Germany’s Cabinet on Wednesday approved a plan to liberalize rules on cannabis, setting the scene for the European Union’s most populous member to decriminalize possession of limited amounts and allow members of “cannabis clubs” to buy the substance for recreational purposes.

The legislation is billed as the first step in a two-part plan and still needs approval by parliament. But the government’s approval is a stride forward for a prominent reform project of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s socially liberal coalition, although significantly short of its original ambitions.

The bill, which the government hopes will take effect at the end of this year, foresees legalizing possession of up to 25 grams (nearly 1 ounce) of cannabis for recreational purposes and allowing individuals to grow up to three plants on their own.

German residents who are 18 and older would be allowed to join nonprofit “cannabis clubs” with a maximum of 500 members each. The clubs would be allowed to grow cannabis for members’ personal consumption.

Individuals would be allowed to buy up to 25 grams per day, or a maximum 50 grams per month — a figure limited to 30 grams for people under 21. Membership in multiple clubs would not be allowed. The clubs’ costs would be covered by membership fees, which would be staggered according to how much cannabis members use.

The government plans a ban on advertising or sponsoring cannabis and the clubs, and consumption won’t be allowed within 200 meters (656 feet) of schools, playgrounds and sports facilities, or near cannabis club premises.

Officials hope their plan will help protect consumers against contaminated products and reduce drug-related crime. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said he expects the system to produce “very competitive” prices, “so we think that we can push back the black market well with these rules.”

At present, “we have rising consumption, problematic consumption,” Lauterbach told reporters. “It simply couldn’t have carried on like this.”

The center-right opposition argues that the government is pressing ahead with legalizing a risky drug despite European legal obstacles and expert opinion. An organization representing German judges says the plan is likely to increase rather than decrease the burden on the judicial system and could even increase demand for black-market cannabis.

Some advocates of legalization aren’t happy either.

“What we’re getting from the health minister is overregulation, a continued stigmatization of cannabis users and a much too tight regulatory corset, which simply makes it impossible for many, many [cannabis clubs] to work,” said Oliver Waack-Jürgensen, who heads the Berlin-based High Ground “cannabis social club” founded last year. He is also on the board of a national association representing such clubs.

Lauterbach rejected the objections.

“The fact that it’s being attacked from both sides is a good sign,” the minister said. He added that “approval with much more liberalization, like for example in Holland or some American states, would have led to consumption expanding,” and that those who oppose any legalization “have no answer” to rising consumption, crime and a burgeoning black market.

The legislation is to be accompanied by a campaign meant to sensitize young people to the risks of consuming cannabis.

The government says it plans to follow the new legislation by mapping out a second step — five-year tests of regulated commercial supply chains in select regions, which would then be scientifically evaluated.

That’s far short of its original plan last year, which foresaw allowing the sale of cannabis to adults across the country at licensed outlets. It was scaled back following talks with the EU’s executive commission.

Approaches elsewhere in Europe vary. The Netherlands combines decriminalization with little market regulation.

Dutch authorities tolerate the sale and consumption of small amounts of the substance at so-called coffeeshops, but producing and selling large amounts of it, necessary to keep the coffeeshops supplied, remains illegal. Amsterdam, long a magnet for tourists wanting to smoke weed, has been cracking down on coffeeshops.

The Dutch government, meanwhile, has launched an experiment it says aims to “determine whether and how controlled cannabis can be legally supplied to coffeeshops and what the effects of this would be.”

In Switzerland, authorities last year cleared the way for a pilot project allowing a few hundred people in Basel to buy cannabis from pharmacies for recreational purposes. The Czech government has been working on a plan similar to Germany’s to allow sales and recreational use of cannabis, which isn’t finalized.

Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, has proposed legalizing weed, but parliament turned down the idea. France has no plans to liberalize its strict cannabis rules.
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Vice President Kamala Harris marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act by touting the Biden administration’s commitment to mitigating the climate crisis. Natasha Mozgovaya reports from Seattle.
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Researchers in heavily drilled Pennsylvania were preparing Tuesday to release findings from taxpayer-financed studies on possible links between the natural gas industry and pediatric cancer, asthma and poor birth outcomes.

The four-year, $2.5 million project is wrapping up after the state’s former governor, Democrat Tom Wolf, in 2019 agreed to commission it under pressure from the families of pediatric cancer patients who live amid the nation’s most prolific natural gas reservoir in western Pennsylvania.

