On a hospital bed in Niger, a 96-year-old woman lay motionless attached to a drip – one of thousands of possible victims of West Africa’s worst heat wave in living memory, which a report said on Thursday was linked to fossil fuel-driven
“In a pre-industrial climate, we wouldn’t expect to see heat waves at this intensity at all,” WWA statistician Clair Barnes told Reuters.Despite a lack of data, WWA estimates there were hundreds or possibly thousands of heat-related deaths, and it warned such extreme heat will become much more common without greater global efforts to reduce planet-warming emissions.
Standing at the hospital bedside on Monday, daughter Zeynabou Toure described how her mother quickly sickened in the heat at the start of April, prompting them to rush to hospital.