ROME — Climate change will result in an estimated 2.3 million additional temperature-related deaths in Europe by 2099, according to researchers led by a London-based climate-modeling group.
The 16-person team hailing from diverse backgrounds has suggested that recent data showing a significant decrease in overall weather-related deaths thanks to a warming planet will be reversed in the coming 75 years.
Among the cities destined to experience the highest climate-change-fueled mortality, Barcelona is projected to suffer 246,082 heat-related deaths by the end of the century, the authors propose.
Two Italian cities, namely Rome and Naples, are projected to experience 147,738 and 147,248 climate-related deaths respectively over the same time period.
“This study provides compelling evidence that the steep rise in heat-related deaths will far exceed any drop related to cold, resulting in a net increase in mortality across Europe,” stated Antonio Gasparrini, lead author of the article and head of the Environment & Health Modelling (EHM) Lab at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
“These results debunk proposed theories of ‘beneficial’ effects of climate change, often proposed in opposition to vital mitigation policies that should be implemented as soon as possible,” he asserted.
What Gasparrini calls “compelling evidence,” however, are actually a series of forecasts and predictions made from notoriously fallible climate-modeling algorithms. As good scientists are aware, it is impossible to collect “evidence” on future events.
The team’s projections purport to challenge recent studies showing that over the last decades, people are almost 10 times more likely to die from cold weather than from heat, meaning that fewer people die from the weather as the world warms.
In point of fact, over 165,000 people die every single day around the world from numerous causes, including cancer, heart disease, respiratory diseases, suicide, and accidents. Of these 165,000 people, however, not one has yet died from climate change.
Of those who die from weather-related causes each year, however, many more people die from cold weather than from heat, and many more die during the winter than during the summer.
According to data published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over the past twenty years annual heat-related deaths in the United States have ranged between 0.9 and 3.6 per million people, whereas cold-related deaths have ranged between 3.6 and 5.9 per million people.
The two graphs below, furnished by the EPA using data from the CDC, depict this disparity visually.
Heat- and cold-related deaths in the United States per annum (EPA).
The prevalence of cold- over heat-based deaths becomes even more apparent when looking at the global scenario, where deaths from cold dwarf heat-related deaths by nearly ten to one.
The UK-based Lancet medical journal published a study in 2021, which found that 5,083,173 deaths worldwide were associated with “non-optimal temperatures per year,” and then went on to explain that the vast majority of these were “cold-related” rather than “heat-related.”
According to the Lancet, people around the world are 9.4 times more likely to die from the cold than from the heat. While 155,000 people die each year from extremely high temperatures, 4.5 million people die from the cold, the Lancet reported.
It added that over the past 20 years, the death rate from heat has slightly increased due to global warming (+0.21 percent), but that the death rate from the cold decreased by more than twice as much (-0.51 percent) during the same period.
As global temperatures have risen, heat deaths have increased but deaths from cold have simultaneously decreased by more than twice as much, producing a significant net drop in weather-related deaths, a welcome trend that seems bound to continue.
