Confronting the Silent Killer: Extreme Heat and Health

This week on Zero, reporter Akshat Rathi sits down with Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a leading expert on the health impacts of global warming. The intersection of health and climate change is a growing area of research, and an increasingly urgent one: Heat deaths among seniors, for example, are projected to increase 370% by mid-century.  But even the young and relatively healthy are at risk. “The take-home I want everyone to go away with is that we all are at risk for this,” Salas says, “especially as we get into more and more extreme conditions.”

Explore further:

• Past episode with climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe about how higher temperatures results in “global weirding”
• Past episode with John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from A Hotter World
• Past episode with Eleni Myrivili, Global Chief Heat Officer at UN-Habitat about designing cities to face extreme heat

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Matthew Griffin, and Jessica Beck. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

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