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After Covid-19, could next big killer be heatwaves? Draft UN report paints grim picture for world
- Draft UN report paints grim – and deadly – picture for warming planet
- Worst hit will be burgeoning megacities in the developing world
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Searing, unrelenting heat scorches large swathes of the Earth, killing millions who have no means to escape. Shade is useless, and shallow bodies of water are warmer than the blood coursing through people’s veins.
This is a scene from a new sci-fi novel, but the suffocating horror it describes may be closer to science than fiction, according to a draft UN report that warns of dire consequences for billions if global warming continues unchecked.
Earlier climate models suggested it would take nearly another century of unabated carbon pollution to spawn heatwaves exceeding the absolute limit of human tolerance.
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But updated projections warn of unprecedented killer heatwaves on the near horizon, according to a 4,000-page Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, seen exclusively by AFP before its scheduled release in February 2022.
The chilling report by the UN’s climate science advisory panel paints a grim – and deadly – picture for a warming planet.
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If the world warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius – 0.4 degrees above today’s level – 14 per cent of the population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years, “a significant increase in heatwave magnitude”, the report says.
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