-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Climate change poses a major existential threat to humanity, meaning billions of people could die as the planet becomes too hot and unstable to live. Case in point, the rash of record-breaking heat waves that have dominated this summer thanks to unprecedented temperatures have caused mass casualty events . This includes more than 100 people in India dying of extreme heat in the last three-and-a-half months, to more than 60 people who died in a Mexican heat dome, to nine confirmed deaths in Las Vegas during its recent heat wave, to more than 550 people who died in Saudi Arabia while performing an important Islamic religious journey known as Hajj .
While summer heat waves have pretty much always been a thing, it's clear that human activity is making them hotter and deadlier. emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, they continue overheating the planet, pushing Earth's life forms to the limits of their thresholds for survival. "If we don’t adapt, heat wave mortality will increase sharply.
" "If we don’t adapt, heat wave mortality will increase sharply," Michael Wehner, a senior scientist in the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told Salon. "Fortunately, humans are an adaptable species and some of that is already happening in efforts to increase awareness of heat wave dangers." Related Sea level rise causes local e.