I am much further south in Italy, living and working without air conditioning through most of the summer. Yes, it's not super comfortable. But we (humans in general) can adapt, and by the time the fall comes 35C feels cool. I wonder how many of the volunteers of the study live in temperature controlled environments. I'm sure this is documented in the paper. My roundabout point is that it's a stretch to extrapolate from a population living with modern comforts to one that is exposed to the climate directly.
Wet bulb is what for those 35C? There appears to be a consensus that it's not the actual temperature that matters most. Even discounting this study on only 24 people.
Thanks for link. I've had hard time convincing my Swedish friends how same Temperature in Tokyo (RH around 80% now) is not comparable to the dry, windy Stockholm summer weather (even with record breaking temperatures a couple of years ago that momentarily put the temperature above Tokyo). I'll send this when they doubt it next time.
I would have thought this was more obvious to Swedish people, on account of experience with saunas. A 45°C Turkish sauna/steam room feels about comparable to a 80°C Finnish sauna (~10% humidity). And of course the way to make any Finnish-style sauna feel hotter is to pour some water over the rocks, increasing humidity.
You just need to them explain how sweat works. Sweat evaporate -> cool skin -> cools internal temp. Humidity high -> sweat no evaporate -> internal temp increases.
Yeah. While probably the way it's calculated makes sense to reflect how warm or cold a day is, it's making headlines because obviously it's shocking "everyone" when you've to read that more than 30C is unbearable ...
Which is why the article sensibly doesn't put the 31°C figure in the headline and before mentioning it at all makes sure to explain what wet-bulb temperature is, how it's different from a normal temperature reading and why it's useful.
Even if the air is that temperature, there will generally be cooler places people can use. For example, well ventilated constantly shaded ground will be substantially cooler.
At +3 or +4 degrees celsius, expect people to die in India, Amazonia, Nigeria, parts of Pacific Islands.
There will be a lot of climatic migrants, I guess many more than the ones caused by the Syrian civil war or the invasion of Ukraine. Just imagine people fleeing the heat.
I live in the south of france, and I already want to move out to a colder place. Summers are too long.
Maybe there is a taboo about heat, because heatwaves are just not bearable, at least for me.
A lot of people die in India during harsh summers due to heatwaves and sunstroke. This would only increase the victims. I asked my dad how they used to manage without Air Conditioning during summers and he said that he doesn't remember summers to be this hot. This proves that Either Climate change is real or my dad just got accustomed to the Air Conditioning through the years.
You're definitely not alone. I've contemplated a vacation home in some colder climate or getting a basement just to deal with the summers. You can definitely survive most of Europe, but barely functioning for several days to months just isn't fun.
I don't see it. Literally billions of people live in tropical countries and somehow seem to manage fine. I myself live in a country that's almost entirely below the tropic of Cancer and while summer heat gets uncomfortable, it's far from unbearable. Let's put a brake on the hyperbole, at least so far, in the absence of concrete evidence of temperatures truly becoming unbearable for billions of people. If millions of migrants from tropical underdeveloped regions of the world are fleeing to the northern world, for now at least it's definitely not because of climate problems. Political troubles of all sorts are a much more immediately pressing issue.
> Let's put a brake on the hyperbole, at least so far, in the absence of concrete evidence of temperatures truly becoming unbearable for billions of people.
Are you saying we should literally wait for billions of people to die?
I agree, there's a ton of research at this point and the people saying otherwise are just trying to obfuscate reality to protect themselves and the way they do things
Exactly, it's an avoidance tactic. We already know and there is still huge consensus, but the problem is so huge and difficult and requires so much sacrifice that everyone is just like "welll maybe we should wait for a bit and see what happens, just to check..."
It's part of the scientific rule that says that speculating about the possibility of something happening before it has already happened is just fearmongering i.e. "it always worked perfectly until it didn't", "don't worry, I haven't fallen yet..." or "these safeguards are just slowing us down."
I thought it was sarcasm, or more exactly how some people say science should be when they do not agree with reality.
Of course, the whole point of science is to make predictions. Kind of like “global warming will increase the probability of heat waves significantly in the near future” they were saying 10 years ago.
So you expect, without exaggeration (aka hyperbole), 2 billion deaths or more from heat effects? If you believe that, I can see the claim that “billions of deaths” is not hyperbolic.
There are literally billions of people living in climates that are already humid and hot. Those are the areas that will be hit the hardest, first. Yea there will be migrants and some people with wealth will likely be okay, but there are billions who won't be. That is the point
That might be the point but it’s not founded in science. “billions” is plural. The consensus is that it will be catastrophic for low millions at most. Unless you change the definition to be “people inconvenienced by higher pricing, required diet changes, and/or being required to move”.
Low millions? Where are all of the people in the hot areas of India, China, Africa, and the middle east going to go? How are they going to migrate? Do they have money? Will it be on foot? Will they have resources for the journey?
In your worst case scenario, what are the global TFR, life expectancy and annual population growth rate etc etc?
It seems to me that you don't take these variables into consideration and just assume they would remain constant or follow their historical trend into the future which needless to say is shortsighted to say the least.