A number of states have strengthened their laws around fracking and waste disposal over the past decade. However, researchers have repeatedly said that regulatory shortcomings leave an incomplete picture of the amount of toxic substances the industry emits into the air, injects into the ground or produces as waste.

The Pennsylvania-funded study involves University of Pittsburgh researchers and comes on the heels of other major studies that are finding higher rates of cancer, asthma, low birth weights and other afflictions among people who live near drilling fields around the country.

Tuesday evening’s public meeting to discuss the findings will be hosted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and the state Department of Health, on the campus of state-owned Pennsylvania Western University.

Edward Ketyer, a retired pediatrician who is president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania and who sat on an advisory board for the study, said he expects that the studies will be consistent with previous research showing that the “closer you live to fracking activity, the increased risk you have at being sick with a variety of illnesses.”

“We’ve got enough evidence that associates, that links, that correlates fracking activity to poor health. And the biggest question is, why is anybody surprised about that?” Ketyer said.

The gas industry has maintained that fracking is safe, and industry groups in Pennsylvania supported Wolf’s initiative to get to the bottom of the pediatric cancer cases.

The study’s findings are emerging under new Governor Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, whose administration has yet to publish or otherwise release the researchers’ reports since taking office earlier this year.

The advent of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, combined with horizontal drilling miles deep in the ground over the past two decades, transformed the United States into a worldwide oil and gas superpower.

But it also brought a torrent of complaints about water and air pollution, and diseases and ailments, as it encroached on exurbs and suburbs in states like Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania.

One of the most enduring images of gas drilling pollution was residents in a northern Pennsylvania community lighting their tap water on fire.

A state grand jury investigation later found that a company had failed to fix its faulty gas wells, which leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in surrounding communities.

The Pennsylvania-funded study comes on the heels of other major studies, such as one published last year by Harvard University researchers, who said they found evidence of higher death rates in more than 15 million Medicare beneficiaries who lived downwind of oil and gas wells in major exploration regions around the U.S.

Yale University researchers last year said they found that children in Pennsylvania living near an oil or gas wellsite had up to two to three times the odds of developing acute lymphocytic leukemia, a common type of cancer in children.

Establishing the cause of health problems is challenging, however. It can be difficult or impossible for researchers to determine exactly how much exposure people had to pollutants in air or water, and scientists often cannot rule out other contributing factors.

Because of that, environmental health researchers try to gather enough data to gauge risk and draw conclusions.

“The idea is we’re collecting evidence in some kind of a systematic way, and we’re looking at that evidence and judging whether causation is a reasonable interpretation to make,” said David Ozonoff, a retired environmental health professor who chaired the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University.

Another key piece of evidence is to identify an activity that exposes people to a chemical as part of assembling evidence that fits together in narrative, Ozonoff said.
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A clinical trial in Australia is developing a treatment for sleep disturbances caused by wildfires. The study, which is supported by Natural Hazards Research Australia, a research organization, and Federation University Australia, is now seeking participants in Australia, the United States and Canada.

The trial is aimed at people who have disturbed sleep, including nightmares, insomnia or symptoms of trauma after surviving a wildfire.

Participants will be asked about their experiences with wildfires and asked to rate the severity of their sleep and trauma symptoms.

Those who take part complete short assessments and provide feedback through online activities. The testing is at home using sleep-specific technology and apps that track sleep.

Clinical psychologist Fadia Isaac is conducting the trial with other researchers at Federation University Australia, with funding from Natural Hazards Research Australia’s Postgraduate Research Scholarship program.

She tells VOA that people confronted by trauma experience a so-called “fight or flight” response, when the brain reacts to shock.

“If we are not getting sleep because of the fight or flight response then there is no room for these emotions to get processed during that time and therefore the trauma can be ongoing, sleep can also continue to be a problem for those people and unfortunately it becomes a vicious cycle for many people,” she said.

This is an international study that is seeking participants in Australia, the United States and Canada.

Their experiences of a wildfire do not need to be recent; the event could be several years or even decades ago.

Isaac says the early signs from the clinical trial are encouraging.

“If they are waking up too early or they cannot initiate sleep, or they are having regular nightmares, these modules are dedicated to actually psycho-educate the public about sleep, insomnia, nightmares and trauma symptoms. It is very easy to use and we have had some great feedback from our current participants,” she said.

Prolific vegetation growth has led to warnings that Australia could face serious wildfires later this year.

