The Effects of Heat Exposure on Human Mortality Throughout the United States

Abstract

Exposure to high ambient temperatures is an important cause of avoidable, premature death that may become more prevalent under climate change. Though extensive epidemiological data are available in the United States, they are largely limited to select large cities, and hence, most projections estimate the potential impact of future warming on a subset of the U.S. population. Here we utilize evaluations of the relative risk of premature death associated with temperature in 10 U.S. cities spanning a wide range of climate conditions to develop a generalized risk function. We first evaluate the performance of this generalized function, which introduces substantial biases at the individual city level but performs well at the large scale. We then apply this function to estimate the impacts of projected climate change on heat-related nationwide U.S. deaths under a range of scenarios. During the current decade, there are 12,000 (95% confidence interval 7,400-16,500) premature deaths annually in the contiguous United States, much larger than most estimates based on totals for select individual cities. These values increase by 97,000 (60,000-134,000) under the high-warming Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario and by 36,000 (22,000-50,000) under the moderate RCP4.5 scenario by 2100, whereas they remain statistically unchanged under the aggressive mitigation scenario RCP2.6. These results include estimates of adaptation that reduce impacts by~40-45% as well as population increases that roughly offset adaptation. The results suggest that the degree of climate change mitigation will have important health impacts on Americans.

Reducing Planetary Health Risks Through Short‐Lived Climate Forcer Mitigation

“…The human health and ecosystem health results may be particularly sensitive to the model's horizontal grid resolution (e.g., Punger & West, 2013). This study has not assessed the health impacts of other air pollutants such as O 3 (Anenberg et al, 2017) and heat (Shindell et al, 2020). This study estimated aerosol-cloud interactions based on scalings of the model's aerosol-radiation interactions (Bond et al, 2013).…”

“…All rights reserved. (Anenberg et al, 2017) and heat (Shindell et al, 2020). This study estimated aerosol-cloud interactions based on scalings of the model's aerosol-radiation interactions (Bond et al, 2013).…”

Carceral and Climate Crises and Health Inequities: A Call for Greater Transparency, Accountability, and Human Rights Protections

“…Prison and jail-attributable death, illness, and injury are receiving greater attention (Massoglia, 2008;Venters, 2019). Increasing temperature exposure intensity will inevitably lead to an increase in preventable death, illness, and injury (Bark, 1998;Bouchama et al, 2007;Mullins & White, 2019;Shindell et al, 2020). For instance, Marcia Powell was incarcerated, exposed to extreme heat, and left to die.…”

“…The deadliest weather disaster is heat, which kills up to 12,000 lives annually in the U.S. (Shindell et al, 2020). Daniel Holt proposes adaptation strategies to address how heat waves and rising temperatures, associated with climate change, affect jails and prisons (2015).…”

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