“Deadly heat stress could threaten hundreds of millions”

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

h/t Patsy Lacey

Deadly heat stress is projected to affect hundreds of millions more people each year under relatively little additional climate warming. The Paris Agreement commits the international community to limit global warming to no more than 2℃ above pre-industrial (late 19th century) air temperatures, with an aspirational target of 1.5℃. In our latest research, which looked at the impact of global temperature rises on megacities, we found that even if 1.5℃ is achieved, large increases in the frequency of deadly heat are expected.

By 2050 about 350m more people living in megacities could be exposed to deadly heat each year.

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Seeing as how we are told the world is already 1C warmer than those idyllic pre-industrial times, I might ask where all of the hundreds of millions are, who must already be dying.

In reality, of course, the UHI effect in big cities must totally dwarf the odd tenth of a degree resulting from any global warming, and it is that which needs attention.

But what Mr Matthews forgets to tell us is that cold weather kills many, many more times as many people as hot weather does, as this study in the Lancet proved in 2015:

Cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather, and it’s not the extreme low or high temperatures that cause the most deaths, according to a study published Wednesday.

The study found the majority of deaths occurred on moderately hot and moderately cold days instead of during extreme temperatures.

"Although the risk of mortality due to extremely cold or hot days is actually higher, they are less frequent," said lead author Antonio Gasparrini of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The study — published in the British journal The Lancet — analyzed data on more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Of those, 5.4 million deaths were related to cold, while 311,000 were related to heat.

Because the study included countries under different socio-economic backgrounds and with varying climates, it was representative of temperature-related deaths worldwide, the study said. The sharp distinction between heat- and cold-related deaths is because low temperatures cause more problems for the body’s cardiovascular and respiratory systems, it added.

"Public-health policies focus almost exclusively on minimizing the health consequences of heat waves," Gasparrini said. "Our findings suggest that these measures need to be refocused and extended to take account of a whole range of effects associated with temperature."

This report backs up a U.S. study last year from the National Center for Health Statistics, which found that cold kills more than twice as many Americans as heat

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And this does not only apply to colder regions. As the analysis shows, countries like Spain and Thailand share the same phenomenon.