A royal commission inquiry into Australia’s Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 — which destroyed vast parts of the country — along with other disasters, said in October 2020 that climate change had exacerbated the extreme conditions which caused the fires.

2023 has already been a savage year for wildfires. The fires in Hawaii are the deadliest in the United States in more than 100-years.

Canadian wildfire officials said earlier this month that the 2023 wildfire season is the worst ever recorded, with millions of hectares of land already scorched.

Fires have also caused widespread devastation in Spain and Portugal.

And recent fires on the Greek island of Rhodes forced the evacuation of thousands of people as the flames reached resorts on the island’s south-eastern coast.
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New Zealand on Monday removed the last of its remaining COVID-19 restrictions, marking the end of a government response to the pandemic that was watched closely around the world. 

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the requirement to wear masks in hospitals and other health care facilities would end at midnight, as would a requirement for people who caught the virus to isolate themselves for seven days. 

New Zealand was initially praised internationally for eliminating the virus entirely after imposing nationwide lockdowns and strict border controls. 

But as the pandemic wore on and more infectious variants took hold, the nation’s zero-tolerance approach became untenable. It eventually abandoned its elimination strategy. 

Reflecting on the government’s response to the virus over more than three years, Hipkins said that during the height of the pandemic he had longed for the day he could end all restrictions, but now it felt anticlimactic. 

He said about 3,250 New Zealanders from a population of 5 million had died with COVID-19 as a primary or secondary cause — about one-fifth of the mortality rate in the United States. 

“While there were no doubt fractures in our collective sense of unity, I believe that New Zealanders can be enormously proud of what we achieved together,” Hipkins said. “We stayed home, we made sacrifices, we got vaccinated, and there is absolutely no question, we saved lives.” 

Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said coronavirus case numbers and hospitalizations were low and had been trending down since June, and the publicly funded health system had faced less disruption from the virus this southern winter. 

“We have been able to complete 16,000 more operations than we did last year, and so that is a very good indication our health system is on a much more even keel than it was,” she said. 

The announcement comes two months before a general election. 

David Seymour, the leader of the opposition ACT Party, said the government had been treating people like children for too long. 

“They have been happy to impose high costs with little benefit and have taken their sweet time getting around to fixing it,” Seymour said in a statement. 
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For the team aboard the Okeanos Explorer off the coast of Alaska, exploring the mounds and craters of the sea floor along the Aleutian Islands is a chance to surface new knowledge about life in some of the world’s deepest and most remote waters.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel is on a five-month mission aboard a reconfigured former Navy vessel run by civilians and members of the NOAA Corps. The ship, with a 48-member crew, is outfitted with technology and tools to peer deep into the ocean to gather data to share with onshore researchers in real time. The hope is that this data will then be used to drive future research.

“It’s so exciting to go down there and see that it’s actually teeming with life,” said expedition coordinator Shannon Hoy. “You would never know that unless we were able to go down there and explore.”

Using a variety of sonars and two remotely operated vehicles — Deep Discoverer and Serios — researchers aboard the ship are mapping and collecting samples from areas along the Aleutian Trench and the Gulf of Alaska. High-resolution cameras that can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) allow researchers to document and immediately share their findings. The ship can also livestream dives to the public.

Many factors, such as depth, speed and sonar capability, influence how much sea floor can be mapped. In 2 to 4 weeks, the Okeanos Explorer can map as much as 50,000 square kilometers (31,069 square miles), Hoy said.

During these dives, Hoy said the team plans to investigate some of the area’s cold seep communities — places where gases from under the sea floor rise through cracks and where plants don’t rely on photosynthesis for food production. 

“We’re also going to be looking through the water column to see what interesting animals and fauna that we can see there,” she said. 

Kasey Cantwell, the ship’s operations chief, said the data will help researchers and the public better understand these remote stretches of ocean, including marine life and habitats in the area. That could inform management decisions in fisheries. Data could also help detect hazards and improve nautical charts.

“It’s really hard to care for things you don’t understand, to love things you don’t understand,” Cantwell said.

The deep ocean off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands is one of the least mapped places in the U.S., partly due to its remoteness. Modern mapping standards have covered just 34% of the sea floor around Alaska, which has one of the nation’s largest coastal ecosystems, and only a fraction of that has been seen, according to the expedition’s website.

