Risk of heat-related deaths has ‘increased rapidly’ over past 20 years
▻https://www.carbonbrief.org/risk-of-heat-related-deaths-has-increased-rapidly-over-past-20-years
“The risk has already shifted strongly,” Lüthi tells Carbon Brief. He says that in many of the regions studied, if no adaptation takes place, what used to be a 1-in-100 year heat mortality extreme in the year 2000 will be expected roughly every other year under a 2C warmer climate.
The results show that “even moderate-sounding rises in global temperature increase the dangers of global heating very dramatically”, adds Prof Peter Stott – a science fellow in climate attribution at the UK Met Office, who was not involved in the study.
[...] Stott tells Carbon Brief that “the health impacts of climate change could be changing even faster than the weather extremes are changing, due to the highly non-linear relationship between temperatures and mortality”.
[...] The authors find that if warming reaches 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, high temperatures could claim as many as 10% of deaths during periods of extreme heat.