms designed by a Republican strategist who wanted to deny the truth of global warming to refer to it. What does that make you? A sucker, a mark, a rube. You’ve fallen for a branding campaign. One designed to pull the wool over eyes about, oh, only the most urgent issue on earth, on which your life and prosperity very much depend, too. Just ask the people in Canada who died of the heat. Oh wait, you can’t, because they’re dead.

Sorry to be harsh — but I feel we have to speak honestly about such matters. Because, of course, there is no doubt about what’s happening to the planet. It’s not cooling, it’s warming, it’s not natural, it’s profoundly unnatural, as in, human-made, and even at that, made by a certain lifestyle of rampant overconsumption, sprawl, greed, and materialism.

What does that make Luntz, by the way? Well, it’s not too hard to see that Luntz’s idea of rebranding global warming as climate change worked.

For decades, nobody much cared. Luntz’s rebranding took place in the early 2000s — when the window to stop the planet hitting severe warming was closing. And the window did close. Now, two degrees of warming is more or less locked in. We’re only at about one so far — and we’ve got killer heat domes in Canada. Want to venture a guess about what happens as the temperature goes on rising?

Lunt’z campaign worked brilliantly. Elites around the planet began using this new term — “climate change” — to sound smart. To please America, the most powerful nation on earth. To align their interests with it. And as elites changed their language, their attitudes and sentiments changed, too. No longer was anyone interested in really stopping runaway global warming. Why — did such a thing even exist?

It was Orwell’s great lesson writ large. If you can disappear a thing in language, you can make people stop thinking it, and it simply…vanishes. The point of Orwellian doublespeak is to veil the truth with doubt, to filigree it with the shadows of complacency, to make the lie seem real. And the truth is that thanks to Luntz, the GOP, American media, and elites around the world following their lead, the dire threat of global warming soon enough became the anodyne sounding “climate change.” And who really worries about that? It makes you think you might be sitting on a tropical beach sipping a Mai Tai — not boiled alive by a killer heat dome.

All the urgency and danger and severity went out of the issue, and the world simply dilly-dallied as if there was plenty of time to waste about a problem that probably wasn’t even going to be much of a problem.

Bang. And here we are, just a few short decades later. The planet has heated dramatically. People are dying from killer…not heat waves…but “heat domes.” We need a whole new vocabulary to describe how rapidly and badly the temperature’s rising. “Summer” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. It’s now a time of mortal danger for people, whether from “heat domes” or “megafires” or “megafloods” or “megafires” and so on.

And yet we’re still using the vocabulary of global-warming deniers to describe all this: “climate change.”

We’ve been made fools of, in such a deep and lasting way. It’s taken away our power — using the Orwellian language which was chosen for us — to fight the biggest and most urgent problem human civilisation has ever faced.

So if using the term “climate change” make us apathetic, spineless, useful idiots, to elites who’d happily watch the world literally burn — what does that make Frank Luntz? Well, Luntz will — or perhaps should — probably go down as one of history’s great monsters. 300 people in Canada are already dead. Climate change is going to claim tens, probably hundreds millions of lives. As nations burn, cities sink, societies go up like tinderboxes, and the desperate and impoverished try to flee it all.

Nobody can really say how much of that death and despair can be ascribed to Luntz alone. But would you like have to played a hand in hundreds of millions of deaths?

Maybe that’s why Luntz himself is apologetic about his malign, Orwellian creation. Of course, apologies aren’t nearly enough. It’s like watching an abuser hit you and say “sorry.” Redress means a whole lot more, and it starts the true process of reparations.

Luntz? I don’t think history will ever forgive him, and that’s OK — he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who cares.

But you should. You should care intensely about all this. Because, like I said, you’ve been made a fool of. You’re using the language global warming deniers invented to try, futilely, to describe what’s happening to a dying planet. Of course, it doesn’t work very well, because they invented the very term “climate change” to stop any reality from entering the discussion, minds, societies, public spheres. Their goal was to kill the truth, and they succeeded.

“Climate change” might well prove the Biggest Lie ever told.

So you should stop telling it, too. It’s not “climate change.” It never was. It’s “global warming,” (or “global heating,” if you like, but that sounds a little silly) and we should all reclaim that term. Yes, it sounds dire. That’s because it contains power, resonance, urgency, forces a confrontation with reality. It has deep, serious, profound meaning. Yes, it’s frightening.

It should be. Because it’s true.

Links

• This Isn’t a Heatwave — It’s a Dying Planet
• The Age of Worst Case Scenarios
• The Climate Change Solution That Could Spark Global War
• Wet Bulb temperature is the scariest part of climate change you’ve never heard of
• This Statistic Changed My Entire Perspective of Climate Change
• How to Have a Useful Conversation About Climate Change in 11 Steps
• Climate Change’s Hidden Victim: Your Mental Health
• The Three Most Important Graphs in Climate Change