Closing these gaps is a mission priority and will help meet a goal of mapping all the United States’ deep waters by 2030 and near-shore waters by 2040, according to Emily Crum, a communications specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But the data collection process is laborious.

Thomas Morrow, a physical scientist on the ship, likened the effort to “walking the length of several city blocks in complete darkness with a tiny flashlight.”

Nevertheless, all these small looks add up to a better understanding of what lies in the deepest parts of the sea.

In the expedition’s first two months, researchers recorded methane seeps and saw a Brisingid sea star at a depth of 2,803 meters (9,200 feet) that had not been documented in the Aleutians before. At least two potential new species have also been discovered.

Earlier this year while on an expedition off the coast of Washington state, researchers aboard the ship documented a jellyfish floating in the deep, and soon had a call from an excited scientist who told them the jellyfish was behaving in ways not seen before.

“The feeling of wonder that sometimes happens in that control room is so palpable,” he said.  
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A Montana judge on Monday sided with young environmental activists who said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by permitting fossil fuel development without considering its effect on the climate.

The ruling in the first-of-its-kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.

District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found the policy the state uses in evaluating requests for fossil fuel permits — which does not allow agencies to evaluate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions — is unconstitutional.

Judge Seeley wrote in the ruling that “Montana’s emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment and harm and injury” to the youth.

However, it’s up to the state Legislature to determine how to bring the policy into compliance. That leaves slim chances for immediate change in a fossil fuel-friendly state where Republicans dominate the statehouse.

The attorney representing the youth, Julia Olson of Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon environmental group that has filed similar lawsuits in every state since 2011, celebrated the ruling.

“As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” Olson said in a statement. “This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.”

Emily Flower, spokeswoman for Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, decried the ruling as “absurd,” criticized the judge and said the office planned to appeal.

“This ruling is absurd, but not surprising from a judge who let the plaintiffs’ attorneys put on a weeklong taxpayer-funded publicity stunt that was supposed to be a trial,” Flower said. “Montanans can’t be blamed for changing the climate — even the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses agreed that our state has no impact on the global climate. Their same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. It should have been here as well, but they found an ideological judge who bent over backward to allow the case to move forward and earn herself a spot in their next documentary.”

Attorneys for the 16 plaintiffs, ranging in age from 5 to 22, presented evidence during the two-week trial in June that increasing carbon dioxide emissions are driving hotter temperatures, more drought and wildfires and decreased snowpack. Those changes are harming the young people’s physical and mental health, according to experts brought in by the plaintiffs.

The state argued that even if Montana completely stopped producing C02, it would have no effect on a global scale because states and countries around the world contribute to the amount of C02 in the atmosphere.

A remedy has to offer relief, the state said, or it’s not a remedy at all.
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Patients who take blockbuster drugs like Wegovy or Ozempic for weight loss may face life-threatening complications if they need surgery or other procedures that require empty stomachs for anesthesia. This summer’s guidance to halt the medication for up to a week may not go far enough, either. 

Some anesthesiologists in the U.S. and Canada say they’ve seen growing numbers of patients on the weight-loss drugs who inhaled food and liquid into their lungs while sedated because their stomachs were still full — even after following standard instructions to stop eating for six to eight hours in advance. 

The drugs can slow digestion so much that it puts patients at increased risk for the problem, called pulmonary aspiration, which can cause dangerous lung damage, infections and even death, said Dr. Ion Hobai, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. 

“This is such a serious sort of potential complication that everybody who takes this drug should know about it,” said Hobai, who was among the first to flag the issue. 

Nearly 6 million prescriptions for the class of drugs that include Wegovy and Ozempic were written between January and May in the U.S. for people who don’t have diabetes, according to Komodo Health, a health care technology company. The drugs induce weight loss by mimicking the actions of hormones, found primarily in the gut, that kick in after people eat. They also target signals between the gut and the brain that control appetite and feelings of fullness, and by slowing how fast the stomach empties. 

In June, the American Society of Anesthesiologists issued guidance advising patients to skip daily weight-loss medications on the day of surgery and hold off on weekly injections for a week before any sedation procedures. Dr. Michael Champeau, the group’s president, said the action was based on anecdotal reports of problems — including aspiration — from around the country. 

It’s not clear how many patients taking the anti-obesity drugs may be affected by the issue. But because the consequences can be so dire, Hobai and a group of colleagues decided to speak out. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, they called for the drug to be stopped for even longer — about three weeks before sedation. 

