Reacción a "Temperature-related deaths could rise by 50% in Europe by the end of the century"

Cold weather and hot weather kill tens of thousands of people across Europe every year. Climate change is bringing less severe cold weather but more frequent hot weather, but it isn't yet known if that means more or fewer people will die from temperature-related deaths in future. The clear finding of this new research is that the net effect of climate change will be more temperature-related deaths in future. Put bluntly, the increase in hot weather will kill more people than the decrease in cold weather will save.

While this new study isn't the final say on the matter, and more research will certainly refine and could still change the overall prediction of future temperature-related deaths, it does break new ground by scrutinizing people's vulnerability to extreme temperatures by age and by city to a much better level of detail than previous work. This extra level of detail ought to make the new study's results more reliable.

This study also confirms two more general features about climate change. First, the harm from climate change impacts people very unevenly (in this case, with far greater increases in temperature-related deaths predicted for southern Europe than for northern Europe, where milder winters may even reduce the number of deaths). Second, we can greatly reduce the harm from climate change by adaptation —making changes that increase our resilience to extreme weather— but these adaptations are far more successful if we also limit the amount of climate change that we are faced with by accelerating the move away from fossil fuels as our primary energy source.