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Deadly humidity events accelerating
Deadly humid heatwaves that exceed the upper tolerance of the human body are happening decades earlier than expected under climate change models, researchers say.
Humid heatwave in Indonesia. Photo: Rafal Jachimczyk/Unsplash
According to a research paper, thousands of episodes of extreme heat and humidity have happened across Asia, Africa and South America, as well as Australia and North America.
“Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” says lead author Colin Raymond, who carried out the research as a PhD student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
The study looked at instances where the so-called wet-bulb temperature reached 35°C – the temperature at which sweat stops evaporating from human skin. A wet-bulb reading is taken by passing air over a thermometer with a wet cloth wrapped around it.
Tens of thousands of people have died and suffered serious health impacts in heatwaves this century, while extreme heat-humidity combinations doubled between 1979 and 2017, according to the study.
It says repeated heat-humidity incidents appeared in much of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, along the coasts of the Red Sea and Mexico’s Gulf of California.
The highest readings occurred 14 times in the Saudi Arabian city of Dhahran, in Qatar and Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. Parts of southeast Asia, southern China, subtropical Africa and the Caribbean were also hit.
It is quite logical that as global temperatures rise, sooner or later conditions will start to approach the upper end of the range we can tolerate.
Humid heat is more dangerous than dry heat since sweat does not evaporate in humid conditions and so the human body cannot cool itself. This research shows that dangerously hot, humid conditions are already occurring more often. (SciDev.Net)
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