Does any of that prevent people from dying in weather that is too hot and humid for humans? If not, I don't see how it's relevant
Like what does population growth have to do with people dying from heat? Okay so the population is growing, that didn't stop the extra deaths from happening.
Why does life expectancy matter? Obviously that's going to change rapidly in these circumstances, but again, still not changing the number of deaths
From heat effects and their knock-on effects, yes. Famines, refugee crises, water shortages. Diseases exacerbated by all of the former. Wars and civil wars fought over all of the former. What William Gibson called the Jackpot.
Water and food scarcity in the Middle East, as a consequence of the changing climate and its reliance on the global food supply chain (wheat imports), is IMO one of the most important contributors of political uproar that lead to the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt.
Edit: possibly a better source describing some of the correlations between extreme climate events and recent global food shortages, and its adverse impact on Middle East and Northern Africa.
Climate change affects the conditions for growing crops: food crops that people live on, and cash crops that the economy rides on.
Climate change also affects which regions get flooded more often and how intense these are. All of which are reasons to migrate. Those aspects do also feed political instability: e.g, the "Arab Spring" had started with protests against rising food prices.
Also, not having a viable substitute for fertilizer when trying to move away from the use of fertilizer. Sri Lanka has collapsed with widepread food shortages following such a policy.
Your 40C doesn't equal my 40C when one country has high humidity, and the other has close to zero. That's precisely what the "wet bulb temperature" for humans is all about.
People ie in south Iran or maybe also Pakistan have very high temperatures and high humidity at the same time and they are still living there.
I can imagine it has big impact on productivity of anybody not under 24h AC, but there is still construction, roadwork, maintenance etc. work done. I guess a mix of adaptation from birth plus suffering through work thats just harder than elsewhere, but still possible.
Also schedule adaptations and building styles. It's not like high wet-bulb temperatures instantly kill you, it's the accumulation of heat in your body you can't get rid of fast enough. So you can go out for short times to move between buildings that either have AC or are built to stay cool enough (reflective roof and enough thermal mass to keep temperatures manageable during the day). Anything that requires you to be outside for extended times can just be done during colder parts of the day, or even in colder seasons.
As things get hotter places like Iran and Pakistan can adapt with more AC. The problems will be worse for places without electricity grids and a population that is too poor for alternative means like running AC from solar.
My house is currently getting remodeled in Austin where it has been over 100F the last few weeks. They don't have electricity, so not even fans. I asked them how they handle it and they said "you get used to it".
According to weather.com, the predicted humidity for when it will be 100F in Austin next, is only around 50-55%, giving a wet bulb temperature of around 30°C, which is below the 31°C from this study.
Our mornings are very humid, often +80%. It tends to burnout late afternoon making hotter evenings actually more bearable than cooler early mornings IMO.
The same amount of water in the air at a lower temperature is more humid than at a higher temperature. So as temperature rises, relative humidity tends to go down. Which is why air can feel so dry inside in winter.
You may not see it because its not an issue today.
The entire point is that it will be.
I believe it's been demonstrated and accepted by the science community that there is "concrete evidence of temperatures" (short of waiting for it to happen) that this level of change can happen and is now likely unavoidable.
This world is full of hyperbole but this looming change is not an obvious exaggeration. We've seen it in action already and we know where its going.
Quoting the article "Pakistan, India reel under intense heat wave" from https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistan-india-re... : "More than a billion people are at risk of heat-related impacts in the region, scientists have warned, linking the early onset of an intense summer to climate change."
"Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths / An increase of 1°C could mean thousands of additional deaths on very hot days, according to a new study" - https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-temperatures...
"The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838 : "The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36)."
"Increases of extreme heat-humidity days endanger future populations living in China" - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac69fc/... : "Many urban population centers in eastern China are expected to frequently experience the extreme heat-humidity events featured by the TWmax well beyond the survivability threshold of 35 °C by the end of this century under SSP5-8.5 scenario"
A small percentage of billions is still a lot more people moving than most countries can handle — economically or socially, especially in that part of the world.
Don’t take for granted the status quo. It’s already yesterday, and the systems we’ve been depending on to tolerate and supply us with viral services haven’t been respected. What happens when the next famine hits India? What happens when South Africa has no water left? It might not be the spark on another regional conflict, but it certainly adds lots of potential for another conflict.
Exactly, areas nationwide can’t handle 0.5% of wealthish Californians moving and being simply able to afford stuff lol because that’s still 200,000 people, dispersed nearly randomly.
Political troubles come from food and energy costs going to high or supply being disrupted.
That will almost always be long the weather in that specific area really shocks everyone, because the food and energy come from a different place where there was a weather shock.
You are wrong, the maximum of average daily wet-bulb temperatures in the tropical region over the past 40 years has been 33°C. The highest ever recorded wet-bulb temperature is 36.3°C, for a brief period. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were the first to break the 35°C threshold.
With climate change the risk is that we will increasingly experience such temperatures.
I also live in a country close to the equator with high temps and humidity. No one basically goes outside all summer, it's hell here, homeless people and people doing manual labor simply die each summer. Many residents simply leave for the whole summer to go somewhere cooler. If this is your idea of "good," then I'm worried for you.
