Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths

[NNadir]

I came across this as news item in Science: Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths.

Subtitle:

An increase of 1°C could mean thousands of additional deaths on very hot days, according to a new study

Science 28 JUN 2022 BY RODRIGO PÉREZ ORTEGA

An excerpt:

In mid-January, the southern tip of South America suffered its worst heat wave in years. In Argentina, temperatures in more than 50 cities rose above 40°C, more than 10°C warmer than the typical average temperature in cities such as Buenos Aires. The scorching heat sparked wildfires, worsened a drought, hurt agriculture, and temporarily collapsed Buenos Aires’s electrical power supply. It also killed at least 3 people, although experts estimate the true number might be much higher.

With climate change, heat waves and cold fronts are worsening and taking lives worldwide: about 5 million in the past 20 years, according to at least one study. In a new study published today in Nature Medicine, an international team of researchers estimates that almost 900,000 deaths in the years between 2002 and 2015 could be attributable to extreme temperatures alone in major Latin American cities. This is the most detailed estimate in Latin America, and the first ever for some cities.

Most studies that link extreme temperatures with mortality in cities have been done in North America, Europe, and China. “There’s relatively little locally generated knowledge that’s specific to the Global South,” says Ana Diez Roux, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who co-authored the new study. “Latin America, in particular, is a region that has not received a lot of attention.”

And the new paper has a much better representation of urban areas in Latin America than previous studies in the region, says Antonio Gasparrini, an environmental epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “So, this is already an improvement.”

To estimate how many people died from intense heat or cold, researchers with the Urban Health in Latin America project—which studies how urban environments and policies impact the health of city residents in Latin America—looked at mortality data between 2002 and 2015 from registries of 326 cities with more than 100,000 residents, in nine countries throughout Latin America. They calculated the average daily temperatures and estimated the temperature range for each city from a public data set of atmospheric conditions. If a death occurred either on the 18 hottest or the 18 coldest days that each city experienced in a typical year, they linked it to extreme temperatures. Using a statistical model, the researchers compared the risk of dying on very hot and cold days, and this risk with the risk of dying on temperate days. They found that in Latin American metropolises, nearly 6%—almost 1 million—of all deaths between those years happened on days of extreme heat and cold...

The full original paper, in Nature Medicine is here: Kephart, J.L., Sánchez, B.N., Moore, J. et al. City-level impact of extreme temperatures and mortality in Latin America. Nat Med (2022).

I believe the full paper is open sourced.

...but...but...but...but...Three Mile Island!!!!!!!

[littlemissmartypants]

1. Thank you. ❤

[jimfields33]

2. I'd be interested to know how much Argentina is doing to combat climate change

The United States certainly can do more but at least we’re going electric cars and adding wind and solar. India and China need to do much more for this to work world wide.

[NNadir]

3. The United States has the highest per capita carbon intensity in the world.

The problem with the US is that too many people think wind, solar and electric cars are meaningful tools to fight climate change.

They aren't.

[jimfields33]

4. They have to be. Getting rid of gas will lower our percentage down to

what places in Africa use. We’ll be lower then Asian countries and definitely European countries.

[NNadir]

5. The laws of physics are not subject to wishful thinking.

Mass intensive, land intensive, intermittent energy is not clean, nor is it even remotely sustainable..

If we are serious about climate change, and there is some rising but still small hope that the world is waking up to this fact, we need to go nuclear against climate change.

Wind and solar were never about replacing fossil fuels. On the contrary, they entrench them. The specious reactionary argument for spending trillions of dollars on them for no result, was to do away with nuclear energy, ironically the last best hope of Earth. That didn't work either.