It's not extreme temperatures that kill

Reading time: 2 min – Spotted on Vox

In Japan, the last two weeks, the heat wave led to the death of eighty people and the hospitalization of 35,000 others. In the city of Kumagaya, north of Tokyo, the national temperature record was sprayed at the start of the week with a thermometer reading 41.1 ° C. The 40 ° C bar has been slightly crossed in Tokyo and the heatwave is expected to last until early August.

Elsewhere in the world, temperatures are at their highest. 2018 is expected to become the fourth hottest year in history. In the United States, summer is far from over but nine temperature records have already been beaten and ten matched. On July 6, it was 48 ° C in Chino, California. In a village in Oman, in the Middle East, it was 42 ° C for fifty-one consecutive hours. In Australia, temperatures have risen above 24 ° C by mid-winter.

Suffering more in the city

Often, heat waves are stronger in dense urban areas. Bitumen, concrete, steel and glbad combined in the summer can create heat islands capable of causing differences of feeling of about ten degrees.

Dark color, soils absorb between 80 % and 95% of the sun's rays: it's like wearing a black t-shirt, it's warmer. When it is 40 ° C in Los Angeles, highways, it can sometimes be 60 ° C. Faced with this, the Californian city has decided to cover its streets with a white coating, called CoolSeal which would reduce the temperature felt from 5 to 7 ° C.

In urban areas, high temperatures can accelerate the formation of pollutants such as ozone, which is likely to ignite the lungs. And since the heat is released by the concrete at night, the temperatures do not decrease enough and it is impossible to cool down. Especially since climate change induces nights that warm up faster.

Furthermore, not all of us are used to high temperatures in the same way. If the thermometer reads 40 ° C in Phoenix, Arizona, this is not unusual, but some 32 ° C in Portland, Oregon can send the world to the hospital.

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In Japan, as in Canada, those hospitalized because of heat are those whose health was already fragile or failing to cool. According to the American public radio NPR, most of the seventy deaths in Canada are elderly people living alone in their apartment without air conditioning and having heart problems. Same thing in Japan

David Kaiser, who works for the Canadian health department, confirmed on the radio that the vast majority of people taken to the hospital were over 60, most between 65 and 85. 60 % were men, mostly under medical treatment.

In Pakistan, the heatwave was deadly in Karachi, killing sixty-five people. But to explain this number, we must take into account the huge blackout occurred a few days earlier. As in 2015 when 1,300 people had died, the oldest and poorest are affected. In Japan, too, many floods damaged the current of tens of thousands of homes the week before the heat wave.