Deadly heat is killing Americans: A decade of inaction on climate puts lives at risk

The article also discusses how both the Obama & Trump administrations neglected this issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/16/climate-deaths-heat-cdc

Dean Russell, Elisabeth Gawthrop, Veronica Penney, Ali Raj and Bridget Hickey, Columbia Journalism Investigations
Tue 16 Jun 2020 02.00 EDT

•••••

Yearly heat-related deaths have more than doubled in Arizona in the last decade to 283. Across the country, heat caused at least 10,000 deaths between 1999 and 2016 – more than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods in most years.

Scientists link the warming planet to a rise in dangerous heat in the US, as well as the spread of infectious diseases and other health conditions. Federal research predicts heatstroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thousands of American lives each year by the end of the century. Already, higher temperatures pose lethal risks: the five warmest years nationwide have all occurred since 2006. In the last six decades, the number of annual heatwaves in 50 US cities has, on average, tripled. In contrast to a viral pandemic, this is a quiet, insidious threat with no end point.

•••••

In Florida, heat-related hospitalizations are on the rise. But health officials there barred the state climate team from publicly acknowledging global warming’s link to heat. Then, with the CDC’s imprimatur, they evicted the program from the health department.

•••••

Federal officials have known for decades that climate change poses a public health crisis. In 1989, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a 100-page report on how global warming could affect human health. It urged public health agencies to fund research on extreme heat and provide health departments with “trained professionals”. By 2000, the US released its first recurring assessment of the changing climate’s impacts. Again, it called for “investments in advancing the public health infrastructure”.

Five years later, Dr Howard Frumkin, a veteran epidemiologist hired to run CDC’s environmental health center, brought the nation’s leading public health agency into the battle against climate change. “We knew that the climate was warming,” said Frumkin, who viewed the CDC as “past the point where we needed to be stepping up”.

•••••