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"Global Heating Pushes Tropical Regions Towards Limits of Human Livability"

Posted on the 09 March 2021 by Markwadsworth @Mark_Wadsworth

I know we've done this sort of story before, but they are an easy target.
From The Guardian:
The climate crisis is pushing the planet’s tropical regions towards the limits of human livability, with rising heat and humidity threatening to plunge much of the world’s population into potentially lethal conditions, new research has found.
Should governments fail to curb global heating to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, areas in the tropical band that stretches either side of the equator risk changing into a new environment that will hit “the limit of human adaptation”, the study warns...

“If this limit is breached, infrastructure like cool-air shelters are absolutely necessary for human survival,” said Sadegh, who was not involved in the research. “Given that much of the impacted area consists of low-income countries, providing the required infrastructure will be challenging. Theoretically no human can tolerate a wet bulb temperature of above 35C, no matter how much water they have to drink,” he added.

"Theoretically"? Maybe not. In practice, clearly we can.
Timeanddate.com shows that in Calcutta (the first hot, humid place that sprang to mind, I'm sure there are even hotter and more humid places) there are two months in which the average daytime high is over 36 degrees and for ten months of the year the average daytime high is 30 degrees or more. How often does the temperature go over 35 degrees with high relative humidity?
I have no idea, but I am sure the answer is "quite often" and they seem to manage just fine. Even London breached 35 degrees on a couple of days last year. Was it unpleasantly hot if you're not used to it? Yes. Did everything grind to a halt and Londoners start dropping like flies? Not that I recall. But there again, I am a climate denier, so maybe it did and we did and I have just suppressed that memory.


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