Climate change: Americans crowding into future heatwave zones
thus exacerbating water and other issues as well as dangerous exposure to heat. Of course if you take into consideration
ocean rise, perhaps many of these places will soon be ocean front properties.
Climate change: Americans crowding into future heatwave zones, study says
Houston-Dallas-San Antonio and Atlanta-Charlotte-Raleigh areas most affected by ‘double whammy’ of population shift and temperature rises, scientists argue.
The combination of global warming and a shifting US population will by mid-century deliver a “double whammy” that greatly increases the number of Americans exposed to extremely hot days, a new study says.
People are migrating into areas where the heat is likely to increase more, said the authors of a study published on Monday by the journal Nature Climate Change. The study highlighted the Houston-Dallas-San Antonio and Atlanta-Charlotte-Raleigh corridors as the places where the effect looks to be greatest.
“It’s not just the climate that is changing in the future,” said study co-author Linda Mearns, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “It is many things: how many people and where people are that affects their exposure to climate changes.”
In a unique study looking at the interplay of projected changes in climate and population, scientists tried to characterize the number of people who will feel temperatures of 95F (35C) or higher and how often they will feel it. They used a figure called person days for the extreme heat to reflect both the length of time heat waves continued and how many people felt it by multiplying people affected by how many days they felt the heat.
MORE - http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/19/climate-change-americans-crowding-into-future-heatwave-zones-study-says
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