Adaptation to Heat Can’t Keep Up With Climate Change

Time -  The last time the Earth was hotter than it is today was at least 125,000 years ago.... Since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable forty-year period in recorded history. The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record. In 2022, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced all-time high temperatures.... One study found that a heat wave like the one that cooked the Pacific Northwest in 2021 is 150 times more likely today than it was before we began the atmosphere with CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age... The truth is, extreme heat is remaking our planet into one in which large swaths may become inhospitable to human life. One recent study projected that over the next fifty years, one to three billion people will be left outside the climate conditions that gave rise to civilization over the last six thousand years. Even if we transition fairly quickly to clean energy, half of the world’s human population will be exposed to life-threatening combinations of heat and humidity by 2100. Temperatures in parts of the world could rise so high that just stepping outside for a few hours, another study warned, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”