As heat waves grow hotter and more frequent, research has suggested some places will begin to see events that reach that limit of human tolerance in the coming decades.
Over the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet, modern humans have managed to adapt to a huge range of climates—from the arid heat of the Sahara Desert to the icy chill of the Arctic. But we have our limits. If temperatures and humidity rise high enough, even a robustly healthy person sitting still in the shade with access to water will succumb to the heat.
High temperatures prompt the human body to produce sweat, which cools the skin as it evaporates. But when sky-high humidity is also involved, evaporation slows down and eventually stops. That point comes when the so-called the wet-bulb temperature—a measure that combines air temperature and humidity—reaches 35 degrees Celsius .
Raymond and his co-authors examined temperature data from more than 7,000 weather stations around the world going back to 1979. They found that extreme humid heat occurs twice as often now as it did four decades ago and that the severity of this heat is increasing. Many places have hit wet-bulb temperatures of 31 degrees C and higher. And several have recorded readings above the crucial 35-degree-C mark.
Given the paucity of weather stations in some of the involved places, such as parts of Pakistan, “there’s probably even higher [wet-bulb] values out there,” says Raymond, who now works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The highest extremes were typically only reached for an hour or two, so they do not yet necessarily hit the limit of human tolerance. But such events will start to last longer and cover larger areas in a warmer future.
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