If the current pace of global warming goes unchecked, it will push billions of people outside the “climate niche,” the temperatures where humans can flourish, and expose them to dangerously hot conditions, according to a new study published Monday.
The study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, evaluated the impact on humans if the world continues on its projected trajectory and warms 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial temperatures.
“That’s a profound reshaping of the habitability of the surface of the planet and it could lead potentially to large scale reorganization of where people live,” Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, said in a video shared by the institute. “Most of these people lived near the cooler 13 degree Celsius peak of the niche and are now in the ‘middle ground’ between the two peaks. While not dangerously hot, these conditions tend to be much drier and have not historically supported dense human populations,” said study co-author Chi Xu, a professor at Nanjing University.
In the worst case scenarios, if the Earth warms up by 3.6 or even 4.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, half of the world’s population would be outside the climate niche, constituting what the report calls “an existential risk.” Scientists have long warned that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius would result in catastrophic and potentially irreversible changes. As the areas within the climate niche shrink as global temperatures rise, a larger swath of the population will also be more frequently exposed to extreme weather events including droughts, storms, wildfires and heatwaves.
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