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More Frequent Heat Waves Linked to Global Warming
Lucy Stickland, vacationing from England, cools off in the public fountain at Washington Square Park in New York.
(By Robert Caplin -- Bloomberg News)
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"The trend lines showing so much hot weather in recent years suggests some concern, even if we can't say definitively this is a signal of climate change," said Daniel C. Esty, a professor of environmental law and policy at Yale University.
Scientists and public health officials said they are particularly worried about an increase in summer nighttime temperatures because people tend to recover from excessive heat exposure at night. Joel D. Scheraga, national program director for the U.S. Global Change Research Program of the Environmental Protection Agency, has delivered presentations indicating that with increasing temperatures and population growth, deaths from extreme heat or cold could as much as triple in major American cities from 1993 to 2050.
Scheraga said the EPA chart was not a clear prediction, because federal, state and local officials are working to better protect citizens from the dangers of extreme heat and cold. Nearly 100,000 people have downloaded the EPA's "Excessive Heat Events Guidebook" since it was posted online six weeks ago.
"These are avoidable deaths. There's an opportunity to save lives," Scheraga said. "With climate change, with warming and an intense hydrological cycle, the water cycle, we do in fact expect more extremes, more flooding and more heat waves."
Since mid-July, 179 Americans, most of them Californians, have died in the current heat wave; more than 52,000 died during the 2003 episode in Europe, where air conditioning is less common.
A group of Swiss researchers including Mark A. Liniger, a senior researcher at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, wrote in a 2004 paper in the journal Nature that if the increased temperature variability continued, "it would represent a serious challenge to adaptive response strategies designed to cope with climate change."
Some climate experts and industry lobbyists, however, question the correlation between global warming and heat waves. Konstantin Vinnikov, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland at College Park, said he expected climate change to have only a minor effect on future scorchers.
"These are events that have happened in the past and will happen in the future. Climate trends related to climate change cannot change it too much," Vinnikov said.
And Bracewell & Giuliani LLP lobbyist Frank V. Maisano, who represents coal-fired power plants, sent an e-mail to reporters this week noting that more than half of the days with temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Washington-Baltimore region occurred between 1874 and 1934.
