Published on Wednesday, July 13, 2016
The Number Of Lives Claimed By Climate Change Is Jaw-Dropping
[SAD]
During a heatwave in 2003, more than 70,000 people in different European countries died in a powerful heatwave which continued during a significant part of the summer.
France was dreadfully affected with the terrifying 15,000 deaths only for August. In the UK, the heat took more than 2,000 human lives.
Nowadays, a recent study analyzes how many of those deaths in the two European capitals were related to the human-caused climate changes. The scientists suggest that 506 of the 735 summer deaths in Paris, as well as 64 of the 315 fatalities in London were a tragic result of our negative influence on the Earth’s climate.
Climate Changes
The heatwave in the summer of 2003 was a crucial point at the researchers of the for scientists whether and how the human-induced climate changes affect extreme weather events.Then, in 2004, the heatwave became the main subject of the first attribution study. The results showed that the warming caused by human activity at least doubled the possibility of such an event.
A research made in 2014 showed that such “extremely hot” summers in Europe have become 10 times more likely for the last 10-15 years and this was a result of the climate change. Now, the new study which was published in Environmental Research Letters suggests that the heatwave in 2003 was strongly related to the warming climate of our planet.
The researchers used the weather@home project. It involved members of the public who offered some spare capacity of their own computers to help the scientists run their model simulations.
Weather Simulations
The researchers ran thousands of simulations of the European weather in 2003. Then, they compared the levels of heat and humidity between their hypothetical world and the one which better matched reality. They checked how the humidity and heat levels affect the total number of premature deaths in that summer, explains the lead author Dr Daniel Mitchell who is a scientist from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.
According to him the team of scientists used climate simulations for calculating the heat in 2003 with and without the human influence. Then, they were able to make comparisons between the simulations.
According to the author, the human-induced climate changes seem to be responsible for about 70% of those heat-related deaths in the center of Paris, and about 20% of the fatalities in Greater London. If it is true, then from the 735 of the deaths in Paris in the summer of 2003, 506 were related to the climate changes caused by the human kind. For London, this result would be 64 out of 315.
Heat-related deaths
For the period between June and August in 2003, the total rate fatalities related to the extreme heat was 4.5 per 100,000 people for the British capital. For Paris, they were 34 per 100,000. And now it has become clear that a significant part of these deaths were related to the strong negative effect of human activities on Earth’s climate.
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