That accounts for how long semaglutide, the active medication in Wegovy, remains in the body, said Dr. Philip Jones, a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist who is also deputy editor-in-chief of the journal. 

“When 90% of it is gone, which is after three weeks, hopefully everything should go back to normal,” Jones said. 

Champeau and Jones both acknowledged there’s not enough evidence to say for certain how long semaglutide should be held to make anesthesia safe. Many patients won’t see providers far enough in advance to stop the drug three weeks before procedures, Champeau noted. 

Aspiration occurs in one of every 2,000 to 3,000 operations that require sedation, and almost half of patients who aspirate during surgery develop a related lung injury. But case reports show recent patients on semaglutide had problems even when they stopped food as long as 20 hours before their procedures. 

“There’s nothing that says if you fast twice as long, it will be OK,” Champeau said. 

Among the several reports detailing potentially serious problems was one of Hobai’s patients, a 42-year-old man in Boston who recently began taking Wegovy, had to be intubated and suffered respiratory failure that put him in intensive care. He aspirated food that remained in his stomach despite fasting for 18 hours. 

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a 31-year-old-woman on a low dose of Ozempic had fasted for 10 hours before a routine endoscopy prior to bariatric surgery last fall. The procedure had to be stopped because solid food remained in her stomach and she was at high risk for aspiration, the report said. 

Since then, doctors have seen dozens of similar cases as use of the weight-loss medication has grown, said Dr. Elisa Lund, an anesthesiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “It has exponentially increased,” she said. 

Hobai is completing a retrospective study of almost 200 patients taking semaglutide. While it’ll be published later this year, the work so far appears to confirm a small study from Brazil, he said. In that study, about a quarter of patients taking semaglutide had residual food in their stomachs during procedures requiring sedation — even after stopping the drug for 10 days. 

The American Society of Anesthesiologists advises doctors who are in doubt to treat patients who haven’t paused the drug as if they have full stomachs, which can mean using different types of sedation protocols or delaying procedures, if possible. Jones added that research is urgently needed to update guidelines for doctors and patients. 

Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs, said the firm’s clinical trial and post-marketing safety data did not show that the medications led to aspiration. But the drugmaker noted that the medications are known to cause delayed emptying of the stomach and that the labels warn of possible gastrointestinal side effects. 

Stopping the medications for three weeks can cause problems, too. Patients with diabetes will need another way to control their blood sugar and those seeking to lose weight may regain some, Hobai said. 

Hobai suggests that people using Wegovy and similar drugs tell their doctors before sedation and discuss the risks and benefits. 

“If you’re taking this drug and you need an operation, you will need to have some extra precautions,” he said. 
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Postal worker Eugene Gates Jr. was delivering mail in the suffocating Dallas heat this summer when he collapsed in a homeowner’s yard and was taken to a hospital, where he died.

Carla Gates said she’s sure heat was a factor in her 66-year-old husband’s death, even though she’s still waiting for the autopsy report. When Eugene Gates died on June 20, the temperature was 36.6 Celsius and the heat index, which also considers humidity, had soared over 43.3 Celsius.

“I will believe this until the day I die, that it was heat-related,” Carla Gates said.

Even when it seems obvious that extreme heat was a factor, death certificates don’t always reflect the role it played. Experts say a mishmash of ways more than 3,000 counties calculate heat deaths means we don’t really know how many people die in the U.S. each year because of high temperatures in an ever-warming world.

That imprecision harms efforts to better protect people from extreme heat because officials who set policies and fund programs can’t get the financial and other support needed to make a difference.

“Essentially, all heat related deaths are preventable. People don’t need to die from the heat,” said epidemiologist Kristie L. Ebi, who focuses on global warming’s impact on human health as a professor at the University of Washington.

With a better count, she said, “you can start developing much better heat wave early warning systems and target people who are at higher risk and make sure that they’re aware of these risks.”

Currently, about the only consistency in counting heat deaths in the U.S. is that officials and climate specialists acknowledge fatalities are grossly undercounted.

“Deaths are investigated in vastly different ways based on where a person died,” said Dr. Greg Hess, the medical examiner for Pima County, Arizona’s second most populous county and home to Tucson. “It should be no surprise that we don’t have good nationwide data on heat-related deaths.”

Many experts say a standard decades-old method known as counting excess deaths could better show how extreme heat harms people.

