25.7.17
Climate Change Is Killing Us Right Now
The most obvious effect of global warming is not a doomsday scenario. Extreme heat is happening today, and wreaking havoc on vulnerable bodies.
Even the best-case scenario shows that nearly half of humanity will be exposed regularly to deadly heat by the year 2100.
This is not meant to scare you quite like this month’s cover story in New York magazine, “The Uninhabitable Earth.” That story was both a sensation and quite literally sensational, attracting more than two million readers with its depiction of “where the planet is heading absent aggressive action.” In this future world, humans in many places won’t be able to adapt to rising temperatures. “In the jungles of Costa Rica, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out,” David Wallace-Wells writes. “[H]eat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain ‘would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.’”These scenarios are supported by the science. “For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” Camilo Mora, a geography professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa, told CNN last month. Mora was the lead author of a recent study, published in the journal Nature, showing that deadly heat days are expected to increase across the world. Around 30 percent of the world’s population today is exposed to so-called “lethal heat” conditions for at least 20 days a year. If we don’t reduce fossil-fuel emissions, the percentage will skyrocket to 74 percent by the year 2100. Put another way, by the end of the century nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s population will face a high risk of dying from heat exposure for more than three weeks every year.
This is the worst-case scenario. Even the study’s best-case scenario—a drastic reduction in greenhouse gases across the world—shows that 48 percent of humanity will be exposed regularly to deadly heat by the year 2100. That’s because even small increases in temperature can have a devastating impact. A study published in Science Advances in June, for instance, found that an increase of less than one degree Fahrenheit in India between 1960 and 2009 increased the probability of mass heat-related deaths by nearly 150 percent.
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# posted by claus_kirche @ 12:04 