Temperatures are already unbearable in South Asia when there are heatwaves. It's estimated ~1500 people per 3 days of heat wave in Bangladesh. An increase in the average by 1 or 2 C could have very serious effects.
Right now we are only seeing these extreme temperatures during brief heat waves. As warming continues though, these periods will become longer and more frequent.
Small changes in the median have big effects when you're looking far enough out along the tail.
That's at least part of why professional basketball is so black--there is a tiny difference in average height between white and black, small enough that on average you won't notice it at all. At the very end of the tail, though, it has a big effect.
looks at weather report for southern france for this week
That’s a very mild summer, I’m located in Southern California where my nights are warmer than your peak day temperatures. During daytime it can be over 45 degrees Celsius. But ACs are everywhere so it makes it livable. I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that.
The parts separated from the coast by mountains are very dry.
Also because the water off the coast is cold, it never gets very hot and humid at the same time anywhere in the western US. For that you need to be near a large body of very warm water.
Specifically, in all of the west coast of the US except the bottom quarter of CA (where the ocean is a little warmer) the weather is cool and humid when the wind is blowing from the west (which it is most of the time) and dry and potentially very hot when it is blowing from the east.
Well, it is a little more complicated than that because every morning the sun heats the land, but not the ocean, which causes wind to flow from ocean to land, then every evening that flow is reversed, so my previous statement refers to the general flow of air masses in the absence of this diurnal coastal wind.
Indeed, AC in private homes is still relatively rare. Of course, in recent years it became more fashionable. Also, a lot of houses in the traditional hot regions of Europe are built to be livable without air conditioning. In my eyes, he biggest impact in recent years has been to the traditionally more moderate regions, where there is no AC and houses or clothing and social habits are not tuned for hot temperatures. In Germany, it was almost welcomed to feel to hot for the very few hot days (if any) it had through the year. Nowadays, we definitely have hotter and more intense summers.
> That’s a very mild summer, I’m located in Southern California where my nights are warmer than your peak day temperatures.
It is not a competition, you know? There’s nothing to win if you have the worst climate.
> I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that
No, and that is a good thing because AC for whole cities in arid regions is a big part of why we are in this situation in the first place. California is pretty much the illustration of how not to build a country.
In general, because of the Gulf Stream, western Europe is warmer than you would expect relative to the US based on latitude. Many Americans who are even somewhat familiar with Europe would be surprised how relatively far north Europe is.
Indeed, I found it very surprising that the latitudes of New York City and Rome are 40.7N and 41.8N respectively, especially when you consider the winters New York City can get.
> I live in the south of france, and I already want to move out to a colder place. Summers are too long.
Ironically, you may want to move to a hotter place where AC is pervasive. I was suffering from the hot French summer too, but doing fine in NYC or Singapore.
French summer is too short so people haven't been using AC traditionally. Conversely, some warmer countries like Greece or Taiwan don't always have heaters and live in coldish houses in winter.
I'm in the market for a house and friends make fun of me when I say I do not want to live in Southern Europe because of climate change, even though I miss it.
Whenever I'll buy, I have to consider that in 30 years it's going to be hotter and I'll be 65 years old.
I used to live in Italy, it's going to be up to 39C in Rome the next two weeks.
I'll miss the sea and the food by staying north, though we'll be planting cantaloupes and prickly pears here in England in 3 decades.
Yep. In Asturias you can be glad if you got three days in row without rain and temperatures above 20 degree. It rains a lot due to the Atlantic influence and in combination with the hight mountains? Nice when you don't like cold winters and don't like warm summers. You can do sports in short clothes in mid February but don't expect a long, warm and dry summer - it will not happen.
A lot people like it but I would miss actual summer.
I beg to differ. I think in 3 decades the climate in England will be atlantic storm after storm after storm, year round. Basically totally miserable. Occasionally a spanish plume will find it's way to England and kill off vulnerable pensioners. Your prickly pears will just get drowned by the constant deluge of water and floods, your cantaloupes will get infected with humidity loving fungus.
During any heatwave, people with heart and blood pressure issues suffer extra. Usually heat waves result in extra deaths especially among elderly people or obese people. High temperatures combined with high humidity are particularly dangerous even before they get lethal for healthy people.
Increasing frequency and severity of heat waves are definitely a noticeable thing. My parents actually lived in the South of France for a few years after their retirement. They were there in the last few weeks for a brief vacation and temperatures went well over 40 degrees in June. That used to be unusual even in the hottest month (July) and is now a yearly recurring thing. Luckily, humidity tends to be quite low in that particular area. But still, 40-45 degrees is a lot to deal with for people.
I think migration will be more an indirect consequence of local economies collapsing when e.g. agriculture becomes hard/impossible due to rising temperatures. People tend to move for economic reasons. Any mass casualties in a wet bulb heat event might of course cause people to panic. But richer countries would be able to compensate with technology by e.g. desalinating water and having buildings with AC. It's poor countries that lack the means for this that are going to suffer most.
Neal Stephenson has some nice perspective on this in his latest novel Termination Shock where people in e.g. Texas are dealing with temperatures that are basically not survivable without a so-called earth suit, which is a battery powered cooling solution people wear to be able to be outside in 50 degree+ Celsius heat. Those might become an actual thing people would need to own pretty soon in some places.
The opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry For the Future" is harrowing. It describes the effects of a heat wave with wet bulb temperatures over 35C in a small city in India. People have air conditioning, but the electrical grid isn't up to the increased demand, so the power goes out citywide. Casualties are extremely high.
Where I live, in the southern US, it'll be a while before wet bulb temperatures top 35C in the hottest weeks of the summer. But they already hit those lower temperatures in the article (31C) quite often (e.g., 35C with 70% humidity), and last week a couple days were over 38C (wet bulb temperature of 33C assuming 70% humidity, though luckily so far it's usually less humid when it's that hot - around 55%).
Ok so maybe someone can enlighten me. I was under the impression that deflecting heat is something that wasn't too hard to do (flat roofs, narrow street closed windows, more shades, etc.).
Am I wrong in believing that people can find some low tech inexpensive solutions to the problem of overheating?
As with lots of other age-related phenomena I thought would never happen to me, at 52 I am starting to really feel the effects of moderately hot weather that I would've shrugged off a few years ago. Tried going out for a lunchtime jog on an overcast day with a high of 30C (86F) and had to stop after 30 min. It wasn't the opening scene from Ministry for the Future or anything, but I got a new respect for the recent headlines about 50C+ temps in various parts of the world. Not looking forward to that eventuality.
Almost 40 and happened to me as well, walk/jogging for 45 minutes at 2pm like 35C my body felt so hot inside, my body reaction was like an alarm that if i don't stop i would faint.
Are there any such studies that have investigated, how heat influences the overall human productivity?
Obviously, physical work becomes harder and correspondingly less productive during heat. But I also notice a considerable degradation of mental work. Personally, I notice the first symptoms at around 25 degrees. From there on my overall mental performance decreases with every degree.
I have never quantified this. So this is pure anecdotal evidence. But I am pretty sure, that more heat correlates with less overall performance and thus leads to a reduction of the GDP.
Isn't it because it's difficult to focus when you are uncomfortable? My mental work performance also decreases when my head hurts or when my neighbours are drilling into the walls.
It seems to me that the very reason we're uncomfortable is because we have evolved a warning system deterring us from overexerting ourselves in the heat. You can literally run some animals to death because of their relative inefficiency at dumping waste heat. Our homeostatic systems are generally superior but will also fail at some point.
I can confirm the same anecdotal evidence. I've had around 30 degrees in my apartment from time to time and my mental faculties most definitely decreases at that time. I tend to make more errors, and not think as clearly.
Yes, there is evidence that is the case[0]. Part of the abstract:
"We provide the first evidence that cumulative heat exposure inhibits cognitive skill development and that school air conditioning can mitigate this effect. Student fixed effects models using 10 million PSAT-takers show that hotter school days in the year prior to the test reduce learning, with extreme heat being particularly damaging and larger effects for low income and minority students. (...) Without air conditioning, each 1°F increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by one percent. "
Was thinking the same thing today, super hot, I couldn't really think, had a ridiculous headache, started to calm down as the sun went down and temps cooled off.
> I have never quantified this. So this is pure anecdotal evidence. But I am pretty sure, that more heat correlates with less overall performance and thus leads to a reduction of the GDP.
Lee Kuan Yew considered air conditioning to be one of the most important inventions in history (and the most important invention for Singapore) for this reason.
Stable temperatures make it much, much easier for people to work consistently. The gains from being able to work from the morning into the mid-late afternoon are under-appreciated and accumulate relatively quickly.
That’s because humidity in Singapore is so thick that you can cut it with a knife and it is a small island built on reclaimed land.
What works for a 5 something million populated island won’t work for 1.4 billion strong India. Cars and air conditioners are luxuries of sparsely populated states and can’t be globally adopted.
We are measuring quality of life with wealth and not living conditions. The tragedy of india is that they are adopting first world criteria as a benchmark. Yet, Singapore’s birth replacement rate is most dire of all the countries in the world.
I feel there is something to unpack here but I am not sure I was able to articulate my point correctly. Did I make any sense or should I try again by rephrasing? Thoughts?
I guess so, but maybe the body and brain adapts too, depending on where you live. Average annual temperature where I live is 26 degrees C, could be lower indoors.
Going Troppo | Mango Madness - aka the effects of saturation humidity and tempretures ranging from 32C - 40C during Australia's northen monsoon seasons.
It's a studied thing, and people write papers anticipating how far it can go before it shuts down any daytime activiy.
How do you jump from ”pure anecdotal evidence” to ”reduction of the GDP”?
This just seems too close to racist theories about why the north hemisphere is richer than the south.
A lot of people confirming with anecdotes in the comments. Consider that any drastic temperature changes affect humans. Until they adapt. So I bet all this confirming anecdotes are from people used to lower temperatures facing, occasionally, higher temperatures. The opposite happens as well. When you live in places where the winter is almost never lower than 20 degree Celsius, when you get to 10 degrees, people only worry are about supporting the new low temperature. Their focus on surviving the new temperature is more important than any other thing. I am certain get a lot of anecdotes that low temperatures diminish their cognitive skills and productivity.