“You want to look at the number of people who would not have died during that time period and get a true sense of the magnitude of the impact,” Ebi said, including people who would not have suffered a fatal heart attack or renal failure without the heat.

The excess deaths calculation is often used to estimate the death toll in natural disasters, with researchers tallying fatalities that exceeded those that occurred at the same time the previous year when circumstances were average.

Counting excess deaths was used to calculate the human impact of a heat wave in Chicago that killed more than 700 people in July 1995, many elderly Black people who lived alone. Researchers also counted excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide more complete information about deaths directly and indirectly related to the coronavirus.

But as things stand now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports just 600 to 700 heat deaths annually in the United States. A study published last month in the journal Nature Medicine estimated more than 61,000 heat-related deaths last summer across Europe, which has roughly double the U.S. population but more than 100 times as many heat deaths.

Dr. Sameed Khatana, a staff cardiologist at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, has said deaths in which heat contributed significantly to fatalities from causes like heart failure should also be considered.

Khatana participated in research published last year that counted excess deaths in all U.S. counties. The findings suggested that from 2008 to 2017 between 3,000 to 20,000 adult deaths from all causes listed on death certificates were linked to extreme heat. Heart disease was listed as the cause of about half of the deaths.

After the Pacific Northwest heat wave in summer of 2021, the Canadian province of British Columbia reported more than 600 deaths due to heat exposure while Oregon and Washington each initially reported a little more than 100 such fatalities.

“It’s frustrating that for 90 years public health officials in the United States have not had a good picture of heat-related mortality because we have such a bad data system,” said Dr. David Jones, a Harvard Medical School professor who also teaches in the epidemiology department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

There is no uniformity among who does the counting across U.S. jurisdictions. Death investigations in some places might be carried out by a medical examiner, typically a physician trained in forensic pathology. In other locales, the coroner could be an elected sheriff, such as the one in Orange County, California. In some small counties in Texas, a justice of peace might determine cause of death.

Utah and Massachusetts are among states that do not track heat-related deaths where exposure to extreme heat was a secondary factor.

The CDC, which is often several years behind in reporting, draws information on heat deaths from death certificate information included in local, state, tribal and territorial databases.

The CDC said in a statement that coroners and others who fill out death certificates “are encouraged to report all causes of death,” but they may not always associate those contributing causes to an extreme heat exposure death and include the diagnostic codes for heat illnesses.

Hess, the Arizona coroner, said determining environmental heat was a factor in someone’s death is difficult and can take weeks or even months of investigation including toxicological tests.

“If someone was shot in the head, it’s pretty obvious what happened there,” Hess said. “But when you find a body in a hot apartment 48 hours after they died, there is a lot of ambiguity.”

Hess noted that Pima County this year began including heat-related deaths in its tally of environmental heat fatalities. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, America’s hottest big city, for years has included heat-related deaths. Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, now also considers deaths in which heat was a contributing factor.

Maricopa’s Public Health Department counted 425 “heat associated” deaths last year, including those where heat was a secondary factor, such as a heart attack provoked by high temperatures.

It reports there were 59 heat-associated deaths confirmed this year through Aug. 5, with another 345 under investigation. The latest count follows the hottest month in Phoenix on record, and a record 31 consecutive days that hit 43.3 Celsius or higher.

Dallas, which regularly sees summer highs above 37.7 Celsius, sweltered through an excessive heat warning this month and also grapples with oppressive humidity.

Carla Gates, whose mail carrier husband died, noted cities worldwide now must learn to deal with extreme weather. She said her spouse, with 36 years on the job, tried to protect himself by taking a chest filled with ice and several bottles of cold water on his rounds.

“Our climate has changed,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s going back to how it was 20 years ago. So we’re going to have to get used to it and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.”

Now she wants to honor her husband by pushing legislation to ensure people working outside are better protected from the heat. Gates noted that the day her husband died he was in an old mail truck without working air conditioning.

“I don’t wish this on anyone, anyone to get a phone call that their loved one died working, doing something that they love in the heat,” she said.
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With field temperatures soaring above 150 degrees at times, 10-year-old baseball player Emmitt Anderson and his teammates from Alabama thought better of kneeling when they gathered near the mound for pregame prayers at a recent regional youth baseball tournament here.

“It was too hot on our knees,” Anderson said of the artificial surface. “We just stood up.”

High heat proved considerably harder to handle than fastballs up in the strike zone at the DYB World Series this week. Temperatures reached 105 degrees, with the heat index peaking at 117.

