LONDON (Reuters) -- When Hurricane Harvey blasted ashore in August, drowning south Texas in a year’s worth of rain in just a few days, it left behind an estimated $150 billion in damage to sodden homes and inundated factories, and claimed about 60 lives. Two weeks later, Hurricane Irma churned into Florida, killing at least 33 people there and causing billions more in damages – as well as brutal loss of life in the Caribbean.
But these storms may not be 2017’s deadliest U.S. disaster. Instead, that title may go to a largely unseen killer: rising temperatures.
Over the last 30 years, increasingly broiling summer heat has claimed more American lives than flooding, tornadoes or hurricanes, according to the U.S. National Weather Service.
And the problem has not been limited to the United States. More than 35,000 people died during a European heat wave in 2003, and tens of thousands perished in Russia during extreme heat in 2010.
The threat is particularly severe in already sweltering places, from South Asia to the Persian Gulf, and has been linked to a rise in migration out of hot and poor parts of rural Pakistan.
But experts say heat remains underestimated as a threat by governments, aid agencies and individuals. That’s both because it’s an invisible, hard-to-document disaster that claims lives largely behind closed doors – and because hot weather just doesn’t strike many people as a serious threat.
"If you have a natural disaster like a cyclone or an earthquake or a flood, the impacts are immediate. Things get washed away, people drown. But heat is a silent killer,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate change researcher at Australia’s University of New South Wales.
"In Australia, heat waves kill more people than any other natural disaster – but no one realizes the destruction they can cause. The attitude is, ‘It’s hot, suck it up, get on with it.’”
Around the world, heat is a neglected and poorly understood disaster, in part because few of the deaths it produces are directly attributed to heat waves.
Victims – many elderly, very young, poor or already unhealthy – often die at home, and not just of heat stroke but of existing health problems aggravated by heat and dehydration.