Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on earth and hunger, drought, more widespread diseases wreak havoc on the global population in the coming decades. Children born in 2021 will face these dangers for at least the next 30 years. The recent analysis of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns of the same. According to the IPCC, the knock of the corona pandemic in 2020 shook the whole world. The worrying thing is that the coming few decades will not be easy for the global population. Malnutrition, water scarcity and infectious diseases will emerge as major challenges to human health.
Earlier climate models suggested it would take nearly another century of unabated carbon pollution to spawn heatwaves exceeding the absolute limit of human tolerance. Now the updated projections by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warn of unprecedented killer heatwaves on the near future.
The 4,000-page report prepared by a UN body known as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which will be released in February 2022 said that if the world warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius – 0.4 degrees above today’s level – 14% of the population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years. Worst hit will be megacities in the developing world that generate additional heat of their own from Karachi to Kinshasa, Manila to Mumbai, Lagos to Manaus.
It is easier to survive a high temperature day if the air is bone-dry than it is to survive a lower temperature day with very high humidity, according to the report. That steam-bath mix has its own yardstick, known as wet-bulb temperature.
Experts say that healthy human adults cannot survive if wet-bulb temperatures (TW) exceed 35 degrees Celsius, even in the shade with an unlimited supply of drinking water.
Research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) reports just over 300,000 heat-related deaths worldwide from all causes in 2019. Some 37 percent of heat-related deaths — just over 100,000 — can be blamed on global warming, according to researchers led by Antonio Gasparrini at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
In half-a-dozen countries — Brazil, Peru, Colombia, the Philippines, Kuwait and Guatemala — the percentage was 60 percent or more.
Most of these deaths were probably caused by heat stroke, heart attacks and dehydration from heavy sweating, and many could likely have been prevented.
Dangerous spikes above 27 degrees Celsius TW have already more than doubled since 1979, according to Raymond’s findings.
His study predicts wet-bulb temperatures will “regularly exceed” 35 degrees Celsius TW at some locations in the next several decades if the planet warms 2.5 degrees above preindustrial levels.
Human activity has driven global temperatures up 1.1 degrees Celsius so far.
The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for capping the increase at “well below” two degrees Celsius, and 1.5 degrees if possible.
Even if those targets are met, hundreds of millions of city dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as South and Southeast Asia, will likely be afflicted by at least 30 deadly heat days every year by 2080, the IPCC report said.
High heat will destroy more lives indirectly rather than by reaching levels at which the body simply shuts down, the IPCC report suggested.
Higher temperatures will spread disease vectors, reduce crop yields and nutrient values, slash labour productivity and make outdoor manual labour a life-threatening activity.
Experts say the worst impacts could be avoided if global warming is capped as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible, in line with the Paris Agreement.
But even then, with temperatures rising twice the global average in many regions, some severe impacts are baked in. “Today’s children will witness more days with extreme heat when manual labour outside is physiologically impossible,” the IPCC report warned.
Tens of millions more people are likely to face chronic hunger by 2050, and 130 million more could experience extreme poverty within a decade if inequality is allowed to deepen.
In 2050, coastal cities on the “front line” of the climate crisis will see hundreds of millions of people at risk from floods and increasingly frequent storm surges made more deadly by rising seas.
Some 350 million more people living in urban areas will be exposed to water scarcity from severe droughts at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming – 410 million at two degrees Celsius.
The report further said that we need transformational change operating on processes and behaviours at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments. We must redefine our way of life and consumption.
“Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot,” the report warned.