Heat Projected to Kill Nearly Five Times More People by 2050 

A woman walks on Paulista Avenue, where urban thermometers register a temperature of 38.0 degrees Celsius in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 14 November 2023.  (EPA)
A woman walks on Paulista Avenue, where urban thermometers register a temperature of 38.0 degrees Celsius in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 14 November 2023. (EPA)
TT
20

Heat Projected to Kill Nearly Five Times More People by 2050 

A woman walks on Paulista Avenue, where urban thermometers register a temperature of 38.0 degrees Celsius in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 14 November 2023.  (EPA)
A woman walks on Paulista Avenue, where urban thermometers register a temperature of 38.0 degrees Celsius in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 14 November 2023. (EPA)

Nearly five times more people will likely die due to extreme heat in the coming decades, an international team of experts warned on Wednesday, adding that without action on climate change the "health of humanity is at grave risk".

Lethal heat was just one of the many ways the world's still-increasing use of fossil fuels threatens human health, according to The Lancet Countdown, a major annual assessment carried out by leading researchers and institutions.

More common droughts will put millions at risk of starving, mosquitoes spreading farther than ever before will take infectious diseases with them, and health systems will struggle to cope with the burden, the researchers warned.

The dire assessment comes during what is expected to be the hottest year in human history -- just last week, Europe's climate monitor declared that last month was the warmest October on record.

It also comes ahead of the COP28 climate talks in Dubai later this month, which will for the first time host a "health day" on December 3 as experts try to shine a light on global warming's impact on health.

Despite growing calls for global action, energy-related carbon emissions hit new highs last year, the Lancet Countdown report said, singling out still-massive government subsidies and private bank investments into planet-heating fossil fuels.

'Crisis on top of a crisis'

Last year people worldwide were exposed to an average of 86 days of life-threatening temperatures, according to the Lancet Countdown study. Around 60 percent of those days were made more than twice as likely due to climate change, it said.

The number of people over 65 who died from heat rose by 85 percent from 1991-2000 to 2013-2022, it added.

"However, these impacts that we are seeing today could be just an early symptom of a very dangerous future," Lancet Countdown's executive director Marina Romanello told journalists.

Under a scenario in which the world warms by two degrees Celsius by the end of the century -- it is currently on track for 2.7C -- annual heat-related deaths were projected to increase 370 percent by 2050. That marks a 4.7-fold increase.

Around 520 million more people will experience moderate or severe food insecurity by mid-century, according to the projections.

And mosquito-borne infectious diseases will continue to spread into new areas. The transmission of dengue would increase by 36 percent under a 2C warming scenario, according to the study.

Meanwhile, more than a quarter of cities surveyed by the researchers said they were worried that climate change would overwhelm their capacity to cope.

"We're facing a crisis on top of a crisis," said Lancet Countdown's Georgiana Gordon-Strachan, whose homeland Jamaica is currently in the middle of a dengue outbreak.

'Staring down the barrel'

"People living in poorer countries, who are often least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, are bearing the brunt of the health impacts, but are least able to access funding and technical capacity to adapt to the deadly storms, rising seas and crop-withering droughts worsened by global heating," she said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to the report by saying that "humanity is staring down the barrel of an intolerable future".

"We are already seeing a human catastrophe unfolding with the health and livelihoods of billions across the world endangered by record-breaking heat, crop-failing droughts, rising levels of hunger, growing infectious disease outbreaks, and deadly storms and floods," he said in a statement.

Dann Mitchell, climate hazards chair at the UK's Bristol University, lamented that "already catastrophic" health warnings about climate change had "not managed to convince the world's governments to cut carbon emissions enough to avoid the first Paris Agreement goal of 1.5C".

The UN warned on Tuesday that countries' current pledges will cut global carbon emissions by just two percent by 2030 from 2019 levels -- far short of the 43 percent drop needed to limit warming to 1.5C.

Romanello warned that if more progress is not made on emissions, then "the growing emphasis on health within climate change negotiations risks being just empty words".



