People around the world are losing sleep over climate change — literally. A new study finds that rising temperatures are eroding hours of rest worldwide. And it’s likely to get worse as the planet gets hotter.
The research, published Friday in the journal One Earth, finds that warm nighttimes steal an average of about 44 hours of sleep per person each year. And they cause the average person to suffer from around 11 nights of inadequate sleep — that’s less than seven hours in a night — each year.
The findings are the fruit of a simple but vital research tool: sleep-tracking wristbands.
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The researchers gathered billions of individual sleep measurements collected from more than 47,000 participants across 68 countries around the world. They then paired these observations with weather and climate data from the locations where they were gathered.
It’s one of the largest studies of its kind to examine the links between climate change and sle …