"The report estimates that the exposure of people to extreme rainfall
will more than quadruple and the exposure of people to drought will
triple compared to the 1990s. In the same time span, the exposure of the
older people to heat waves is expected to go up by a factor of 12,
according to Peter Cox, one of the authors, who is a professor of
climate-system dynamics at the University of Exeter in Britain. By
the end of the century, the report estimates, the exposure to heat
waves each year for older people around the world is expected to be
around 3 billion more cases than in 1990. The number of times people of
all ages are exposed to drought would increase by more than a billion a
year. The rise in exposures to extreme rain would be around 2 billion a
year by the end of the century, in part because populations are growing. Even
without climate change, the health problems that come along with
economic development are significant, the authors note. About 1.2
million people died from illnesses related to air pollution in China in
2010, the report said. Most
broad climate reports do not go further than explaining the science,
but much of the Lancet report is dedicated to policy prescriptions to
slow or stop climate change and mute its effects on health. It notes
that using fewer fossil fuels “is no longer primarily a technical or
economic question — it is now a political one,” and urges governments to
enact changes that would accomplish that."
READ THE FULL ARTICLE: WASHINGTON — More people will be exposed to floods, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather associated with climate change over the next century than previously thought, according to a new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/risk-of-extreme-weather-from-climate-change-to-rise-over-next-century-report-says.html?_r=1
