University of California - San Diego
Climate change may keep you awake -- and not just
metaphorically.
Nights that are warmer than normal can harm human sleep,
researchers show in a new paper, with the poor and elderly most affected.
According to their findings, if climate change is not addressed,
temperatures in 2050 could cost people in the United States millions of
additional nights of insufficient sleep per year.
By 2099, the figure could rise by several hundred million more nights
of lost sleep annually.
The study was led by Nick Obradovich, who conducted much of the
research as a doctoral student in political science at the University of
California San Diego.
He was inspired to investigate the question by the heat wave
that hit San Diego in October of 2015.
Obradovich was having trouble sleeping. He tossed and he turned,
the window AC in his North Park home providing little relief from the
record-breaking temperatures. At school, he noticed that fellow students were
also looking grumpy and bedraggled, and it got him thinking: Had anyone looked
at what climate change might do to sleep?
Trump’s decision to pull America out
of the Paris climate accord is being described by policy experts and scientists
as nothing short of catastrophic. 
