How Many People Is Climate Change Killing?

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One of the most vexing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic was the inability of scientists to keep track of the spread and effects of the disease. One reason is that death certificates sometimes listed differing causes, although COVID was the trigger. Another is that, in third-world nations, the ability to have accurate counts without coroners and doctors became impossible. In a nation like India, with huge geography and 1.2 billion, the count could have been under by tens, if not hundreds of thousands.

Climate Crisis Causes Civil War

Climate scientists have started to express concerns that they cannot accurately track the health effects and deaths caused by the climate crisis. According to NPR, “The definitive federal accounting of climate change’s impacts in the United States, the National Climate Assessment, estimates that upward of 1,300 people die in the U.S. each year due to heat alone and that extreme floods, hurricanes, and wildfires routinely kill hundreds more. But those numbers are rough estimates.”

A US Problem?

Climatecrisis247 views this as a US problem. However, it is much worse in developing countries. Thousands of people, for example, have died from weather events in India.

Data collection is so primitive, however, that it cannot measure what is more likely to have been tens of thousands of deaths in the nation so far this year. These low counts can make the climate crisis seem less urgent.