Scientists predict that heat-related deaths in Manhattan will rise by 20 percent by the 2020s.
A team of researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute and the Mailman School of Public Health conducted a study, which predicts that heat-related deaths in Manhattan will rise by 20 percent by the 2020s. If the heating scenario gets worse than it already is, this may rise to more than 90 percent by the 2080s. The rise in winter temperatures is expected to somewhat reduce the number of deaths. Even if the temperatures don't reach extreme conditions, death rate is expected to go up by a third.
They also predicted many other adverse health effects of rising temperatures in other cities but the study done on Manhattan - the most populated city of the United States - is the most comprehensive of them all.
"This serves as a reminder that heat events are one of the greatest hazards faced by urban populations around the globe," said coauthor Radley Horton, a climate scientist at the Earth Institute's Center for Climate Systems Research. Horton says that people need to look no further for the potential dangers than the record 2010 heat wave that hit Russia, killing some 55,000 people, and the 2003 one that killed 70,000 in Central and Western Europe.
Records of the city reveal that temperatures have already risen by 3.6 degrees between 1901 and 2001. For the study, researchers took temperature projections from 16 global climate models, downscaled these to Manhattan, and put them against two different backdrops. The first one assumed rapid global population growth and few efforts to limit emissions and the other model assumed slower growth, and technological changes that would decrease emissions by 2040.
Both the models suggested increased mortality. If Manhattan's current population of 1.6 million remains the same, the worst-case scenario translates to more than 1,000 annual deaths.