Some spectators and umpires required treatment for heat-related symptoms. A few passed out and were briefly hospitalized.

“The heat was so extreme, I just knew it was a matter of time before something happened,” said Dr. Kelsey Steensland, an anesthesiologist from Dothan, Alabama, who was there to watch her 10-year-old son, Finn, play for a team representing their state.

During opening ceremonies, she rushed to help an elderly woman who’d collapsed and didn’t regain consciousness for several minutes.

“This was a medical emergency,” Steensland said. “It was more than just giving someone a glass of water.”

With climate change driving average global temperatures higher, organizers, players and spectators taking part in quintessentially American traditions such as midsummer youth baseball championships are having to pay closer attention to the heat — and become more resourceful about mitigating its effects.

A case in point is the DYB World Series, which features teams from 11 Southern states competing in multiple age groups up to 12 years old. Formerly known as Dixie Youth Baseball, DYB was established in 1955.

“The number one priority to any event that anybody puts on outdoors is the safety and health of the participants,” DYB Commissioner William Wade said. “We’ve got to do the best we can to preach whatever safety we can.”

Large evaporative coolers — which pull air over water to cool it before blowing it back out — were placed in dugouts. It was the first time B.J. Branigan, who coached a team from the New Orleans area, had ever seen that.

During the first four days of the six-day tournament, when temperatures were hottest, games were halted every two innings for five-minute “heat breaks.” Cases of water were supplied to coaches, players and umpires.

Many also wore wet cooling towels on the back of their necks.

Sail shades over the stands helped keep fans out of direct sunlight at the Ruston Sports Complex — a newly built facility that drew widespread praise from tournament participants and attendees. But some expressed concern over the way the artificial turf fields, “infilled” with black rubber pellets for cushioning, became so hot at times that one could easily see air rippling from convection just above the surface.

“One day they advised us that the temp was 167 on the field — and it felt like it,” umpire Tim Ward said, noting that he’d never been so hot in 25 years of calling balls and strikes. “You couldn’t stand still. You had to keep moving or your shoes would start getting soft on the bottom, and the heat was radiating up into you.”

Ward was behind home plate that day, wearing a mask and chest protector, and passed out between innings.

When he regained consciousness, he was being treated in the dugout, and was taken soon after by ambulance to a hospital. He missed one day of games and returned to umpire again before the tournament ended.

Any proposal to cancel or postpone the tournament would have been met with considerable opposition. It was getting close to the start of the school year for some players, and these were their highest-stakes games of the season. Parents and grandparents had booked hotels and traveled from as far as Virginia.

Spectators tried to adapt on the fly.

Many showed up with hand-pulled wagons to move newly purchased, lithium-ion battery powered misting fans to seating areas, where they were rigged to buckets of water.

“I’ve never experienced any kind of heat like this before. You can feel your eyes drying out,” said Steensland, who watched games with a misting fan pointed at her and her 7-month-old daughter.

“You’re either prepared or you’re not,” she said. “And the people that come prepared have a wagon full of hundreds of dollars of equipment — chairs, fans, tents. You have to have industrial grade fans to get through temperatures like this.”

Experts say heat exhaustion and heat stroke are likely to become more common in the coming decades. Signs of heat illness include heavy sweating, dizziness, muscle spasms, nausea and loss of consciousness. One of the more common ways people die from extreme heat is cardiovascular collapse because of the extra energy the heart expends to help the body respond.

During opening ceremonies, the featured guest speaker was Louisiana Tech baseball coach Lane Burroughs. He tried to mentally prepare players and their families by noting, “It’s August in Louisiana. … We’re going to have to dominate those elements, won’t we?”

Casey Anderson, Emmitt’s father, smiled as he recalled that pep talk.

“I don’t know about dominating,” he said. “More like enduring and surviving.”

But parents and coaches said they heard virtually no complaints from the kids, who seemed thrilled to have a chance to end their season at the marquee event of every DYB season.
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Scientists are wondering if global warming and El Nino have an accomplice in fueling this summer’s record-shattering heat.

The European climate agency Copernicus reported that July was one-third of a degree Celsius (six-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) hotter than the old record. That’s a bump in heat that is so recent and so big, especially in the oceans and even more so in the North Atlantic, that scientists are split on whether something else could be at work.

