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Climate change is already killing people....and it will only get worse

The usual climate change deniers may scoff and ridicule the now vast number of scientists and experts who unequivocally state that climate change is upon us and that we must all do something about it.      The people of India, who are now suffering hitherto unknown levels of heat, with many dying from the effects of the heat, are another example of what is happening in our world.

In February, President Obama said that the media "absolutely" overstates the risk of terrorism, while many more lives are claimed by climate change and epidemics. Mike Huckabee shot back, telling Fox News, "I assure you that a beheading is much worse than a sunburn."

Perhaps the GOP climate denier and presidential contender should take a trip to India, where a heat wave has claimed the lives of more than 1,800 people, making it the deadliest in over three decades.

While climate deniers may disagree, the increase in extreme weather events around the world — and the deaths they cause — is linked to climate change. The India Meteorological Department (IMD), the nation's weather agency, analyzed long-term data from over 100 weather stations and confirmed that as global warming has taken effect, heat waves have become more frequent and more intense, increasing by a third over the past 50 years.

The IMD researchers assert that "the huge increase in the heat wave days during the last decade is mainly caused by the increase in the events associated with three El Niño years (2002, 2004 and 2009)." They say that the deaths in the country following El Niño years in 2003, 2005 and 2010 corroborate this trend.

A 2014 study led by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation found that climate change could double the frequency of super El Niño events. “Under greenhouse warming the eastern equatorial Pacific warms faster than the surrounding regions ... making it easier to have maximum SST (sea surface temperatures) in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and hence more occurrences of extreme El Nino events,” said the study's lead researcher Wenjun Cai."




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