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France saw around 1,000 additional deaths last week at the height of its record-smashing heat wave, the country's public health agency said Sunday, as Europeans elsewhere were suffering through yet another day of new temperature highs that sparked wildfires in Germany and had Berlin police using water cannons to cool down the crowds. Temperature records were toppled in several countries on the weekend as the heat wave slowly moved toward eastern parts of the continent. In Germany, a new night time temperature record was reported Sunday from Kubschutz, in eastern Saxony, where the temperature did not drop below 29.4 degrees Celsius. The nightly record came only hours after a daytime record of 41.5 C in Mockern-Drewitz in Saxony-Anhalt, according to preliminary data by the German Weather Service DWD. The previous record was set a day earlier. A new study from the World Weather Attribution, a Europe-based collaboration of scientists, reported Friday that the record-breaking heat and ..
The world's highest-consuming 10 per cent of people could be causing an environmental damage worth USD 1.7 trillion to USD 5.7 trillion a year -- 60 per cent of which live in the US and the European Union (EU), while only about two per cent are in India, a new study has estimated. About 40-45 per cent of EU's and over half of the US' population falls within the highest-consuming group, findings published in the journal Communications Sustainability show. Researchers from the universities of Oxford in the UK and Leiden in the Netherlands combined consumption-based environmental footprints with prices from the Environmental Prices Handbook 2024 to estimate the monetary cost of damage across climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and freshwater use. It looked at six countries -- Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, India, and the US. The team found that damage through biodiversity loss makes up 47-56 per cent of the total bill -- the biggest contributor -- ...
Earth's climate system is accumulating heat at an accelerating rate as human activity pushed global warming to 1.37 degrees Celsius last year, with the figure projected to surpass the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5 degrees in about four years, strong and consistent evidence shows, researchers have said. Record-high greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, combined with a continued drop in sulphur aerosols -- thereby unmasking a part of the GHGs' warming effect -- are driving human-induced warming, which remains at an all-time high of around 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, an international team of more than 70 scientists from 56 institutions across 17 countries, including the UK, the US, India and in Europe, said. There is evidence that carbon dioxide emission growth is slowing, but society needs to massively increase decarbonisation efforts during this critical decade, the researchers said. They added that the rate at which heat is accumulating in the Earth system suggests high levels of ...
Hot and humid conditions prevailing during India's monsoon season could extend the duration of uncompensable heat stress of the summer season under a global warming of 2 degrees Celsius, a study has found. Findings published in the journal American Geophysical Union (AGU) Advances highlight a "surge of UHS (uncompensable heat stress) during the monsoon season (July-October) as the climate warms". Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar and the US' Stanford and Purdue universities said long-lasting uncompensable heat stress across both the seasons -- summer and monsoon -- could pose critical challenges to public health, labour productivity, and climate resilience in densely populated and vulnerable regions. Uncompensable heat stress occurs when one's body is unable to cool down through sweating or other mechanisms due to extreme heat and humidity. A sustained accumulation of heat can endanger human health, including causing heat-related illness, organ .