But for the very worst-case emissions scenarios, heat waves would not merely be a public health crisis, or a “threat multiplier,” as the US Pentagon calls global warming. Humanity would have to abandon most of the earth it now inhabits. In their paper, Huber and Sherwood write: “If warmings of 10°C were really to occur in the next three centuries, the area of land likely rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level.” Huber said, “If you ask any schoolchild, ‘What were mammals doing in the age of the dinosaurs?’ they’d say they were living underground and
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