Scientists agree that by far the biggest cause of the recent extreme warming is climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas that has triggered a long upward trend in temperatures. A natural El Nino, a temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, adds a smaller boost. But some researchers say another factor must be present.

“What we are seeing is more than just El Nino on top of climate change,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said.

One surprising source of added warmth could be cleaner air resulting from new shipping rules. Another possible cause is 165 million tons (150 million metric tons) of water spewed into the atmosphere by a volcano. Both ideas are under investigation.

The cleaner air possibility

Florida State University climate scientist Michael Diamond says shipping is “probably the prime suspect.”

Maritime shipping has for decades used dirty fuel that gives off particles that reflect sunlight in a process that actually cools the climate and masks some of global warming.

In 2020, international shipping rules took effect that cut as much as 80% of those cooling particles, which was a “kind of shock to the system,” said atmospheric scientist Tianle Yuan of NASA and the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

The sulfur pollution used to interact with low clouds, making them brighter and more reflective, but that’s not happening as much now, Yuan said. He tracked changes in clouds that were associated with shipping routes in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, both hot spots this summer.

In those spots, and to a lesser extent globally, Yuan’s studies show a possible warming from the loss of sulfur pollution. And the trend is in places where it really can’t be explained as easily by El Nino, he said.

“There was a cooling effect that was persistent year after year, and suddenly you remove that,” Yuan said.

Diamond calculates a warming of about 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) by midcentury from shipping regulations. The level of warming could be five to 10 times stronger in high shipping areas such as the North Atlantic.

A separate analysis by climate scientists Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth and Piers Forster of the University of Leeds projected half of Diamond’s estimate.  

Did the volcano do it?

In January 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai undersea volcano in the South Pacific blew, sending more than 165 million tons of water, which is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas as vapor, according to University of Colorado climate researcher Margot Clyne, who coordinates international computer simulations for climate impacts of the eruption.

The volcano also blasted 550,000 tons (500,000 metric tons) of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.

The amount of water “is so absolutely crazy, absolutely ginormous,” said Holger Vomel, a stratospheric water vapor scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who published a study on the potential climate effects of the eruption.

Volmer said the water vapor went too high in the atmosphere to have a noticeable effect yet, but that effects could emerge later.

A couple of studies use computer models to show a warming effect from all that water vapor. One study, which has not yet undergone the scientific gold standard of peer review, reported this week that the warming could range from as much as 1.5° C (2.7° F) of added warming in some places to 1° C (1.8° F) of cooling elsewhere. 

But NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman and former NASA atmospheric scientist Mark Schoeberl said those climate models are missing a key ingredient: the cooling effect of the sulfur.

Normally huge volcanic eruptions, like 1991’s Mount Pinatubo, can cool Earth temporarily with sulfur and other particles reflecting sunlight. However, Hunga Tonga spouted an unusually high amount of water and low amount of cooling sulfur.

The studies that showed warming from Hunga Tonga didn’t incorporate sulfur cooling, which is hard to do, Schoeberl and Newman said. Schoeberl, now chief scientist at Science and Technology Corp. of Maryland, published a study that calculated a slight overall cooling — 0.04° C (0.07°F).

Just because different computer simulations conflict with each other “that doesn’t mean science is wrong,” University of Colorado’s Clyne said. “It just means that we haven’t reached a consensus yet. We’re still just figuring it out.”

Lesser suspects

Lesser suspects in the search include a dearth of African dust, which cools like sulfur pollution, as well as changes in the jet stream and a slowdown in ocean currents.

Some nonscientists have looked at recent solar storms and increased sunspot activity in the sun’s 11-year cycle and speculated that Earth’s nearest star may be a culprit. For decades, scientists have tracked sunspots and solar storms, and they don’t match warming temperatures, Berkeley Earth chief scientist Robert Rohde said.

Solar storms were stronger 20 and 30 years ago, but there is more warming now, he said. 

Look no further

Still, other scientists said there’s no need to look so hard. They say human-caused climate change, with an extra boost from El Nino, is enough to explain recent temperatures.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann estimates that about five-sixths of the recent warming is from human burning of fossil fuels, with about one-sixth due to a strong El Nino.

The fact that the world is coming out of a three-year La Nina, which suppressed global temperatures a bit, and going into a strong El Nino, which adds to them, makes the effect bigger, he said.

“Climate change and El Nino can explain it all,” Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto said. “That doesn’t mean other factors didn’t play a role. But we should definitely expect to see this again without the other factors being present.” 
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