Rising heat ‘nearing threshold where healthy are at risk’ • FRANCE 24 English

Rising heat ‘nearing threshold where healthy are at risk’ • FRANCE 24 English

we can now bring in chlo bmom climate scientist at the wagon Center at the University of Gratz thank you very much for joining us here on France 24 today now we are seeing high temperatures impact a number of uh regions in the world from the United States to Saudi Arabia India how do you explain all this happening at the same time so we’ve seen over the last couple of years this happening quite often and it is as a result of climate change so as the report said climate change causes heat waves to occur more frequently last longer and be more intense but we’re also seeing a greater number of people exposed to extreme heat conditions year on year and we know that this will only get worse if we do not reduce emissions and therefore Baseline temperatures and therefore our extremes from climate change but Chloe what we’re seeing this time around uh is you know when we have floods of course there are people who die now people are dying from uh the Heat uh in India people wouldn’t really die before now we have tens of people 52 just this week according to one newspaper in Saudi over a thousand people have died during the hjj pilgrimage is this a phenomenon that’s going to continue where people actually going to start dying from the heat yes exactly so we do know that people have died in heat waves before but what we’re now seeing which is very good news is this being reported and this means that we can change the tide and put in place measures like heat plans and heat early Warning Systems so that we can stop these people dying so in a lot of cases these deaths can be preventable the people that are most at risk of dying are those that are over the age of 65 have a pre-existing medical condition um and also is sometimes at risk at infants and children because um they have a smaller body area and can’t cop in the heat as well as adults so but in India for example we’re seeing a threshold being close to being reached where even healthy people would experience heat illnesses and also be at risk of dying which is very concerning I I understand that you said the elderly and the the young are particularly uh uh more prone uh to to dying from the heat but isn’t it also the poorest in society those who who don’t have access to proper shelters air conditioning uh the the possibility of remote work what have you yes so people that are the poorest in society we are seeing more and more inequitably impacted by climate change whether this is heat or flooding because simply they can’t get access to the adaptation strategies that they need and so increasingly this group should be targeted by governments when they put in place adaptation plans so that they can access cooling or that they can protect their houses from flooding for example Chloe let’s talk about the importance of minimum nighttime temperatures because I don’t know if you saw in my introduction I said uh in Delhi this this week the minimum nighttime temperature on one of the nights was some 35.2 de C that’s incredibly hot isn’t it why is uh the nighttime minimum temperature so important the nighttime minimum temperature that is a very hot temperature and I think you said that it maybe even broke all the records 50 year records yes it did yeah 50e records um it’s important because it means that you can’t even cool your body down overnight so it additionally if you’re exposed to hot temperatures during the day then you have this period overnight where you do cool down but this means that you can’t cool your body down um unless you have access to these cooling strategies so this could be um showers or bus so lots of water or for example um air conditioning but even in some cases um it’s been found that if you put a fan directly on your body in that sort of temperature it doesn’t actually cool you down it just dehydrates you and you would need more water um to actually cool yourself down so it is very concerning and again it just shows that people that without access to cooling now and in the future will continue to be inequitably impacted by things like heat waves uh Glory I’m asking you a question for uh pretty much uh my entire production team here uh if you’re in Paris if you know people in Paris you know that the summer has been non-existent I I’ll put it that way we’ve had just maybe three four days of of sunny days and the rest of it it’s we’ve either it’s rained been gray or or depressing muggy uh why is it that it’s an either or situation either it’s super hot and there’s a heat wave or we we had this these per this periods of no summer is a very good question there’s also been a lot of flooding in in Germany as a result of this sort of same weather um it’s because when you have a high pressure system uh the atmosphere is trying to get into equilibrium with each other so you have to have a really like quite low pressure system to to cancel out the effect of that very strong high and that’s why you see this real difference in very rainy places right next to places where it’s incredibly hot and we’re just seeing more of this but it is incredibly um concerning in both cases because then you have this effect of really bad flooding somewhere and then really bad heat in the neighboring country or even within the same country um so yes given that we’re go we we’re seeing what we’re seeing right now with these incredibly high temperatures in parts of the US uh and floods as you mentioned in Germany can we expect Winters to also progressively get milder so the trend is that Winters are getting progressively milder I know that in recent years we’ve also had quite a few really quite cold snaps but if you look at the trend over time these cold snaps have actually got warmer so um we’re not seeing them as being as intense and that is the trends that we think will continue with climate change um which is it’s also not good in the meantime because you still have to protect people’s lives in the winter so we are also seeing increases of sometimes if it’s a warmer period of like flu because it can spread quicker than if it was very cold and then it would die um but um you still need to protect people in the winter from very cold weather but you now also need to protect them from really hot weather so it’s a it’s a bad time indeed Chloe thank you very much Chloe brim joining us there thank you very much for that

As climate change renders heatwaves increasingly common and severe, some parts of the world are nearing the threshold where healthy people are at risk of getting ill and even dying in the extreme heat, says Chloe Brimicombe, a climate scientist at the University of Graz’s Wegener Centre.
#heatwaves #climate #change

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