Bradfield Lyon is an associate research professor at the Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate at the University of Maine. Lyon is also the lead author of a new study in Environmental Research Letters that discusses the broader implications of rising global temperatures.
In the new study, Lyons suggests that if nations seriously attempted to mitigate the effects of climate change, by mid-century, the area straddled by those bands of extreme heat could still increase by 50 percent.
However, doing nothing would open the door to dangerous and extreme heatwaves in the future that could cover areas 80 percent bigger than at present, according to EcoWatch.
“As the physical size of these regions increases, more people will be exposed to heat stress,” Lyons warns. “Larger heatwaves would also increase electrical loads and peak energy demand on the electricity grid as more people and businesses turn on air conditioning as a response.”
A double punch
In some regions, a combination of high heat and high humidity could make conditions intolerable. However, climate scientists have warned repeatedly that higher average temperatures must mean ever hotter extremes. So it is not like we haven’t been warned.
But getting a double punch of high heat and humidity is possibly the worst scenario to imagine. And this can be a lethal combination – So much so that with meticulous attention to clinical detail, US climate scientists have identified 27 different ways to die during a heatwave.
It is interesting to note that the scientists who wrote the paper on the many ways to die in a heatwave wrote that “in the last decade, there has been >2,300 percent increase in the loss of human life from heatwaves as a result of less than 1.0°C warming.
Up until now, the primary focus has been on the highest temperatures by day and by night, the number of days of sustained heat, and the frequency with which extremes might return.
With the new dimension thrown into the mix, the increased area oppressed by extreme heat presents unexpected challenges for city authorities and energy utilities. And this makes the study very useful to utility operators and city officials in planning for heat extremes in the future.
“If you have a large contiguous heatwave over a highly-populated area, it would be harder for that area to meet peak electric demand than it would be for several areas with smaller heatwaves that, when combined, are the same size,” says one of the report’s other authors, Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, reports Eco-Business
