Research: About 10,000 children a year would survive if the temperature did not go beyond normal bounds
At least 24 previously impossible heatwaves have struck communities across the planet, a new assessment has shown, providing stark evidence of how severely human-caused global heating is supercharging extreme weather, The Guardian writes.
The impossible heatwaves have taken lives across North America, Europe and Asia, with scientific analyses showing that they would have had virtually zero chance of happening without the extra heat trapped by fossil fuel emissions.
In total, studies calculating the role of the climate crisis in what are now unnatural disasters show 550 heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires have been made significantly more severe or more frequent by global heating. This roll-call of suffering is only a glimpse of the true damage, however. Most extreme weather events have not been analyzed by scientists.
The new database of hundreds of studies that analyze the role of global heating in extreme weather was compiled by the website Carbon Brief and shared with the Guardian. It is the only comprehensive assessment and provides overwhelming proof that the climate emergency is here today, taking lives and livelihoods in all corners of the world.
The studies have examined the impacts resulting from about 1.3C of global heating to date. The prospect of 2.5C to 3.0C, which is where the world is headed, is therefore catastrophic, warn the scientists. They urge the world’s nations meeting at the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan to deliver deep and rapid cuts to carbon emissions and to fund the protection desperately needed by many communities against now-inevitable climate disasters.
The burning of fossil fuels has so dramatically changed the climate that heatwaves are hitting communities with a severity and frequency never seen during the entire development of human civilization over the past 5,000 years. It is a new world, for which cities, hospitals, roads and farms are unprepared, and a world that gets even more dangerous every day as carbon emissions continue to be pumped into the atmosphere.
One study has found that one in three newborn babies that died due to heat would have survived if global heating had not pushed temperatures beyond normal bounds – that is about 10,000 lost babies a year. Another study of heat-related deaths in summer from 1991-2018 also found a deadly impact of global heating in the 43 countries assessed. Extrapolating these findings to a global figure is not straightforward, but an approximate estimate given by the scientists is more than 100,000 deaths a year. Over the two decades, that implies a toll of millions of lives due to the climate crisis.