> This just seems too close to racist theories about why the north hemisphere is richer than the south.
First, you can’t deny that different counties have different economy structure. And before you put a racist label on me, remember, that correlation is not causation.
Second, I bet that office workers in Vietnam have a decent air conditioning. Their northern hemisphere counterparts might not. Germany is a prime example. I have flashbacks of working in a hot sauna of an office in Berlin.
> This just seems too close to racist theories about why the north hemisphere is richer than the south.
Not sure if this is satire, but I'll bite.
Rascist is saying "these people are worse because of their intrinsic properties". Saying "these people are worse because of the circumstances they happen to be born into" is the opposite of racist, surely?
I've got it the other way around. I can run around with a pair of jeans, a tshirt and a hoodie when it's -20C outside, but anything over +20C makes me insanely uncomfortable.
As expected per your hypothesis, my productivity drops like a rock during summer.
well if someone is cutting your leg while you are typing, you are less productive due to being uncomfortable, not due to missing a leg as you dont need a leg to type.
since evntually the heat kills you, it stands to reason that the condition is not only 'dead' and 'alive', but also includes 'barely surviving', and that condition is not productive.
I wonder how common that is. I only find that once it gets to about 30 degrees, but I live in south east Queensland and so I’m somewhat acclimated to higher every day temperatures
Anecdotally, if its too hot outside i struggle to sleep and i can barely function during the day. Unless my brain is properly ventilated my productivity simply dives.
> Personally, I notice the first symptoms at around 25 degrees.
I was like this for probably 20 years. I had resigned myself to the notion that this was an immutable fact. During COVID, I stayed for 6 months somewhere with a gym and sauna. I began doing cardio for 1 - 1.5 hours per day and 45 minutes in the sauna. I am shocked at how this year, with already intense heat, how little the temperatures affect me.
100% anecdata, and I don’t know if it is the cardio or the sauna, but it has totally changed my enjoyment of this season.
It's both cardio and sauna. The body adapts to these stimuli with greater heat adaptation, it's well studied in sports physiology. It works even better when cardio is combined with heat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24444197/
Besides the extremes where the body simply can't take it any more, it also depends on what you're used to.
I'm typing this with the a/c set to 26 degrees. But I'm in my home office and definitely not wearing a suit and tie. I feel just fine(tm).
Your mileage is obviously different.
Edit: there's also the cultural thing of setting the a/c in offices to 18 C because that's where a man in a 3 piece suit would feel comfortable. Just drop the 3 piece suit if you're still wearing it :)
I work fine in warm weather. Since I live in Thailand I often work in temperatures of around 30 degrees. In my home office I only use a fan.
Same as someone else in this thread: I get very unproductive when it's too cold. If my fingers feel cold, it just becomes much less pleasant to use they keyboard. It's one of the reasons why I emigrated from a Northern European country to Thailand.
Us in the tropical region, we are usually fine around the low-30s and even higher as long as there's fans. Most of the public schools in our country have ceiling fans and large open windows so that air could circulate better. I blame Westerners' addiction to air-conditioning for their low tolerance in temperature (which is by the way, further fueling the climate crisis).
The problem is that western buildings for the most part are not designed for those temperatures in mind, we were more concerned with keeping heat in historically.
>I blame Westerners' addiction to air-conditioning for their low tolerance in temperature
Western Europeans at least either have decent tolerance to high temperature, or have low tolerance due to the weather itself being colder
Sauce: spent the first 25 years of my life in a tropical country, then moved to north-ish of England. My tolerance to high temperatures got way, way lower and the only place I've been with AC were a couple of car rides
The focus of western architecture has always been to retain heat inside to make it comfortable in winter. This gives a lot of problems in the new Summers that we are seeing.
Heat Pumps could help here in the long term. Once I am able to build my own house, I am going to add floor heating and a heat pump.
During winter it will heaten the place and during summer I can use the same pipes to pipe cool water around the house. Therefore, I will have a warm place during winter and a fresh place during summer.
I'm much more concerned about nature: we can, at least in western countries for middle-class and above, afford aircon and heating systems, but nature can't. We have started experimenting in artificial environments like "vertical farms" etc but overall results are not good on scale.
Long story short: we can't survive anyway if nature can't with us.
my productivity craters in the summers because I'm forced to be indoors all day in air conditioning. No random walks around just to clear my head and break the monotony.
> I also notice a considerable degradation of mental work
Austria's Federal Statistical Office reported this week[0] that there is a significant increase in the number of road traffic accidents in Austria on days with a top temperature of 30°C or above. They report a corresponding increase of the proportion of road accidents caused by "distraction" or "carelessness" on these hot days.
>Obviously, physical work becomes harder and correspondingly less productive during heat. But I also notice a considerable degradation of mental work. Personally, I notice the first symptoms at around 25 degrees.
I can manage being hot while awake, as long as I can sleep in the cold. If I'm hot while sleeping it's almost like I never slept at all.
Yes. Agricultural collapse, rather than heatstroke, is what'll start killing people if we see WBTs in the low 30s.
