Climate change could triple the number of heat deaths in the US by mid-century, experts warn

If global warming goes largely unchecked, the number of Americans succumbing to extreme heat will triple by mid-century, new projections estimate.

According to a team led by Dr. Sameed Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania, these deaths could affect poor Americans and minorities far more than white and affluent Americans.

Rising temperatures will lead to a slight drop in deaths from extreme cold, his team found, but triple-digit heat waves will more than offset that.

‘Overall, deaths from extreme temperatures are expected to more than double or triple, depending on conditions [carbon] scenario for an increase in emissions analyzed,” Khatana’s team reported in the magazine on September 20 JAMA network opened.

A study published last month found that heat-related deaths in the US rose sharply and steadily between 2016 and 2023.

“Heat-related illnesses, such as heat exhaustion or heat stroke, happen when the body cannot cool itself properly,” the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“While the body normally cools itself by sweating, during extreme heat this may not be enough. In these cases, a person’s body temperature rises faster than they can cool themselves. This can cause damage to the brain and other vital organs.”

In the new study, the UPenn team used data on all counties in the United States for past trends in deaths from extreme heat and cold.

They then turned to “temperature projections from twenty climate models,” plus projections on population changes, “to estimate deaths from extreme temperatures for the period 2036 to 2065.”

Those projections were based on two models of what could happen to our planet’s climate in the coming decades.

One projection assumed lower CO2 emissions, “due to the successful implementation of many currently proposed emissions controls,” such as a switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, the researchers said.

The other projection assumed a continuation of ‘fossil fuel-dependent socio-economic development, with greater increases in emissions’.

The result: In the first scenario, in which the pace of global warming was slowed somewhat, annual deaths in the US from extreme temperatures (mostly heat) rose from about 8,249 today to 19,348 annually by mid-2019. the century.

That is still more than a doubling of the death rate.

In the second, worst-case scenario, however, deaths will more than triple by mid-century, to an average of 26,574, Khatana’s group said.

Race and ethnicity will make a big difference in who might die on extremely hot days.

While the risk of deaths from extreme temperatures is expected to increase by about 71% among white Americans by mid-century, the risk for Black Americans will increase by 395.7% and the risk for Hispanic Americans will increase by 537.5 %, the researchers calculated.

“Many individuals from ethnic and racial minority groups live in neighborhoods with lower access to air conditioning, higher urban heat island effect, less exposure to green space, greater exposure to traffic-related air pollution, and a greater likelihood of winter power outages. that increase their vulnerability to extreme temperatures,” Khatana and colleagues explained.

Of course, air conditioning use may increase, but “even areas with near-universal access to air conditioning, such as the southern US, appear to experience high burdens of extreme heat and temperature-related deaths,” the team noted.

But climate change will bring other health threats, one expert noted.

Dr. Cioe-Peña, vice president of the Northwell Health Center for Global Health, emphasized that climate change is no longer a distant threat, pointing to the undeniable increase in extreme weather events, record-breaking temperatures and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever to new areas as evidence.

“We’ll see [these diseases] in places where we haven’t seen them before,” he warned. ‘Malaria in Florida, dengue on the West Coast. But we will also see them moving further north than ever before.”

He also noted that the United States is facing a “perfect storm” of rising temperatures and a wave of vulnerable aging baby boomers. With 10,000 boomers turning 65 every day, the health care system is preparing for a demographic shift like no other, he said.

“They always say that extreme weather events disproportionately affect the extremely old,” Cioe-Peña says. “And we’re now seeing a sort of top-heavy graph in the age distribution in the United States as the baby boomers age.”

This is especially concerning because seniors are particularly vulnerable to heat. They have a harder time regulating their body temperature, are less likely to recognize the signs of heatstroke and are more susceptible to dehydration and heat-related illness, he noted.

Still, acting now could help prevent thousands of deaths in the coming years, the researchers said.

“In addition to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, efforts are needed to mitigate the negative impacts of extreme temperatures on public health,” they wrote.

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