Dr. Gulrez Azhar

speaker

158 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 29 Jul

Dr. Gulrez Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · The reality of living with extreme heat in India · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

And if in Europe, mild Europe, it had 70,000 documented deaths in places which are less densely populated, well, they have better health care systems and are not as hot.

So then what's going on in India?

So we went and looked into the data which we have.

And admittedly, data in our parts of the world are not very accurate or complete.

But we still had orders of magnitude, I think 1,300 excess deaths in that month.

And I think more than 300 excess deaths per day.

Just one city, just one, two, three day heatwave period.

So that was completely eye-opening.

And before that, there was this assumption that, you know, people are somehow used to it.

And, you know, India is always hot.

I mean, it is true to some degree.

But at the same time, there are certain limits to human adaptation, human physiological threshold.

There are those hard limits, which we as humans just cannot.

And we notice that temperatures...

even right now and in future are projected to exceed those human survival thresholds.

So what would happen to places?

And it's already to some degree gradually happening.

And we are seeing that especially like people who are working in service based industries, even agriculture, construction, laborers, people who are forced to spend time outside, don't have access to air conditioning.

And that's huge.

Access to air conditioning in India is in single digits all over the country.

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