Burning of fossil fuels caused 1,500 deaths in recent European heat wave, study estimates

Washington: Human-caused climate change is responsible for killing about 1,500 people in last week’s European heat wave, a first-of-its-kind rapid study found.

Those 1,500 people “have only died because of climate change, so they would not have died if it had not been for our burning of oil, coal and gas in the last century,” said study co-author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College in London.

Scientists at Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used peer-reviewed techniques to calculate that about 2,300 people in 12 cities likely died from the heat in last week’s bout of high temperatures, with nearly two-thirds of them dying because of the extra degrees that climate change added to the natural summer warmth.

Past rapid attribution studies have not gone beyond evaluating climate change’s role in meteorological effects such as extra heat, flooding or drought. This study goes a step further in directly connecting coal, oil and natural gas use to people dying.

“Heat waves are silent killers, and their health impact is very hard to measure,? Said co-author Gary Konstantinoudis, a biostatistician at Imperial College. ”People do not understand the actual mortality toll of heat waves, and this is because doctors, hospitals and governments do not report heat as an underlying cause of death”, and instead attribute it to heart, lung or other organ problems.

Of the 1,500 deaths attributed to climate change, the study found more than 1,100 were people 75 or older.

“It’s summer, so it’s sometimes hot,” study lead author Ben Clarke of Imperial College said in a Tuesday news conference. ”The influence of climate change has pushed it up by several degrees, and what that does is it brings certain groups of people more into dangerous territory, and that’s what’s important. That’s what we want to highlight here. For some people, it’s still warm, fine weather, but for now, a huge sector of the population, it’s more dangerous.”

Researchers looked at June 23 to July 2 in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Germany, Budapest, Hungary, Zagreb, Croatia; Athens, Greece; Barcelona, Spain; Madrid; Lisbon, Portugal; Rome; Milan and Sassari, Italy. They found that, except in Lisbon, the extra warmth from greenhouse gases added 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) to what would have been a more natural heat wave. London got the most at nearly 4 degrees (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Climate change only added about a degree to Lisbon’s peak temperature, the study calculated, mostly because of the Atlantic Ocean’s moderating effect, Otto said.

That extra climate-change-caused heat added the most extra deaths in Milan, Barcelona and Paris and the least in Sassari, Frankfurt and Lisbon, the study found.

Wednesday’s study is not yet peer-reviewed. It is an extension of work done by an international team of scientists who do rapid attribution studies to search for global warming’s fingerprints in the growing number of extreme weather events worldwide, and combine that with long-established epidemiological research that examines death trends that differ from what’s considered normal.