The tropics don't usually get as hot as the worst days in the midlatitude zones; what defines the tropical zone is temperature consistency. This means that many species won't adapt to serious climate change if it happens so rapidly, but it also means we can expect labor productivity to drop by 50% or more, because if tropical locations start posting 31-32 WBTs, they won't be doing it once per year (as you see on the hottest days in the midlatitudes) but hundreds of days per year.
If corporate workers become 50% less productive, that just means fewer passive-aggressive emails get sent; but if global farm labor becomes 50% less productive, we're in a shitload of trouble.
I've had a similar thought related to CO2. The human race will become collectively dumber as CO2 levels rise. It might take a while for CO2 levels to double or quadruple, but high indoor CO2 levels make people perform worse, and so increasing the base CO2 level will make everyone dumber. And as you say, the heat won't help either.
This is an angle I've taken with people who don't believe human activity increases temperatures. A small intelligence hit applied to literally every single human is a big thing. And it's hard for people to deny we're increasing CO2 levels.
Cognitive function defines performance in objective tasks that require conscious mental effort. Extreme environments, namely heat, hypoxia, and cold can all alter human cognitive function due to a variety of psychological and/or biological processes. The aims of this Focused Review were to discuss; (1) the current state of knowledge on the effects of heat, hypoxic and cold stress on cognitive function, (2) the potential mechanisms underpinning these alterations, and (3) plausible interventions that may maintain cognitive function upon exposure to each of these environmental stressors. The available evidence suggests that the effects of heat, hypoxia, and cold stress on cognitive function are both task and severity dependent. Complex tasks are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat stress, whereas both simple and complex task performance appear to be vulnerable at even at moderate altitudes. Cold stress also appears to negatively impact both simple and complex task performance, however, the research in this area is sparse in comparison to heat and hypoxia. In summary, this focused review provides updated knowledge regarding the effects of extreme environmental stressors on cognitive function and their biological underpinnings. Tyrosine supplementation may help individuals maintain cognitive function in very hot, hypoxic, and/or cold conditions. However, more research is needed to clarify these and other postulated interventions.
They'll be ok because they're sitting in air conditioned offices telling the peasants to turn off their lights and air conditioners. If people don't comply they can send out the law enforcement, maybe one day will be robots. Already started happening [1]
I can't track it down in English but there are guidelines people need to follow, turning lights off during certain times and having air conditioners set to > 28c and not at unless required.
Japanese follow rules unlike many other cultures, they won't take these requests lightly and will be pretty uncomfortable doing what they're told.
majority of world leaders don't represent the majority of countries responsible for polluting this planet, it's completely irelevant what Europe does if India, China and Indonesia won't care
This ignores the influence Western markets and industry have. Western countries issuing the right kind of regulations would have a global effect. Most dirty industry in the West has been outsourced to those countries anyway.
I think you overestimate influence of Western politicians abroad, we can clearly see how on board is world with sanctioning Russia when it comes to their own interests (almost whole world DGAF about some silly Western sanctions), it's even funnier to think they would hurt their economy for some abstract changed in environment. Have you ever lived in developing Asian or African country?
I think you overestimate influence of Western populations on their own governments.
The point is that Western politicians don't care about the climate catastrophe. For a data point, my own government (Germany) magically conjured up a €100bn emergency defense budget for the Russian war in Ukraine in addition to a promise to boost its defense budget to the NATO recommendation of 2% of GDP (over €70bn in 2020[0]). In contrast, total government budget for "ecological protection" in 2019 was €79bn[1], but more than 2/3rds of that is just waste and water management -- less than €2bn ended up in research and development. The federal budget in 2021 only allocated €2.7bn[2] to the "Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection" either. Even the "The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action" only had a budget of €10.4bn (it was called "... and Energy" at the time).
If German politicans took the climate catastrophe as the world-ending threat serious that it is according to researchers, how come they haven't assigned a similar 2% of GDP or a similar "emergency budget" to preventing it? Instead solar subsidies have been cut, subsidies for sustainable private building development have been slashed and a conservative-led (not even the Greens!) coalition decided to shut down nuclear power in favour of coal and (Russian) gas.
There's no will to address the climate catastrophe among Western governments and there never has been. The only climate action you see are concessions to voter demographics that maintain minimal impact to the economy. Your mistake is to believe that the effects you're seeing are the consequence of politicans in power actually cracking down on something.
FWIW the effect of sanctions, since you mention them, are always delayed and always affect the weakest members of society first. We've already seen moderate capital flight in Russia (e.g. foreign companies extracting their local talent or simply shutting down their Russia offices with mass layoffs). The problem is that much like trickle down economics, "trickle up sanctions" have never been shown to work. Individual seizures of oligarch properties have been vastly more effective than blanket bans that mostly hit the middle and lower classes.
Plus, of course, the sanctions are ridiculous when the same countries enacting those sanctions still pay Russia billions of dollars for resources like gas that they depend on and can't just give up. And of course other countries like China take this opportunity to offer loans and cheap buyouts with zero competition.
I dislike this habit of blaming “leaders” in democratic countries. The problem is that the electorate either don’t care or won’t accept anything that might inconvenience them or require them to change their habits. Not much leaders can do in these circumstances.
