A new study shows how deadly warming can be, and how behavioral and social changes can reduce mortality. More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes during 2023, the world’s hottest year on record, a new report in Nature Medicine has found.But the number could have been much higher.Without heat adaptation measures over the past two decades, the death toll for Europeans experiencing the same temperatures at the start of the 21st century could have been 80 percent higher, according to the new study. For people over 80 years old, the toll could have doubled.Some of the measures include advances in health care, more widespread air-conditioning, and improved public information that kept people indoors and hydrated during extreme temperatures.“We need to consider climate change as a health issue,” said Elisa Gallo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a nonprofit research center, and the lead author of the study. “We still have thousands of deaths caused by heat every year, so we still have to work a lot and we have to work faster.”Counting deaths from extreme heat is difficult, in part because death certificates don’t always reflect the role heat played in a person’s death. The study used publicly available death records in 35 countries, representing about 543 million Europeans and provided by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Wildfire smoke from the Western United States and Canada is blowing across the Northeast, lowering air quality and endangering vulnerable populations.Wildfire smoke from hundreds of fires burning in the West reached New England on Thursday afternoon. A long tendril of haze could lower air quality in cities along the coast, including in Delaware, New Jersey, Cape Cod, New Hampshire, New York City and even parts of Maine.Last summer, Canada’s record wildfires at times blanketed smoke across the United States as far south as Florida, and the current fires have raised fears that this year could see a similar intensity.Where are most of the fires?Wildfires are burning across Western Canada and the Western United States, where 89 active wildfires had burned more than 1.6 million acres as of Thursday morning, with the most extreme fires concentrated in Oregon and Washington.In Canada’s westernmost provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, more than 600 wildfires were actively burning and tens of thousands of people had been evacuated from their homes, including in Jasper, a popular tourist destination.Officials in both British Columbia, and Calgary, Alberta’s largest city, warned of deteriorating air quality levels this week. Some forecasts were so low that Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, called them “horrific.”“A warmer world means more fire,” Dr. Flannigan said. “These fires are consistent with what we expect with climate change.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.