Searing Heat in Washington, DC and Other Cities Pose Major Health Risk

Washington (June 28, 2010)—Having just completed the warmest spring on record, Washington, DC, and other cities in the eastern United States are enduring a record-breaking heat wave that is consistent with climate change. Last week’s temperatures in Washington D.C. broke a century-old record and forecasters expect this month to be the hottest June on record for the area. These patterns fit the long-term trends of more frequent heat waves driven by climate change and are likely to intensify if climate change continues unabated.

“We’re getting a dramatic taste of the kind of weather we are on course to bequeath to our grandchildren,” says Tom Peterson, Chief Scientist for NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

The America’s Climate Choices reports issued by the National Academy of Science (NAS) identified the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions as vulnerable to heat waves driven by climate change and notes that “heat waves, already the leading cause of weather-related mortality in the United States, are projected to increase.” Health risks related to heat waves include heat exhaustion and heat stroke that can result in symptoms from vomiting, diarrhea and fatigue to organ and neurologic damage, which can be fatal.

While individual heat waves can be driven by a number of factors, more frequent heat waves are one of the more visible impacts of climate change already underway in the United States. Characteristics of the current heat wave in the Washington, DC area include record daytime highs, record high overnight lows, and the long string of days above 90 degrees, all of which are consistent with the trends in the U.S. driven by climate change. The back-to-back heat waves experienced in Philadelphia this June also reflect the long-term global warming trend, as do the record-breaking average temperatures witnessed this past spring in Washington D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

The NAS reports also point out that while these trends are already underway, and can be expected to continue, the severity and frequency of heat waves and their consequences can be mitigated by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The reports note that “projections of future climate depend strongly on current and future human actions.”

The Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report issued last year by the U.S. government found that “in recent decades most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights… and there has been an increasing trend in high-humidity heat waves, which are characterized by the persistence of extremely high nighttime temperatures.”

The Global Climate Change Impacts report also notes that “with rising high temperatures, extreme heat waves that are currently considered rare will occur more frequently in the future. Recent studies using an ensemble of models show that events that now occur once every 20 years are projected to occur about every other year in much of the country by the end of this century. In addition to occurring more frequently, at the end of this century these very hot days are projected to be about 10°F hotter than they are today.”

Source: U.S. Climate Change Science Program

Projected Frequency of Extreme Heat (2080-2099 Average)

Source: U.S. Global Change Research Program

For Additional Information:

Climate Prediction Center
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/global_monitoring/temperature/global_temp_accum.shtml

Health impacts of heat waves:
http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/about/heatguidebook.html

Centers for Disease Control on Extreme Heat
http://www.emergency.cdc.gov/disasters/extremeheat/

The Project on Climate Science is committed to collecting and disseminating high-quality scientific research and information so that individuals, the media, and lawmakers can make well-informed and responsible decisions about how to address climate change. For more information please visit, http://www.projectonclimatescience.org

Contact:  Laura Gross, 202-207-3645, lgross@prismpublicaffairs.com
Richard  Ades, 202-207-3665, rades@prismpublicaffairs.com
.