Billions could face lethal heat if climate change worsens - Yahoo News
Billions could face lethal heat if climate change worsens
STORY: Billions could face lethal heat within the century, new research has found
And if temperatures rise only a few degrees higher
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
around 750 million people could face one week
a year of potentially deadly humid heat
[Daniel Vecellio, Climatologist]
"Uncompensable heat stress is basically the point where you can no longer physiologically cool yourself down through the convection of heat from your body or the evaporation of sweats off your skin."
"Based on the data that we found here we did an analysis of looking at different global warming targets and seeing the number of people that would be exposed to this heat for however long the period during the summertime in the future. We found that at about two degrees Celsius warming, we see a large increase to about three quarters of a billion people exposed to one week of incompensable environmental temperatures every summer at that point. Once you get to about three degrees Celsius, that's where we start to see the emergence of a month of these temperatures for a significant part of the population, about half a billion people every year. And at four degrees Celsius warming, we see that, you know, about 3 billion people experience one week of these environmental thresholds are deemed uncompensble every year."
Source: 2022 United Nations Emissions Gap
The world is on track for 2.8C of warming by the year 2100
"Once you start experiencing 300, you know, 300 days of this every year, that's where you think such as climate migration, have to take place, or unless you want to sit inside and air conditioning every day of every, you know, nine months a year, which is not a life that I would want to live."
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.