Everyone knows the horrible feeling: A stuffy night, just a little too warm, leads to restless sleep, and then next morning, you feel like a slow, groggy shell of yourself.That feeling isn’t just unpleasant. Years of research show that sleep deprivation can ramp up heart disease risk, intensify mood disorders, slow one’s ability to learn, and much more—problems with big personal, societal, and economic costs.Now a new study links sleep loss—and by extension, all the problems that come with it—with climate change. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen found that ever-warmer nighttime temperatures, nudged higher by climate change, push bedtimes later and wake times earlier, costing us precious nighttime rest.Sleepers tracked in the study, published last week in the journal One Earth, lost rest even in places where temperatures weren’t blazingly high, and had trouble adapting to even mildly challenging sleep temperatures. And sleep costs, the researchers warn, will rise as temperatures do, potentially costing sleepers—that is, all of us—an extra 13 to 15 days of poor sleep each year by the end of the century.It’s a very clear example of how climate change is playing out in people’s everyday lives, experts say—not just in catastrophic ways like more droughts and flooding, but in small costs that add up. Sleep loss from climate change “is already happening, right now, not in …
Climate change is eroding a precious resource: sleep – National Geographic
