Guest essay by Eric Worrall
People who work in bakeries, factories or mines regularly deal with 130F/54C+. But for climate scientists working in comfortable offices, anything above 122F/50C seems to represent some sort of limit.
Kuwait is rapidly becoming uninhabitable as global warming takes its toll
Temperature records are being broken worldwide, but Kuwait – one of the hottest countries on the planet – broke 50 degrees Celsius in June, weeks before its usual peak weather.
Fiona MacDonaldJanuary 20, 2022 – 9 am
Trying to catch a bus at Maliya station in Kuwait City can be unbearable in the summer. About two-thirds of the city’s buses pass through the center and the schedules are unreliable.
Smoke from the passing traffic filled the air. Small shelters provide refuge for a few people, if they are crowded. Dozens of people stood in the sun, sometimes using umbrellas to shield themselves.
Global warming is breaking temperature records worldwide, but Kuwait – one of the hottest countries on the planet – is quickly becoming uncontrollable.
In 2016, the thermometer hit 54C, the highest reading on Earth in 76 years. Last year, it hit 50 degrees Celsius for the first time in June, weeks before the usual peak weather. According to the Environment Agency, parts of Kuwait could be 4.5 degrees Celsius hotter between 2071 and 2100 than the historical average, rendering large areas of the country uninhabitable.
For wildlife, it’s pretty much the same. Dead birds appear on rooftops during the brutal summer months, unable to find shade or water. Veterinary authorities were flooded with feral cats, brought in by people who found them near death from heat exhaustion and dehydration. Even wild foxes are abandoning a desert that no longer blooms after rains because small patches of green remain in the city, where they are considered pests.
“This is why we see less and less wildlife in Kuwait, it’s because most of them don’t live,” said Tamara Qabazard, a Kuwait zoo and wildlife veterinarian. through the seasons. “Last year we had three to four days at the end of July, it was humid and very hot, it was difficult even to walk outside your house, and there was no wind. A lot of animals started to have breathing problems.”
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Humans are well adapted to work in extreme temperature conditions.
I have personal experience of working in extreme heat conditions. One of my first jobs was working in a chemical plant in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne has scorching hot summers. Plant floor temperatures frequently exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. One week, the temperature outside reaches 110 degrees F every day. There was a thermometer on the factory floor that hit 130F at 10 a.m. every day of that week.
The factory floor was wet and steamy like a rainforest, because the chemical production line released a huge amount of steam. The plant also houses numerous stock steam-heated hydraulic presses, which are fed by leaky pipes, adding to the moisture. Conditions are so humid, water droplets continuously condense on some machines, even when the store floor temperature reaches 130°C.
I’m not sure what the wet bulb temperature was on that weekly shop floor, but it sure is impressive. The management was so caring during the heat wave, they made us drink a plastic cup of electrolyte water every 5 minutes. There’s a well-equipped in-house lab attached to the factory that does regular quality assurance on the products, so I think management knows the exact wet bulb temperature on the factory floor. But if they knew they wouldn’t say.
How can myself and my colleagues operate in web bulb temperatures that are almost certainly above 35C? The following provide some insight.
Simplicity lacks robustness when it comes to predicting heat health outcomes under changing climates
Jennifer K. Vanos,firstJane W. Baldwin,2Ollie Jay,3.4 and Kristie L. Ebi5Author information Article notes Copyright and license informationDisclaimer
Extreme heat adversely affects human health, productivity and well-being, with more frequent and intense heat waves expected to increase exposure. However, Current risk projections oversimplify important interpersonal factors in human thermoregulation, leading to unreliable and unrealistic estimates of adverse outcomes. for future health.