Mega-iceberg Drifts towards Antarctic Penguin Island

The iceberg could threaten penguins as they forage to feed their young. Patrick HERTZOG / AFP/File
The iceberg could threaten penguins as they forage to feed their young. Patrick HERTZOG / AFP/File
TT
20

Mega-iceberg Drifts towards Antarctic Penguin Island

The iceberg could threaten penguins as they forage to feed their young. Patrick HERTZOG / AFP/File
The iceberg could threaten penguins as they forage to feed their young. Patrick HERTZOG / AFP/File

The world's biggest iceberg -- more than twice the size of London -- could drift towards a remote island where a scientist warns it risks disrupting feeding for baby penguins and seals.

The gigantic wall of ice is moving slowly from Antarctica on a potential collision course with South Georgia, a crucial wildlife breeding ground in the South Atlantic.

Satellite imagery suggested that unlike previous "megabergs" this rogue was not crumbling into smaller chunks as it plodded through the Southern Ocean, Andrew Meijers, a physical oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey, told AFP on Friday.

He said predicting its exact course was difficult but prevailing currents suggested the colossus would reach the shallow continental shelf around South Georgia in two to four weeks.

But what might happen next is anyone's guess, he said.

It could avoid the shelf and get carried into open water beyond South Georgia, a British overseas territory some 1,400 kilometres (870 miles) east of the Falkland Islands.

Or it could strike the sloping bottom and get stuck for months or break up into pieces.

Meijers said this scenario could seriously impede seals and penguins trying to feed and raise their young on the island.

"Icebergs have grounded there in the past and that has caused significant mortality to penguin chicks and seal pups," he said.
'White wall'
Roughly 3,500 square kilometers (1,550 square miles) across, the world's biggest and oldest iceberg, known as A23a, calved from the Antarctic shelf in 1986.

It remained stuck for over 30 years before finally breaking free in 2020, its lumbering journey north sometimes delayed by ocean forces that kept it spinning in place.

Meijers -- who encountered the iceberg face to face while leading a scientific mission in late 2023 -- described "a huge white cliff, 40 or 50 meters high, that stretches from horizon to horizon".

"It's just like this white wall. It's very sort of Game of Thrones-esque, actually," he said, referring to the dark fantasy series.

A23a has followed roughly the same path as previous massive icebergs, passing the east side of the Antarctica Peninsula through the Weddell Sea along a route called "iceberg alley".

Weighing a little under a trillion tons, this monster block of freshwater was being whisked along by the world's most powerful ocean "jet stream" -- the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Raul Cordero from Chile's University of Santiago, who is also part of the National Antarctic Research Committee, said he was confident the iceberg would sidestep South Georgia.

"The island acts as an obstacle for ocean currents and therefore usually diverts the water long before it reaches the island," he said.

"The iceberg is moved by that water flow, so the chances of it hitting are not that high," though chunks could, he said.

Another scientist, glaciologist Soledad Tiranti currently on an Argentinian exploration voyage in the Antarctic, said that icebergs such as A23a "are so deep that before reaching an island or mainland they generally get stuck" on the seabed.

Icy obstacle
It is summer in South Georgia and resident penguins and seals along its southern coastline are foraging in the frosty waters to bring back food to fatten their young.

"If the iceberg parks there, it'll either block physically where they feed from, or they'll have to go around it," said Meijers.

"That burns a huge amount of extra energy for them, so that's less energy for the pups and chicks, which causes increased mortality."

The seal and penguin populations on South Georgia have already been having a "bad season" with an outbreak of bird flu "and that (iceberg) would make it significantly worse," he said.

As A23a ultimately melted it could seed the water with nutrients that encourage phytoplankton growth, feeding whales and other species, and allowing scientists to study how such blooms absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

While icebergs are natural phenomena, Meijers said the rate at which they were being lost from Antarctica was increasing, likely due to human induced climate change.