SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Global heating pushes tropical regions towards limits of human livability:
Humans’ ability to regulate their body heat is dependent upon the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air. We have a core body temperature that stays relatively stable at 37C (98.6F), while our skin is cooler to allow heat to flow away from the inner body. But should the wet-bulb temperature – a measure of air temperature and humidity – pass 35C, high skin temperature means the body is unable to cool itself, with potentially deadly consequences.
“If it is too humid our bodies can’t cool off by evaporating sweat – this is why humidity is important when we consider livability in a hot place,” said Yi Zhang, a Princeton University researcher who led the new study, published in Nature Geoscience. “High body core temperatures are dangerous or even lethal.”
The research team looked at various historical data and simulations to determine how wet-bulb temperature extremes will change as the planet continues to heat up, discovering that these extremes in the tropics increase at around the same rate as the tropical mean temperature.
[...] Dangerous conditions in the tropics will unfold even before the 1.5C threshold, however, with the paper warning that 1C of extreme wet-bulb temperature increase “could have adverse health impact equivalent to that of several degrees of temperature increase”. The world has already warmed by around 1.1C on average due to human activity and although governments vowed in the Paris climate agreement to hold temperatures to 1.5C, scientists have warned this limit could be breached within a decade.
This has potentially dire implications for a huge swathe of humanity. Around 40% of the world’s population currently lives in tropical countries, with this proportion set to expand to half of the global population by 2050 due to the large proportion of young people in region. The Princeton research was centered on latitudes found between 20 degrees north, a line that cuts through Mexico, Libya and India, to 20 degrees south, which goes through Brazil, Madagascar and the northern reaches of Australia.
Journal Reference:
Yi Zhang, Isaac Held, Stephan Fueglistaler. Projections of tropical heat stress constrained by atmospheric dynamics, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00695-3)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14 2021, @04:44PM (4 children)
Try it without your AC and plumbing for a while. And the article is about places where temp+humidity is expected to go above what humans have been dealing with for millennia.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 15 2021, @01:03AM (3 children)
And you reckon we won't be able to find adaptations this time, with all the knowledge we've accrued, unlike every other temperature range we've adapted to throughout history? And you wonder why folks like you get called hysterical idiots...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 15 2021, @06:18AM (2 children)
Depends on the temperatures/humidity and available infrastructure. And whether we can adapt isn't the same as saying we will adapt. I mean, it's possible for folks to live on Antarctica but I don't see a large land grab there. Nor in the deep deserts, unless there's a handy river. And either way, the point is that there will have to be adaptions from the current situation.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 15 2021, @01:31PM
So? There have had to be adaptations to changing conditions all throughout human history. And we're damned good at it. It's why there are so bloody many of us while it's pretty hard to find a woolly mammoth. The ice ages were a lot more difficult to deal with than a couple degrees worth of temperature rise. Is your complaint really that you might be horribly inconvenienced by having to do what the species has done its entire existence?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 15 2021, @05:17PM
If you can't be bothered, then why should I be bothered? The disease is the cure.
Such a land grab is presently illegal by treaty with that law enforced by the most powerful nations of the world.