The electorate's information is limited to what their rulers feed them. When elites decide they want to do something awful, the population starts 80% against it, and over time they're worn down.
You’re not wrong, but also: the electorate’s opinions are shaped by the media they consume. And media is easily bought by disinformation campaigns from oil companies to muddy the waters and convince voters that climate change isn’t a big deal, or is an outright hoax.
You only need to propagandize about 40% of the electorate to completely sink the chances of making real political action on an issue.
Add to that the fact that elected leaders don’t really represent the majority of their “constituents,” they represent the interests of whichever corporations fund them. Democracy has been bought and sold and is controlled by an unaccountable minority, at least in America.
That’s because they outsourced all their dirty manufacturing to China, which has since picked up the pace of emissions. No country exists in a vacuum - the global economy we all participate in is financing the climate crisis.
Which is also why any climate agreements that don't include the third world are pretty much useless. They'll just drive the energy-intensive stuff out of the country, harming their economy for little actual improvement. Kyoto etc are just kicking the can, pretending to do something to shut up the rabble.
> I like cars. It’s comfy and it’s freedom. I don’t care if you have the fastest, cleanest, cheapest public transport in the world. I don’t want to ride with other people.
I can't find the whole article but are the test subjects all from America who's experienced regular winters their whole lives? If that's the case, isn't the data going to be skewed to that cluster?
Is there any characterization of genetic adaptions to temperature ? I live in Spain, but I have a pretty bad heat intolerance and an equally good cold tolerance. Same for 2 of the 6 brothers and 1 of my 2 sons.
“For this study, the researchers recruited 24 participants between the ages of 18 and 34.”
Only 24 people. Do we also know the geographic breakdown of the participants? I would be interested in seeing how African, Indian, and other groups who live in high heat regions adapt.
You don’t get it. It’s actually a very important result that tells us that you can’t lock humans in a sauna and ask them to ride a bike. This new information allows us to know that > 1 billion people will die of climate change in the next 30 years.
the result based on 24 people from one country, one climate, yeah, that sounds like very reliable result, which can be extrapolated to billions of people of different races living in different climates
36c currently in Austria and I’d be okay with it if we
were seaside. I regularly go to Croatia and Greece and the dry/salty wind from the sea makes a huge difference
My lived experience of growing up in a 95+ percent humid city that had 85-100 degrees day time temperatures in summer remembers that the saving grace of the coastal city was the sea breeze setting in at 5.30ish without fail everyday.
During my time in this southern city(I hear that it isn’t so anymore), there was an aggressive tree planting agenda so much so that if they laid down a road, it would go around the older trees.
And when I first came to America and landed in Southern California, I experienced the zero humidity dry desert heat that made every inhale so piercingly painful with bloody crusts blocking my nostrils.
I still have trouble maintaining/regulating core body temperature because I am primed to sweat but there is no humidity. My blood is also thicker which made higher altitude sports more challenging for me because this genetic factor designs your heart and lungs to work differently.
Wet bulb temperatures will wipe out millions of people overnight if we don’t bring down global temperature. Yes, we haven’t understood climate science properly. But there is no denying that one can’t go wrong with planting more trees.
India, for example is more green precisely because of global warming but that’s because trees thrive in the tropics, soaks in the carbon and there is an almost fanatical reverence for trees(iirc). But not everywhere. Wet bulb temperatures will kill
Indians in a narrow northern swath precisely because it’s land locked and parched that trees can’t thrive.
So there will always be hostile and unhabitable land in our world where it takes more resources than it would be worth to make it human friendly. Where net net, it contributes more to global warming that we are only hastening our eventual demise.
This is one of the reasons for two of my very deeply held core beliefs: 1. We are past carrying capacity. 2. Not all land is viable and no amount of ‘high density housing’ hacks will solve the resource allocations/scarcity equations.
That’s why I feel so helpless when in California there is so much misguided illiterate enthusiasm for high density housing projects at government level. And that magically rearranging world population distribution through migration is somehow feasible. These politicians and policy makers have never travelled outside the USA or lived anywhere else. They don’t understand that just because India or China has 1+ billion people, we can replicate those numbers and enjoy a better quality of life just because California is richer.
Even between India and China, there are so many variables and that’s why India is the largest producer of wheat and is largely food sufficient while China has depleted aquifers and relies on the rest of the world for its calorie needs. Latitude, longitude matters.
One needs a long perspective. We need to curb population growth stat and maintain a healthy breeding population. This is for 120-150 years ahead. In that time, we need to rebuild resources and learn to use resources effectively.
The world was 500 million in 1600 and 3.5 billion in 1975. We will be 9-10 billion by 2050 and we are burning through planetary resources. We are setting ablaze our only home. Time to hit the brakes and reset.
The solution is two fold: 1. Bring population a little below carrying capacity. This can be anywhere between 1-3 billion. We will live longer. We should live healthier. 2. Rebuild resources and find alternative renewable energy for our way of life. This is a true emergency.
In the short term, healthy procreation done responsibly starting with removing social/religious/cultural pressure to have more babies. Secondly, trees. One can’t go wrong with planting more trees. It could be the only solution. This means for long periods of time, a lot of land mass has to be giv...
