Humans can tolerate some extremes of hot and dry temperatures by sweating, which lowers our body temperature via evaporative cooling. However, this ability is greatly reduced when high temperatures are accompanied by high humidity. When people are exposed to a combination of higher temperatures and increased humidity, heat stroke can lead to untimely deaths.
Existing climate models have shown that a global temperature increase to the threshold of human survivability would be reached in some regions of the globe at a point in the distant future. However, a new paper published by Jeremy Pal and Elfatih Eltahir in Nature Climate Change presents evidence that this deadly combination of heat and humidity increases could occur in the Persian Gulf much earlier than previously anticipated.
These regions are critical suppliers of oil and fossil fuels, so if they become inhospitable to humans, the global consequences could be dire—assuming we’re still using these fuels as these effects kick in.
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