By Lin Taylor
LONDON, July 26 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The effects of climate change mean the world can expect higher temperatures and more frequent heat waves, climate experts have warned, with poor communities likely to be worst affected.
Heat is neglected because it is both an invisible and hard-to-document disaster that claims lives largely behind closed doors, they said, and because hot weather does not strike many people as a serious threat.
The warning comes as hot weather has swept the northern hemisphere. Britain has sweltered in a prolonged heat wave, with temperatures set to test national records, the country’s Meteorological Office said.
“We will have to get used to these kinds of summers,” said Friederike Otto, deputy director at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.
“There is no doubt that there is a link to climate change. We need to take heat waves seriously around the world as something that we need to adapt to,” Otto told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Fires have also caused devastation in Greece, Sweden and the United States. In Greece, rescuers are searching scorched land and the coastline for survivors three days after a wildfire destroyed a village outside Athens killing at least 82 people.
