According to collected data, more than 68,000 people lost their lives to heat-related factors in Europe during summer 2022. File photo by Vincent Jannink/EPA-EFE
Researchers looking at the sweltering European summer of 2022 estimated that more than half of the heat-linked deaths occurring on the continent would not have happened if human-led climate change weren’t in place.
“Without strong action, record temperatures and heat-related mortality will continue to rise in the coming years,” said study senior author Joan Ballester Claramunt, an associate research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, in Spain.
According to collected data, over 68,000 people lost their lives to heat-related factors in Europe during summer 2022.
The Barcelona team first tracked “global mean surface temperature anomalies between 1880 and 2022,” to get a sense of how human activity has been warming the planet over time.
They then calculated the difference in what temperatures would have been if there had been no human-mediated (anthropogenic) global warming, versus actual recorded temperatures.
Using that data, they modeled expected heat-related deaths (in the absence of climate change) versus the number of Europeans who died from heat in the summer of 2022.
The result: 56% of those deaths were caused by the excessive high temperatures brought about by anthropogenic climate change, the Spanish team found.
That’s an excess of more than 38,000 fatalities in 32 European countries during the summer of 2022.
Excessive temperatures appeared to be more deadly for women than men and for the elderly (those aged 80 and older) versus the young, the study also found.
“This study sheds light on the extent to which global warming impacts public health,” study first author Thessa Beck, a meteorologist and climatologist at the Barcelona institute, said in an institute news release.
The findings were published Tuesday in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.
More information
Find out how to protect yourself on hot, humid days at Yale Medicine.
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