Climate change, fossil fuels hurting people’s health, says new report

Climate-influenced disasters are making people sick. When wildfire smoke from massive fires in Canada blanketed the U.S. in the summer of 2023, emergency rooms saw a spike in admissions for lung problems but also heart attacks and other health issues.

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Burning fossil fuels has driven climate change, and now climate change is costing people their health and increasingly their lives, says a new report from the prestigious medical journal the Lancet. The eighth annual Lancet Countdown, an international analysis that tracks nearly 50 different health-focused issues affected by climate change, calls for an immediate wind-down of fossil fuel use.

“We’re currently at 1.14 degree Celsius of global indicator heating, and we’re already seeing climate change claiming lives and livelihoods in every part of the world,” says Marina Romanello, a scientist at University College, London, and the lead author of the report. “The impacts are happening here and now. However, these impacts that we’re seeing today could be just an early symptom of a very dangerous future unless we tackle climate change urgently.”

Every country is affected. But those with the least historical responsibility for causing climate change are feeling the worst effects. Pakistan–a country responsible for roughly 0.3% of all climate-change-causing carbon emissions, suffered massive floods in 2022 that displaced more than 30 million people and killed at least 1,700.

But wealthier countries are not immune. In the U.S., wildfire smoke this summer sent people to the emergency room from New York to Georgia. In Europe, a 2022 summer heat wave resulted in over 60,000 deaths.

Heat waves and droughts, actively intensified…