by Washington (AP)-The climate change caused by humans is responsible for killing around 1,500 people in the European heat wave of last week, a unique quick study.
These 1,500 people “only died because of climate change, they would not have died if it hadn’t been for our burning of oil, coal and gas in the last century,” said Study co-author Friederike Otto, air conditioning table at Imperial College in London.
Scientists from the Imperial and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used experts examined techniques to calculate that around 2,300 people in 12 cities probably died with high temperatures in the past week, with almost two thirds of the needs died.
In earlier quick attribution studies, the role of climate change in meteorological effects such as additional warmth, floods or drought did not go beyond the evaluation of climate change. This study goes one step further if you die the use of coal, oil and natural gas use with people.
“Heat waves are silent murderers and their health effects are very difficult to measure,” said co-author Gary Konstantinoudis, a biostatistic at Imperial College. “
Of the 1,500 deaths that are due to climate change, the study found that more than 1,100 people were 75 or older.
Climate change made a heat wave hotter
“It’s summer, so it is sometimes hot,” said Ben Clarke from Imperial College in a press conference on Tuesday. “The influence of climate change has pushed it over several degrees, and what that is is certain groups of people more in a dangerous territory and that is important. We really want to highlight that here. For some people it is still warm, fine weather, but it is more dangerous.”
The researchers looked in London from June 23 to July 2. Paris; Frankfurt, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Zagreb, Croatia; Athens, Greece; Barcelona, Spain; Madrid; Lisbon, Portugal; Rome; Milan and Sassari, Italy. They found that the additional heat from greenhouse gases 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) was added to a more natural heat wave in Lisbon. London got most of it at almost 4 degrees (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Climate change has only added about one degree to Lisba’s top temperature, the study, mainly due to the moderating effect of the Atlantic, calculated, said Otto.
This extra climate -changing heat added in Milan, Barcelona and Paris and least in Sassari, Frankfurt and Lisbon, as the study found. The number of 1,500 is the middle of the area of the total climate -drawn death estimates from around 1,250 to around 1,700.
How scientists weigh up climate change, calculate the deaths
The study of Wednesday has not yet been checked by experts. It is an expansion of the work of an international team of scientists who carry out rapid attribution studies in order to search for the fingerprints of global warming in the global number of extreme weather events, and to combine them with long -term epidemiological research that examine the death trends that differ from what is considered normal.
The researchers compared what the thermometers read last week, with what computer simulations in a world would have done without a planet warming farm gas from fossil fuel consumption. Health researchers then compared the estimates – there are no solid numbers – for heat esters in what was expected with the deaths for every city without this additional degree of heat.
There have been established formulas for a long time that calculate excess deaths that differ from normal location, demography, temperatures and other factors, and these are used, said Otto and Konstantinoudis. And health researchers take into account many variables such as smoking and chronic diseases, so that it compares similar people with the exception of the temperature so that they know what is to blame, said Constantinoudis.
Studies in 2021 generally combined excess deaths with people with people with people, climate change and carbon emissions, but not specific events such as the hot sorceress of the past week. In a study of 2023 in Nature Medicine, it estimates that the temperature in Europe has increased for every degree Celsius since 2015, an additional 18,547 summer heat.
Studies like on Wednesday “end the installment game about the health of the healthcare system by further burning fossil fuels,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin. He was not part of research, but said that “the latest climate and health methods combined and found that every fraction of a certain degree of heating is important in terms of extreme heat waves.”
Dr. Courtney Howard, a Canadian emergency doctor and chairman of the global climate and health alliance, said: “Studies like them help us to see that the use of fossil fuels is health care.”
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