1000s of heat deaths coming—Eunice Lo: climate change & American cities—Radio Ecoshock 2019-06-19
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2019-07-10

More people will die from heat as the world warms. A new study estimates how many more will die in 15 major American cities according to how hot we make it. Lead author Dr Eunice Lo is a Research Associate in the Climate Dynamics group at University of Bristol UK.

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/06/the-end-is-in-sight.html

Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more at https://stopfossilfuels.org

SHOW DETAILS
The US Government is retracting climate controls, but city governments continue climate action, leading the nation from below. The new paper "Increasing mitigation ambition to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal avoids substantial heat-related mortality in US cities" give Mayors, Councils & voters more information & motivation for local climate action. They can see how climate mitigation could directly save lives.

The authors investigated future heat deaths in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington DC. A city-by-city approach is vital because there are so many different factors from adaptation to local weather. A national approach isn’t enough to know what the future will bring.

Counter-intuitively, mortality risk is higher for northern cities such as Boston, Detroit, NYC, and Philadelphia than for southern cities such as Houston, Miami, and Phoenix. The authors concede that their numbers, though shocking, are very conservative. For the purposes of the model, they kept the population numbers the same right through 2050. But with population increasing, heat deaths likely would too.

Other conservative assumptions may be balanced somewhat by the unknown effect of adaptation. Cities in many countries reduced heat deaths after the 2003 Europe mass mortality event with better planning, public cooling centers & checking on seniors. We may manage to keep deaths down despite more deadly heat (until it overwhelms our ability to respond.)

THE IPCC NEVER ASKED ABOUT 3 DEGREE WARMING
The recent report by IPCC only compared possible outcomes of heating to 1.5C (by 2100) versus 2C. Importantly, this paper considers a 3C future.

Like many of my guests, I ask Why bother talking about 1.5C warming? We are practically already there in many places, including in India for 9 months per year. The only hope of 1.5C warming would be amazing and massive shift of whole economies to carbon capture and storage, removing CO2 from the atmosphere instead of adding it more rapidly as we did last year. [Stop Fossils Fuels adds: or by dedicated activists directly shutting down fossil fuels]

SOME OF MY CONCERNS
I worry that science is not getting to the full horror. Eunice Lo and her team did excellent science that is needed. However, science consistently understates the developing climate reality.

In my June 5th show, I interviewed Dr. Jane Baldwin, who found back-to-back heat waves are a new development since the year 2000. We don’t know yet whether this phenomenon will kill more people. This new development would not be included in this paper’s base-line climate, which ran from 1987 to 2000, so it may underestimate future heat deaths.

Will heat deaths follow a predictable ramp-up pattern, or will there be steep steps up as we warm? we don’t know if warming above 2C will be experienced differently. We haven’t been there before.

What if we don't have the stable social future this study assumes?

What if air conditioning isn't always available? If the grid goes down heat deaths could multiply greatly. California utility PG&E recently shut down the grid for some northern CA cities due to wildfire risk. Their grid actually started forest fires that burned out places like Paradise last year. Nuclear and coal stations have to shut down if cooling water supplies become too warm. A solar storm can knock down the grid. We can’t count on air-conditioning to keep people alive, every year for the rest of this century.

What if we reach 3C of warming by 2050, not 2100?

Perhaps the future is too unstable to predict future heat deaths, other than saying they will be higher, and could be  much higher.

This paper finds almost 2,000 New Yorkers “would be saved from a heat-related death at a 2C increase compared with 3C heating.” Forty thousand Americans died from guns last year. I’m not sure heat deaths will really motivate climate action. They may be seen as just another cost of business-as-usual. Are these numbers really high enough to motivate state actors at upcoming climate conferences?

I worry the numbers of future heat deaths in this paper are extremely conservative, given the large factors in play and the climate surprises already underway. This information is aimed at policy makers. Isn’t it a danger for science to understate the risk?