Climate change responsible for about a third of heat deaths, study says

Climate change responsible for about a third of heat deaths, study says
By Mary Beth Griggs

People try to keep cool in Lisbon, Portugal during a heatwave in 2018. | Photo credit should read PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images

Heat is a killer — and climate change is driving up its body count. On average, about 37 percent of heat deaths can be tied back to human-caused climate change, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change.

The study looked at data from 732 places in 43 countries over a period of about three decades, from 1991-2018. They used information including heat deaths and temperature readings from those places to build computer models that calculated how many deaths could be attributed to climate change. The numbers varied depending on location, with a larger percentage of climate-change related deaths occuring in warmer countries than cooler ones.

Overall, about 166,000 people died of heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2017, according...

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May 31, 2021 at 10:25PM
via The Verge - All Posts