As a grueling March heat wave batters the U.S. West with dangerous temperatures, and the world girds itself for what could be another sizzling record-smashing Super El Niño, a team of researchers has published a study looking at how global warming is already impairing people’s regular daily activities. Using 75 years of data stretching from 1950 to 2024, the scientists identified a clear trend and concluded that climate change is already placing serious limitations on people’s daily lives, with those impacts now widespread and very likely to worsen as temperatures continue to rise. Older adults, and people in the tropics, are especially being affected. The research team found that the global average number of hours per year people are exposed to heat that severely limits their activity has doubled for younger adults since the 1950s, while for older adults it went from about 600 hours per year to about 900 hours. However, these impacts aren’t evenly distributed: Parts of Southwest and South Asia, South America and Australia already experience what the researchers call “extreme livability limitations” even for younger adults. Farmer harvesting rice by hand in Indonesia. Parts of Southwest and South Asia are among locations already experiencing what researchers call “extreme livability limitations” even for younger adults. Image by Annam Jeje via Pexels (Public domain). The research team behind the study, led by Luke Parsons, an applied climate modeling scientist at The Nature Conservancy, said he used a “physiologically grounded” heat model to analyze 75 years of global climate…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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