A report published in The New York Times, regarding the rise in night temperatures, suggests that it is a potentially dangerous situation.

On average, nights are warming faster than days across most of the United States, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment Report. This is part of a global trend that is being fueled by climate change, the NYT stressed.

Human bodies need time to cool off, which happen during sleep, when the body temperature naturally dips. After a hot day, ‘it is really important that people have an opportunity to bring their core body temperature down,’ said Kristie Ebi, an environmental health scientist at the University of Washington.

‘The problem really is the nighttime,’ said Rupa Basu, chief of air and climate epidemiology at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment at the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Claudia Tebaldi, an earth scientist and climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, cautioned that it was not clear if nights would keep warming faster than days, but it was certain that climate change is going to make heat waves more frequent and severe.

As a general rule, she explained that for every one-degree increase in the global average temperature, extreme temperatures; that is, the maximum and minimum temperatures, will rise twice as much.

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