The Heat is On

BY KIM BELLARD Attention must be paid: the world is now hotter than it has been in 125,000 years. A week ago, we broke the record for average global temperature. That record was broken the next day.  Later in the week it was broken yet again.  Yeah, I know; weather records are broken all the time, so what’s the big deal?   Well, it is a big deal, and we should all be worried. “It’s not a record to celebrate and it won’t be a record for long,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, told CNN.   Bill Maguire, a professor at University College London, tweeted: “The global temperature record smashed again yesterday. The first four days of the week were the hottest recorded for Planet Earth. I would say welcome to the future – except the future will be much hotter.”   “Expect many more hottest days in the future,” agrees Saleemul Huq, director of Bangladesh’s International Centre for Climate Change and Development. Some will shrug and say we’ll just have to get used to it, but tell that to the 61,000 people who died in Europe’s heat wave last summer, according to a new study.  Sixty-one thousand people dying of heat, in developed countries, in the 21st century.  And it’s going to get worse.  “In an ideal society, nobody should die because of heat,” Joan Ballester, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs