Heat and Drought
Understanding climate change from a global analysis of city analogues
To our knowledge, our study represents the first global analysis of the shifts in climate conditions of the world’s major cities under climate change. Our analysis revealed that over 77% of the world’s cities are likely to experience a shift towards the climate conditions of another major city by 2050, while 22% will shift to climate conditions that are not currently present for any major cities on the planet. Across the globe, the direction of movement is generally trending towards the subtropics, providing unifying patterns that support trends observed in Europe and North America. In addition, this analysis revealed new insights for cities in equatorial regions, many of which are likely to move to entirely new climate conditions that are not currently experienced by any of the other global cities today. These city analogues, and the data we openly share, can help land managers and city planners to visualize the climate futures of their respective cities, facilitating efforts to establish targeted climate response strategies. As well as facilitating our basic understanding of climate change effects, our analysis highlights the value of using cities to visualize the tangible effects of climate change across the globe.
In These U.S. Cities, Heat Waves Will Kill Hundreds More as Temperatures Rise
The number of heat deaths becomes staggering if you try to project them out to a global scale, with hundreds of millions of people expected to be exposed to potentially deadly heat by 2050, said Dann Mitchell, a climate researcher at the University of Bristol. The challenge for doing similar studies for big cities in Asia, Africa and Middle East is lack of reliable health data.
Climate Change Has Made Droughts More Frequent Since 1900
Tree ring data from various parts of the world shows that greenhouse gas increases have impacted soil moisture for over 100 years
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Unbearably Heat in India
Unbearably heat in India- Soon (Climate Change) 7/2018
An analysis of South Asia’s biggest cities found that if current warming trends continued, wet bulb temperatures — a measure of heat and humidity indicating when the body can no longer cool itself — will become so high people directly exposed for six hours or more would die.]
Higher temperatures increase suicide rates in the United States and Mexico
High Temps/Suicide Scholarly Research (Climate Change) 7/2018
Linkages between climate and mental health are often theorized but remain poorly quantified. In particular, it is unknown whether the rate of suicide, a leading cause of death globally, is systematically affected by climatic conditions. Using compre-hensive data from multiple decades for both the United States and Mexico, we find that suicide rates rise 0.7% in US counties and 2.1% in Mexican municipalities for a 1 °C increase in monthly average temperature. This effect is similar in hotter versus cooler regions and has not diminished over time, indicating limited historical adaptation. Analysis of depressive language in > 600 million social media updates further suggests that mental well-being deteriorates during warmer periods. We project that unmitigated climate change (RCP8.5) could result in a combined 9–40 thousand additional suicides (95% confidence interval) across the United States and Mexico by 2050, representing a change in suicide rates comparable to the estimated impact of economic recessions, suicide prevention programmes or gun restriction laws.
Rising Temps linked to Suicides
Rising Temps linked to Suicides (Climate Change) 7/2018
The links between mental health and global warming have not been widely researched but the new work analysed temperature and suicides across the US and Mexico in recent decades. It found that the rate of suicide rose by 0.7% in the US and by 2.1% in Mexico when the average monthly temperature rose by 1C.
Deadly Heat Waves Could Endanger 74% of Mankind by 2100, Study Says
A new online tool explores the number of days per year in places worldwide when heat is likely to exceed a deadly threshold if nothing is done about climate change.
Global risk of deadly heat
Climate change can increase the risk of conditions that exceed human thermoregulatory capacity1,2,3,4,5,6. Although numerous studies report increased mortality associated with extreme heat events1,2,3,4,5,6,7, quantifying the global risk of heat-related mortality remains challenging due to a lack of comparable data on heat-related deaths2,3,4,5. Here we conducted a global analysis of documented lethal heat events to identify the climatic conditions associated with human death and then quantified the current and projected occurrence of such deadly climatic conditions worldwide.
Heatwaves: Number of deadly heat days
Online Tool
