Coffel Quoted in Washington Post Article on Deadly Heatwaves
July 13, 2022
The Washington Post
As the climate warms, conditions once experienced only in saunas and deep mineshafts are rapidly becoming the open-air reality for hundreds of millions of people, who have no escape to air conditioning or cooler climes. A major heatwave just a few degrees higher than those seen in India over the past two months might not just kill tens or even hundreds of thousands, it could also overload electricity grids, cause power plants to shut down, make harvests fail and hamper the ability of affected economies to grow.
“A lot of these extreme events have never happened in the past, so they’re really outside the bounds of experience,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment and author of a 2018 study warning about the risks of wet-bulb temperatures approaching the fatal 35C threshold toward the end of this century.
Read more in the Washington Post article, "When the Weather Gets Hot Enough To Kill."
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