Climate Change to Spur Major Rise in Heat Wave Deaths in Chicago

Chicago May See Up to 40 Times as Many Heat Wave Deaths a Year. No one seems to want to talk about all the shitty things that climate change is going to cause to happen anymore. But so as long as climate change is indeed going to cause some shitty things to happen, somebody should be mentioning them. So here goes: Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have done some estimates on how rising temperatures caused by climate change may impact extreme weather events in the city. And they've found that deaths caused by heat waves will rise dramatically as the temperature warms -- in the decades nearing the end of the century, the researchers estimate that there will be between 166 and 2,127 deaths from heat waves per year.

Roger Peng, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells Newsroom America that "Our study looks to quantify the impact of increased heat waves on human mortality. For major a U.S. city like Chicago, the impact will likely be profound and potentially devastating," said . "We would expect the impact to be less severe with mitigation efforts including lowering CO2 emissions."

Source: TreeHugger