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IMAGE: The UC San Diego team wanted to explore the tradeoffs countries would face by taking aerosols into consideration while concurrently making CO2 cuts to implement Paris pledges. Their model provides. view more
Credit: UC San Diego
Aerosol reductions that would take place as countries meet climate goals could contribute to global cooling and prevent more than one million annual premature deaths over a decade, according to a new study from the University of California San Diego.
The landmark Paris Agreement of 2016 does not address emissions of aerosols fine particulates like soot that cause pollution. Nonetheless, findings from the recent study authored by researchers at UC San Diego s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the School of Global Policy and Strategy suggests that aerosol accounting should be explicitly incorporated into international climate policy.
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Between 1991 and 2018, more than a third of all deaths in which heat played a role were attributable to human-induced global warming, according to a new article in
Nature Climate Change.
The study, the largest of its kind, was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the University of Bern within the Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) Collaborative Research Network. Using data from 732 locations in 43 countries around the world it shows for the first time the actual contribution of man-made climate change in increasing mortality risks due to heat.
Overall, the estimates show that 37% of all heat-related deaths in the recent summer periods were attributable to the warming of the planet due to anthropogenic activities. This percentage of heat-related deaths attributed to human-induced climate change was highest in Central and South America (up to 76% in Ecuador or Colombia, for example) and South-East Asia (between 48% to 61%).
Although sun radiation was relatively low, the temperature on the young Earth was warm. An international team of geoscientists has found important clues that high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were responsible for these high temperatures. It only got cooler with the beginning of plate tectonics, as the CO2 was gradually captured and stored on the emerging continents.