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Extreme heat and humidity are increasing worldwide, threatening millions of lives and economies in places where working outdoors could be fatal, scientists said on Friday.
Parts of Australia, India, Bangladesh, the Persian Gulf, China, Mexico and the United States have experienced hundreds of previously rare incidents of extreme heat and humidity since 1979, the study said in the journal Science Advances.
These punishment conditions have lasted only an hour or two, but climate change is likely to extend them to approximately six hours at a time by 2060 and expand the affected areas, lead author Colin Raymond told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“That is a conservative estimate, but it still predates what anyone else had projected,” said Raymond, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at Columbia University and now works for NASA.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Wet and humid conditions make it more difficult for people to sweat excess heat, which carries health risks, including heat stroke, which can kill or disable victims who are not receiving treatment.
Many scientists are examining the potential increase in extreme heat and its impact on economies and health, and mental health problems will skyrocket as people have trouble sleeping and working.
Also read: Get used to the record heat because it’s here to stay
Limiting warming to 1.5 ° C above pre-industrial times is the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and global temperatures have already risen by 1.2 ° C.
A separate document released this week by the Wageningen University in the Netherlands warned of the “almost impossible to live” heat of over 29 degrees Celsius (84.2 ° F) for a third of humanity in 2070.
In the Columbia University-led study, data from nearly 8,000 weather stations showed that readings near or above 30 ° C have doubled since 1979, and two, in the Persian Gulf and Indus River Valley of Pakistan, reported values above 35 ° C.
“We may be closer to a real tipping point than we think,” Radley Horton, co-author and climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a statement.
The highest readings were in parts of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where some 3 million people live.
Surviving in these conditions would require adapting buildings to provide shade, cooling and human behavior, which includes minimizing outdoor work, Raymond said.
This could severely disrupt agriculture and commerce, as many poor people cannot afford air conditioning, Horton said.
The study focused on “wet bulb” temperatures, which scientists say reflect the combined effects of temperature and humidity, a more useful indicator of heat stress.
Russian heat waves in 2010, with temperatures of nearly 40 ° C that killed tens of thousands of people, experienced wet-bulb temperatures “no higher than 28 ° C,” the newspaper said.
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