🌡️ Rising Temperatures Kill One Person Per Minute

🌡️ Rising Temperatures Kill One Person Per Minute

The 2025 edition of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report led by the University College London in collaboration with the World Health Organization was produced by 128 experts from more than 70 academic institutions. The report’s most notable finding was that rising global heat is now killing one person per minute around the world. Fossil fuel usage has caused toxic air pollution, wildfires, and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever. Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, but recent coal reviving efforts may drive that number down. Heat-related deaths have surged by 23% since the 1990s to an average of 546,000 per year between 2012 and 2021. In the past four years, the average person has been exposed to 19 days per year of life-threatening heat and 16 of those days would not have happened without human-caused global heating. Overall exposure to high temperatures resulted in a record 639 billion hours of lost labor in 2024, which caused losses of 6% of national GDP in the least developed nations.

Damian Carrington, The Guardian

🇧🇷 COP30 is Underway

COP30, the 30th annual UN climate meeting, began yesterday. Ten years ago in Paris, nearly 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Now, leaders from many of those nations are meeting in Brazil in the Amazon rainforest to discuss how overshooting the 1.5C target is now inevitable and talk about new goals. Some of the topics expected to be discussed include the need to transition away from fossil fuels, richer countries committing to give developing nations money to help them tackle climate change, the continued growth of renewable energy sources, and how to prevent the loss of tropical rain forests. Prior to COP30, countries were supposed to have submitted updated plans detailing how they will cut their emissions of planet-warming gases, however, only a third did so. The U.S. is not expected to attend. Check back in a couple weeks to see the results from the meeting.

Mark Poynting, BBC News

🇨🇳 China Builds Colossal Solar Farm

China has built an enormous solar farm complex on the Tibetan Plateau which is currently around seven times the size of Manhattan. Upon completion in three years, it is intended to reach about 10 times the size of Manhattan. China’s launch of the now 162 square mile solar park underscores a consequential shift in global energy investment. It houses 7 million solar panels that produce enough electricity to power up to 5 million homes. Adjacent to the solar park, China also installed wind turbines that produce 4,700 megawatts of electricity and hydroelectric dams that produce 7,380 megawatts of energy. President Xi Jinping of China has pledged to curtail China’s greenhouse gas emissions and multiply the country’s renewable energy output by six times over the coming years.

James Bickerton, Newsweek