Soh, there is so much euphoria, love of life in these pictures, they let happy hormones bubble in our brain, and yet they trigger ever more conflicting feelings: the pictures of a hot summer. fed up with sun She is happy to caress our senses. Soaking up the sun is healthy too, but the heat it produces can kill. And she kills more and more often. The consequences of climate change are penetrating our consciousness more and more. Many scientists no longer speak of global warming, it is called global warming. And we do not associate the climate catastrophe with the supposedly manageable rise in mean global temperature, but rather with the meteorological extremes, of which heat has long been recognized as by far the most catastrophic.
Of the 195,000 European deaths as a result of extreme weather, which the European Environment Agency (EAU) has listed in its most recent climate change balance sheet since the 1980s, 81 percent are victims of heat. At the same time, the heat causes 15 percent of the total damage amount of 560 billion euros after extreme weather (of which, incidentally, only a third was insured). In short: Heat waves are the first to bring people to their knees. Cold, storms, floods, landslides, fires are also increasing with accelerating climate change, but the heat has a broader, more brutal effect. Is it any consolation when reference is made to the “older ones” who lose out first?
Heat is increasingly recognized as a threat
In the meantime, a kind of front is building up on social media against scientists, doctors, civil servants and politicians who want to promote heat protection, but above all want to coordinate it better. Climate and health researchers, many in public institutions, are warning and are playing a key role in heat being increasingly recognized as a threat. The Advisory Council for Environmental Issues, the Scientific Advisory Council for Environmental Issues, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – just three German examples from the past few months that have advocated more active heat protection in an expert and public capacity. The RKI will regularly report on heat-related deaths and excess mortality from heat until autumn, if they are recognized as such. In the dry and hot previous year there were an estimated 4500 heat deaths in the country, in 2018 there were 8700.
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach invited doctors, nurses and community representatives in the country to install a national heat protection plan, presented a draft for it – and thus launched another disinformation campaign from the first minute after the announcement among corona deniers (“delusion”). Summer is the new virus. The heat protection plan was denounced in the darkest conspiracy manner as part of the green transformation and the environmental movement.
But what is the heat protection plan really about? Obviously networking, timely warning and coordination for the benefit of vulnerable people. France is a role model for Lauterbach. Their SACS heat warning system works according to a step-by-step plan. The meteorological authority Météo-France calculates the biometeorological indicators for a reference station in each department, which are compared with threshold values.
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