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Future population exposure to US heat extremes
- Provides a new projection of population exposure to extreme heat for the continental United States that takes into account both climate change and human population change
- Uses projections from a suite of regional climate models driven by global climate models and forced with the SRES A2 scenario and a spatially explicit population projection consistent with the socioeconomic assumptions of that scenario
- Projects changes in exposure into the latter half of the twenty-first century
- Finds that US population exposure to extreme heat increases four- to sixfold over observed levels in the late twentieth century, and that changes in population are as important as changes in climate in driving this outcome
- Finds aggregate population growth, as well as redistribution of the population across larger US regions, strongly affects outcomes whereas smaller-scale spatial patterns of population change have smaller effects
- States the relative importance of population and climate as drivers of exposure varies across regions of the country
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