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Capturing these intricacies allows researchers to understand the extent of heat stress generated by heat stress and by extension heat-related health outcomes. These complexities are currently overlooked in common heat-related health projections. Eg, The most commonly used metric for predicting future heat-related mortality is wet bulb temperature (BILLIONw) threshold of 35°C (eg:ten,), which is based on the thermodynamic limit for heat exchange, whereby the human body becomes an adiabatic system (Table first). The conservative assumption that this value must be reached to cause widespread mortality is only valid under certain conditions, i.e. the person is completely sedentary, undressed, acclimatized. maximal and average-sized adults do not experience any impairment of thermoregulation. These assumptions are implausible in the real world and severe illness and death can occur at much lower levels of heat stress. when considering actual metabolic heat loads, clothing, population demographics, and health status. In essence, use this BILLIONw thresholds without questioning such implicit assumptions could lead to a substantial underestimation of the future scope and potential severity of heat-related outcomes. Conversely, a single threshold may also overestimate risk because humans are known to live in extreme climates. through averting the effects of climate extremes using adaptive innovations. Typically, these innovations involve technological, infrastructural, and behavioral adaptations to assist in minimizing overexposure and/or the amount of time an individual is exposed to hazardous levels. certain harshness.11.
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The general applicability, and therefore usability, of the predictions is questionable when they are based on a single ambient threshold at which mortality is expected to occur for a given population. with an inanimate unclothed human (eg, BILLIONw 35 °C) against a range of outcomes with potential uncertainty. Furthermore, regardless of contact time, space, activities, clothing, behavior and above all, individual psychophysiology, the mismatch between the complex climate model and the oversimplified human model does not provide useful information for decision makers. Embedding more complex human heat stress models into climate projections will provide health projections that are more relevant across a more realistic and therefore more diverse population group than a rational individual. thought is assumed.
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Read more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7695704/
My point is, if you’re used to extreme conditions, like people who work in hot factories, or people who live in very hot places like Kuwait, those extreme conditions are normal. and tolerable. I’m confident we regularly exceed 35 degrees Celsius in a wet bulb on our hottest days for most of the 8 hours of our workday, due to extreme temperatures and water particles condensing on the machine – but we’re fine.
The most enjoyable part of the experience, when the shift ended at 3pm, and I stepped outside in sweaty 110F, I sometimes started to shiver. Within minutes, I felt freezing cold on a 110F day, as my body readjusted to cooler outside conditions.
If I walked into that factory today, without acclimatizing to the heat, it would be very difficult for me to function. But if you do your best, working for months in a slightly cooler temperature as the outside temperature rises to its peak in Summer, most people’s bodies can adapt.
Scientists claim that older people have more difficulty adapting to heat. But a lot of the people who worked in that factory were old. From memory, the people on the store floor I worked with were half a dozen older chain smokers who were Eastern Europeans, a pregnant Pacific Islander, and a few Asians. Most of them have worked there for many years and some are now close to retirement. None of them had any problems dealing with the heat.
So why do climate scientists think 35C web bulbs are a hard limit?
I suspect the reason is that it’s a bit difficult to study the true limits of human endurance. It would be unethical to put people in a test furnace and raise the temperature and humidity until they overtake us or die. In any case, the test subjects will need several weeks of acclimatization to cope with the type of temperature and humidity I am describing, in order to produce a representative result.
Studying people in Kuwait is also an issue. Have you ever noticed the picturesque towers atop buildings in the Middle East? Medieval air conditioning (see picture at top of page). Even the homes of the poor often had small wooden louvers before modern air conditioning. People in hot climates aren’t stupid, they don’t bother going to midday sun to test their personal physiological limits unless they have to – even though they can if they have to.
Scientists can try to find workplaces where people have routinely endured harsh conditions beyond the limits of a 35C web light bulb, but it’s up to a company executive to acknowledge the conditions Working so harshly exists can be a problem. Workplace regulations are written by people who believe in the hard damp bulb limit, so it appears the factory where I work has seriously violated health and safety laws by continuing to operate during the heatwave. hot, even if none of us were actually harmed.
My factory work is not unique – talking to friends, there are many other factories and workplaces that quietly ignore the supposed limits to human survival.
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