10 percent of global electricity: International Energy Agency, The Future of Cooling: Opportunities for Energy-Efficient Air Conditioning (Paris, 2018), p. 24, www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/The_Future_of_Cooling.pdf.
triple, or perhaps quadruple: Ibid., p. 3.
700 million AC units: Nihar Shah et al., “Benefits of Leapfrogging to Superefficiency and Low Global Warming Potential Refrigerants in Room Air Conditioning,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (October 2015), p. 18, http://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl-1003671.pdf.
more than nine billion cooling appliances: University of Birmingham, A Cool World: Defining the Energy Conundrum of Cooling for All (Birmingham, 2018), p. 3, www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-eps/energy/Publications/2018-clean-cold-report.pdf.
hajj will become physically impossible: Jeremy S. Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, “Future Temperature in Southwest Asia Projected to Exceed a Threshold for Human Adaptability,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016), pp. 197–200, www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2833.
sugarcane region of El Salvador: Oriana Ramirez-Rubio et al., “An Epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease in Central America: An Overview,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 67, no. 1 (September 2012): pp. 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jech-2012-201141.
grew by 1.4 percent: International Energy Agency, Global Energy and CO2 Status Report, 2017 (Paris, March 2018), p. 1, www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GECO2017.pdf.
“in range”: See the Climate Action Tracker.
emissions grew by 4 percent: Zach Boren and Harri Lammi, “Dramatic Surge in China Carbon Emissions Signals Climate Danger,” Unearthed, May 30, 2018, https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/05/30/china-co2-carbon-climate-emissions-rise-in-2018.
coal power has nearly doubled: Simon Evans and Rosamund Pearce, “Mapped: The World’s Coal Power Plants,” Carbon Brief, June 5, 2018, www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants. Evans and Pearce estimate 1.061 million megawatts of coal power in 2000 and 1.996 million in 2017.
the Chinese example: Yann Robiou du Pont and Malte Meinshausen, “Warming Assessment of the Bottom-Up Paris Agreement Emissions Pledges,” Nature Communications, November 2018.
“limited realistic potential”: European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, Negative Emission Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets? (Halle, Ger., February 2018), p. 1, https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative_Carbon/EASAC_Report_on_Negative_Emission_Technologies.pdf.
“magical thinking”: “Why Current Negative-Emissions Strategies Remain ‘Magical Thinking,’ ” Nature, February 21, 2018, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02184-x.
full-scale carbon capture plants: Andy Skuce, “ ‘We’d Have to Finish One New Facility Every Working Day for the Next 70 Years’—Why Carbon Capture Is No Panacea,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 4, 2016, https://thebulletin.org/2016/10/wed-have-to-finish-one-new-facility-every-working-day-for-the-next-70-years-why-carbon-capture-is-no-panacea.
eighteen of them: Global CCS Institute, “Large-Scale CCS Facilities,” www.globalccsinstitute.com/projects/large-scale-ccs-projects.
Asphalt and concrete: Linda Poon, “Street Grids May Make Cities Hotter,” CityLab, April 27, 2018, www.citylab.com/environment/2018/04/street-grids-may-make-cities-hotter/558845.
22 degrees Fahrenheit: Environmental Protection Agency, “Heat Island Effect,” www.epa.gov/heat-islands.
Chicago heat wave of 1995: Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
two-thirds of the global population: “Around 2.5 Billion More People Will Be Living in Cities by 2050, Projects New U.N. Report,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, May 16, 2018, www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-world-urbanization-prospects.html.
that list could grow to 970: Urban Climate Change Research Network, The Future We Don’t Want: How Climate Change Could Impact the World’s Greatest Cities (New York, February 2018), p. 6, https://c40-production-images.s3.amazonaws.com/other_uploads/images/1789_Future_We_Don't_Want_Report_1.4_hi-res_120618.original.pdf.
70,000 workers: Public Citizen, “Extreme Heat and Unprotected Workers: Public Citizen Petitions OSHA to Protect the Millions of Workers Who Labor in Dangerous Temperatures” (Washington, D.C.: July 17, 2018), p. 25, www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/extreme_heat_and_unprotected_workers.pdf.
255,000 are expected: World Health Organization, “Quantitative Risk Assessment of the Effects of Climate Change on Selected Causes of Death, 2030s and 2050s” (Geneva, 2014), p. 21, http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/134014/9789241507691_eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
a third of the world’s population: Camilo Mora et al., “Global Risk of Deadly Heat,” Nature Climate Change 7 (June 2017): pp. 501–6, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3322.
heat death is among: Langewiesche, “How Extreme Heat Could Leave Swaths.”
Hunger
the basic rule of thumb: David S. Battisti and Rosamond L. Naylor, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat,” Science 323, no. 5911 (January 2009): pp. 240–44.
Some estimates run higher: “The temperature-crop relationship is nonlinear,” Battisti says. “Yields drop off faster for each one degree Celsius temperature increase—so yes, all else being the same, yields would drop off much more than 50 percent.”
eight pounds of grain to produce: Lloyd Alter, “Energy Required to Produce a Pound of Food,” Treehugger, 2010. As Battisti put it in an interview, “Usually this is quoted as ‘it takes 8 to 10 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef.’ ”
Globally, grain accounts: Ed Yong, “The Very Hot, Very Hungry Caterpillar,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2018.
two-thirds of all human calories: Chuang Zhao et al., “Temperature Increase Reduces Global Yields of Major Crops in Four Independent Estimates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 35 (August 2017): pp. 9326–31, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701762114.
the United Nations estimates: Food and Agriculture Organization, “How to Feed the World in 2050” (Rome, October 2009), p. 2, www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_World_in_2050.pdf.
the tropics are already too hot: “In the tropics, the temperature already exceeds the optimate temperature for major grains,” Battisti told me. “Any additional increase in temperature will further reduce yield, even under otherwise optimal conditions.”
at least a fifth of its productivity: Michelle Tigchelaar et al., “Future Warming Increases Probability of Globally Synchronized Maize Production Shocks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 26 (June 2018): pp. 6644–49, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718031115.