Photo credit: suburbanbloke

Man-made climate change will render half of the world’s inhabited areas unliveable. And we humans will not be able to adapt to a warmer climate as good as previously thought, a US climate expert warned during a climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Steven Sherwood, a climate expert at Yale University, warned that parts of China, India and eastern USA will become so warm during the summers that people will not be able to lose heat by sweating, and thus making those parts unliveable.

The physiological limits of the human body will begin to render places impossible to support human life if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels, he said.

“There will be some places on Earth where it would simply be impossible to lose heat,” Sherwood said. “This is quite imaginable if we continue burning fossil fuels. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t end up there.”

During the climate conference scientists said that global temperature could rise by 6 degrees this century and warned that the IPCC reports have underestimated the climate crisis. And they are not alone in criticizing the conservative IPCC estimates. During the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently scientists warned that the pace of climate change ”have largely outpaced” the models and estimates from the IPCC 2007 report.

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