Heat Killed 50,000 in Europe Last Year–Are We Next?

Brief discussion by an intelligent basketball legend on hot weather caused by pollution and the resulting deaths from it.

“Heat aggravated by carbon pollution killed 50,000 in Europe last year – study,” The Guardian, as discussed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Summary: Hot weather inflamed by carbon pollution killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year, with the continent warming at a much faster rate than other parts of the world, research has found.

The findings come as wildfires tore through forests outside Athens, as France issued excessive heat warnings for large swathes of the country, and the UK baked through what the Met Office expects will be its hottest day of the year.

Doctors call heat a “silent killer” because it claims far more lives than most people realize. The devastating mortality rate in 2023 would have been 80% higher if people had not adapted to rising temperatures over the past two decades, according to the study published in Nature Medicine.

Kareem’s Take: I realize that most of the time we have our hands full worrying about the things that most affect us here in America. Last year in the U.S., 2,302 people died from heat-related causes. Even accounting for the difference in population (Europe: 746 million, U.S.: 333 million) they have a lot more deaths. But can we afford to just shrug off the fact that 50,000 people died there last year from the abnormal heat? Or are they the canary in the mine telling us what horrors are awaiting the U.S. in the near future? If the record-breaking heat waves across America are any indication of our future, then we need to be very concerned.

In March, one of the world’s top climate scientists, Gavin Schmidt, a British climatologist and the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned that global warming may have developed to a point that scientists can no longer predict the next stages:

“The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modelers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.”

However, these indicators are ignored by a startling number of members of Congress. A July report indicated that 123 members of the House and Senate deny that human-caused climate change is occurring, despite overwhelming scientific consensus. All 123 are Republicans, including both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA).

Others are on subcommittees funding the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department or the Energy Department. If 2,000 people died all at once in a building collapse or terrorist attack, we’d be hearing outraged speeches and promises of investigations. But spread it out over a year—and have a lot of elderly as the victims—and you get 123 Congress members shrugging. Maybe that has something to do with the report that “the lawmakers who deny climate science have together received $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry.”

And the death rates will continue to rise.