What’s the Best Way to Sleep in a Heat Wave?
Are you waking up in a puddle of sweat — if you can sleep at all? That’s the grim reality for millions of people around the globe suffering through severe, unbearable heat waves. July is the hottest month on record for the planet and very likely the hottest period in 120,000 years, according to global climate authorities. “These are the hottest temperatures in human history,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told CNN recently.
It’s expected to get worse: A new study found the number of days of “dangerous heat” — defined as 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4 degrees Celsius) — will more than double by 2050 in the midlatitude regions, which include Western Europe and countries such as China, Japan and the United States. Tropical areas could face those temperatures for the majority of the year.
No relief at night: It’s not just the unbearable sunshine — temperatures at night aren’t dropping as they should. Nights are warming faster than days on average in most of the US, the 2018 National Climate Assessment found. That’s dangerous for sleep — a vital period when the body and brain do housekeeping chores such as repairing and discarding old cells and generating new ones.
Excerpted from CNN
