By Keely Brewer, The Daily Memphian, and Eva Tesfaye, Harvest Public Media
A climate study released during one of the hottest summers on record predicts a 125-degree “extreme heat belt” will stretch across a quarter of the country by 2053.
Within the next 30 years, 107 million people—mostly in the central U.S.—are expected to experience temperatures exceeding 125 degrees, a threshold that the National Weather Service categorizes as “Extreme Danger.” That’s 13 times more than the current population experiencing extreme heat.
The hottest cities, according to the study, will be Kansas City, Missouri.; St. Louis; Memphis, Tennessee; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Chicago.
“This is… really off the charts of the scales that we’ve developed to measure these kinds of things,” said Bradley Wilson, the director of research and development at First Street Foundation, the New York-based climate research nonprofit that developed the model.
Temperatures are expected to increase by 2.5 degrees over the next three decades. Warmer air retains water, creating more humid conditions and compounding heat indexes.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that human activity, in particular fossil fuel emissions, has warmed the climate at an unprecedented rate in at least the last 2,000 years.
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