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How hot is too hot for the human body?:
Some climate models predict that we're going to start hitting wet-bulb temperatures over 95 °F by the middle of the 21st century. Other researchers say we're already there. In a study published in 2020, researchers showed that some places in the subtropics have already reported such conditions—and they're getting more common.
While most researchers agree that a wet-bulb temperature of 95 °F is unlivable for most humans, the reality is that less extreme conditions can be deadly too. We've only hit those wet-bulb temperatures on Earth a few times, but heat kills people around the world every year.
[...] Heat acclimatization builds up over time: It can start in as little as a few days, and the whole process can take six weeks or longer, Hanna says. People who are more acclimatized to heat sweat more, and their sweat is more diluted, meaning they lose fewer electrolytes through their sweat. This can protect the body from dehydration and heart and kidney problems, Hanna says.
Acclimatization is why heat waves in cooler places, or heat waves early in summer, are more likely to be deadly than the same conditions in hotter places or later in summer. It's not just that places like Canada and Seattle are less likely to have air conditioning, although infrastructure is another big factor in how deadly heat waves will be. Residents of cooler places are also just less acclimatized to the heat, so wet-bulb temperatures below 95 °F can be deadly.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday July 19 2021, @03:32PM (1 child)
> general disdain for model based science
I agree to a point - but in the end, science is an endless loop of model vs data.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday July 19 2021, @06:41PM
Indeed, but bad models can completely freeze this loop. And while there are many important aspects to good science including testability, and creating novel predictions, I think the most important is simply falsifiability. How do you falsify geocentricism given the technology available to those at the time? You simply cannot. Any deviation could be quite reasonably dismissed as minor imprecisions in the epicycles [wikipedia.org]. After all if it gets everything 99% right, how could that 1% really matter?
The problem is that when a model cannot be falsified it becomes easy to simply assume it must be true, and at worst needing of greater refinement. And so more and more is built upon it, and at some point it goes from the *assumption* that it must be true, to the *demand* that it must be true because so much comes to be invested in it. Scientific careers become built and completely invested in it, centuries of scientific literature becomes contingent upon it, and political authorities (in the past this would have been the Church) integrate the idea into their very existence. Geocentricism, for instance, was adopted by the Church as evidence of the uniqueness of man and of Earth.