Results showed that global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels would worsen human health.
According to the findings, a warming of the earth that is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond its preindustrial levels would have progressively negative effects on human health everywhere on the planet.
According to a recent study that was published on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), climate change might put up to 2.2 billion people in India and the Indus Valley at risk of experiencing several hours of heat that is intolerable to humans by the end of the century. The study was presented in Delhi on October 10th.
The researchers projected global temperature rises ranging from 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius to find locations on the earth where warming might lead to levels of heat and humidity that surpass what is considered safe for humans. Heat stress grows in severity and scope with every degree that the global mean surface temperature rises, and it is anticipated that changes in monsoon dynamics will make conditions hotter in South Asia and East China.
Despite the fact that the impacts are concentrated in eastern Pakistan and the Indus River Valley in northern India in the 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius warmer world, they expand in the 2 and 4 degrees Celsius warmer world, with a substantial accumulation of annual hot hours in the highly populated cities of Delhi, Kolkata, Shanghai, Multan, Nanjing, and Wuhan. In the 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius warmer world, the impacts are concentrated in eastern Pakistan and the Indus River Valley in northern India.
The regions that will experience the first moist heat waves and subsequent substantial increases in accumulated hot hours per year as a result of increased global warming are also the regions that have the largest concentrations of the world’s population. These regions include India and the Indus River Valley (population: 2.2 billion), eastern China (population: 1.0 billion), and sub-Saharan Africa (population: 0.8 billion), respectively.
If emissions keep rising at the rate they are now, nations with middle- and low-income populations will be the ones to suffer the most. This is also a reflection of the vast populations in East and South Asia, which are anticipated to experience around 608 and 190 billion person-hours of threshold exceedance under humid circumstances, respectively, in a world that is 4 degrees Celsius warmer than it was during the preindustrial era.
According to the findings of interdisciplinary research conducted by the Penn State College of Health and Human Development, the Purdue University College of Sciences, and the Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future, if global temperatures rise by one degree or more above their current levels, each year billions of people will be subjected to heat and humidity so extreme that they will be unable to naturally cool themselves. These findings were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
According to the findings, a warming of the earth that is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond its preindustrial levels would have progressively negative effects on human health everywhere on the planet. Before a person’s body begins to suffer heat-related health concerns, such as heat stroke or a heart attack, the human body can only handle particular combinations of heat and humidity for a certain amount of time. As a result of climate change, temperatures throughout the globe are expected to rise, which might result in billions of people exceeding these thresholds. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when people first started using machinery and industries that used fossil fuels, average temperatures all across the globe have grown by around one degree Celsius.
The Paris Agreement, which was signed by 196 countries in 2015, intends to keep global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The study group modelled global temperature rises ranging from 1.5 to four degrees Celsius, which is considered the worst-case scenario when warming would begin to accelerate, in order to locate regions of the earth in which warming would lead to levels of heat and humidity that would surpass human tolerances. “To understand how complex, real-world problems like climate change will affect human health, you need expertise both about the planet and the human body,” said co-author W. Larry Kenney, professor of physiology and kinesiology at Penn State and co-author of the new study. Kenney is also the Marie Underhill Noll Chair in Human Performance at Penn State.
“I am not a climate scientist, and the people with whom I work are not physiologists,” she said. Collaborating is the only way to comprehend the intricate ways in which people’s lives will be affected by the environment, and it’s also the only way to start developing answers to the challenges that we all have to deal with together.
