Climate change

EcoWatch - According to a new global survey of 75,000 people — Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024 — 80 percent want their governments’ climate commitments to be stronger. The poll, conducted by the United Nations Development Program, GeoPoll and Oxford University, posed 15 questions via telephone to residents of 77 countries that represented 87 percent of the global population, reported AFP.

Inside Climate News -   As a cardiologist in the largest city in the nation’s fastest-warming region, Ethan Katznelson has daily, first-hand knowledge of how high temperatures can put stress on the human heart. Katznelson, who practices at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, regularly sees the cardiovascular stress suffered by patients who live in homes without air conditioning, or climb steep stairs in multi-story apartment buildings with no elevators, or rely on public assistance to help cope with the heat in a city where residents feel almost 10 degrees hotter than their suburban neighbors because of the urban heat island effect. He’s long understood the threat—but has wondered whether the same can be said of “the average doctor.”  So he and a team of research associates set out to make that case as powerfully as possible, examining roughly 500 observational studies of the effects of high temperatures, extreme weather and wildfire smoke—all factors amplified by climate change—on cardiovascular problems.

Their findings, published last week in JAMA Cardiology, noted an increased risk for cardiovascular problems related to high heat that intensified the longer populations were exposed to the heat, particularly in normally cooler locations where buildings often don’t have air conditioning and heart patients aren’t as used to high heat. The research team also found that extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods not only increased the risk of cardiovascular health issues, but that the dangers exist long after the event itself. The research team cited one study of the health impact of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, after which the risk of death from cardiovascular disease remained elevated for up to a year after the storm.

Guardian -Hawaii officials have announced a “groundbreaking” legal settlement with a group of young climate activists, which they said will force the state’s department of transportation to move more aggressively towards a zero-emission transportation system.“You have a constitutional right to fight for life-sustaining climate policy and you have mobilized our people in this case,” Josh Green, the Hawaii governor, told the 13 young plantiffs in the case, saying he hoped the settlement would inspire similar action across the country.

Under what legal experts called a “historic” settlement, announced on Thursday, Hawaii officials will release a roadmap “to fully decarbonize the state’s transportation systems, taking all actions necessary to achieve zero emissions no later than 2045 for ground transportation, sea and inter-island air transportation”, Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said at a press conference with the governor.