Reports say rising temperatures lead to more sickness

This article was written by Seth Borenstein and was published in the Toronto Star on November 15, 2023.

Humanity’s fight to curb climate change is failing in dozens of ways with people getting sicker and dying as the world warms and the fossil fuels causing it get more subsidies, according to two global reports issued Tuesday.

The health journal Lancet’s annual Countdown on climate and health found more people, especially the elderly, dying because of heat waves in recent years and it projects that will soar as temperatures keep rising. The international team of doctors, scientists and economists looked at 47 measurements, many outside health, to diagnose a sick Earth, emphasizing harms they attribute directly to the fossil fuel industry.

Earlier in the day, the World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker, the Bezos Earth Fund and others issued their State of Climate Action report, which found the world off track in 41 of 42 important measurements. It said six indicators are heading in the wrong direction, including fossil fuel subsidies. Also Tuesday, the United States government issued its more than 2,200-page National Climate Assessment that looked at hundreds of measurements for what warming is doing to America.

Worldwide heat deaths for people over 65 were 85 per cent higher in the last 10 years compared to 1991 to 2000, the study found. Researchers compared the death increase to computer simulations for the same population but in a world that hadn’t warmed and found they could attribute most of those deaths to climate change, not population growth.

In the U.S., heat deaths for the elderly increased 88 per cent in the past five years compared to 2000 to 2004 with most of that attributable to climate change, the study found. There were 23,200 elderly heat deaths in 2022, the report found.

“We are already seeing climate change claiming lives and livelihoods in every part of the world,” said Lancet Countdown executive director Marina Romanello. “However, these impacts that we’re seeing today could be just an early symptom of a very dangerous future unless we tackle climate change urgently.”

Romanello said people self-reporting hunger because of heat waves and drought has also soared, adding “this could be just an early glimpse into what we now know could be a very dangerous future.”

“These findings are stark and — coming from the most thorough annual scientific assessment at the nexus of climate change and health — should be considered accurate,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, formerly of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn’t part of the study. “Worrisome is our sluggish response to depart from fossil fuels, which the authors show offers enormous immediate health benefits.”

Report authors directly blasted the fossil fuel industry, comparing it to tobacco companies, and the banks that loaned them money.

“All our indicators on the fossil fuel industry are extremely relevant because this is an industry that is actually killing people in large numbers and making them ill in even larger numbers,” said report co-author Paul Ekins, an economics professor at the University College of London.