At least 35,000 people died (click here) as a result of the record heatwave that scorched Europe in August 2003, says an environmental think tank.
The Earth Policy Institute (EPI), based in Washington DC, warns that such deaths are likely to increase, as “even more extreme weather events lie ahead”....
That was 35,000 people in ONE CLIMATE EVENT. Those people were in "The West" and not Africa or some other impoverished nation. There is no discrimination by Earth's climate. It's going to get you if these priorities are not moved along by 2030 and in place.
Not to diminish any losses of people in any country, but, this climate event killed more Western citizens than any storm or flooding or tornado or massive wildfires as witnessed in Australia and California. The only other major event that dwarfed this was the 50,000 deaths in Russia due to wildfires. But, this wasn't fire, it was heat and people literally died of in their homes not realizing what the heat was doing to them.
A huge hole opened in the Arctic's oldest, thickest ice in May 2020, (click here) a new study revealed. Scientists previously thought that this area of ice was the Arctic's most stable, but the giant rift signals that the ancient ice is vulnerable to melt.
The polynya, or area of open water, is the first ever observed north of Ellesmere Island. But in their report on the hole in the ice, published in August in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers deduced from old satellite data that similar polynyas may have opened in 1988 and 2004.
"North of Ellesmere Island it's hard to move the ice around or melt it just because it's thick, and there's quite a bit of it," study lead author Kent Moore, an Arctic researcher at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, said in a statement. "So, we generally haven't seen polynyas form in that region before....