Is it just me or is it messed up that the article is talking about people dying from climate changes and most of the comments on here are talking about how AC makes humans more productive and that is great?
They are talking about enduring as surviving, not "putting up with". Wow, talk about willful blindness.,..
The 35 wet-bulb figure assumes ideal conditions otherwise: shade, access to hydration, and complete physical inactivity. People will get sick, and some will die, sitting on their couches. It's the level at which death or severe illness becomes a likely outcome of long-term exposure, no matter what. The good news is that it almost never happens in nature. 31-32 is about as bad as it gets, anywhere in the world. You'll be miserable at 31 WBT, but if you drink lots of water (meaning 2+ gallons per day) and stay in the shade, you won't die. Go out and work in the sun for two hours and all bets are off.
That said, most people in the world cannot afford to sit on their couches to wait out the heat. Agricultural workers will start dropping dead once we see 30 WBT on a regular basis. If things get bad enough, we'll see a collapse in food productivity that will utterly destroy the global system, and while the downfall of corporate capitalism is something all people of conscience want, I don't think any of us want it to happen in that precise way, because it'll be replaced by something worse (widespread war and slavery).
the participant entered a specialized environmental chamber that had adjustable temperature and humidity levels. While the participant performed light physical activity like light cycling or walking slowly on a treadmill, the chamber either gradually increased in temperature or in humidity until the participant reached a point at which their body could no longer maintain its core temperature.
Why are they having people do "light physical activity"? The 35C number they're comparing to is for someone generating as little heat as possible (resting).
Long answer: They're thinking about whole human cities subject to high web bulb temperatures, for (at least) many hours. Avoiding even light physical activity is not an option for everyone in a city, for any period of time.
Short answer: Next time you get DoorDash or Uber Eats, ask the delivery guy about this.
Even if your vehicle has air conditioning, past a certain point (say, when your aging mid-level sedan has been driven for 6+ hours on local streets in direct sun the whole time), a lot of them won't be able to keep the cabin cool enough to prevent discomfort.
Sweaty buttcrack almost ended my run with Lyft & Uber prematurely. My passengers were fine with the a/c on max, but I was getting more sun & moving around more. What saved my ass was a fan-infused car seat cushion powered off a standard car outlet. It's most effective once you've already started sweating, but it changed the game for me. I now consider it essential equipment.
I have to really really believe in the exponential - sigmoid development of green / carbon free energy and tech for this situation to be bearable. I hope the ridiculously low solar prices cause an exponential growth of installations, causing cheap peak-solar power prices for hydrogen based products to become competitive against fossil fuels. Its my only hope for the future atm.
Climate engineering also holds promise. We'll get it wrong a few times and a lot of people and species will die, but then we'll get it right. And we will try it, because our nature is to keep doing what we are doing until it will become the only choice. My pitch for VC is waiting until we hit that point and people stop thinking its crazy to intentionally modify the feedback loop of our climate, because the alternative will be crazier.
The cheapest, lowest risk climate engineering approach imo is to just install a f-ton of solar panels in desert regions, produce gigatons of green hydrogen and substitute fossil fuels with these. If I was the king of saudi arabia, thats what I'd do. Some australian billionaires have already such plans [0]
I can’t find a single reputable scientific organization that argues in favor of ambitious climate engineering. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, is wholly against it. I recommend reading their explainer on it. “A lot of people and species will die” - you gloss over that callously like it’s all fine and dandy.
Its horrifying, but we have proven we aren't going to do the things we need to until the sane options won't cut it. I agree that right now its a terrible idea, but when climate refugees are dying by the tens of thousands, and species are disappearing faster than the coastlines, climate engineering and its unforseen consequences will be what are left to us.
Sadly I think you’re right, assuming business as usual continues until it can’t. But a potential foil to that timeline would be technological civilization grinding to a halt, such that we couldn’t deploy geoengineering even if we wanted to. At that point it’s anyone’s guess.
For anyone confused about wet-bulb (global temperature) and dry-bulb temperature, heat index etc.
Those are all specific formulas with different sets of parameters and defined domains.
To exemplify the range:
[...] Meteorologists measure the heat/humidity effect on the so-called "wet bulb" Centigrade scale; in the United States, these readings are often translated into "heat index" or "real-feel" Fahrenheit readings. Prior studies suggest that even the strongest, best-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities when the wet bulb hits 32 C, equivalent to a heat index of 132 F [~56 C]. Most others would crumble well before that. A reading of 35—the peak briefly reached in the Persian Gulf cities—is considered the theoretical survivability limit. That translates roughly to a heat index of 160 F [~71C]. (The heat index actually ends at 127 F, so these readings are literally off the charts.)[...] [0]
A 3 centigrade difference at the end of the wet bulb spectrum (from 32 to 35) could be translated roughly to an estimated 15 centigrade difference from 56C to 71C (or a delta of 28F from 132F to 160F, respectively) in the heat index where it not to end at 127F. That's quite a divergence resulting from the differernt formulas (from the quick look on it: polynomial vs exponential function). At even 95% humidity one fares far better than at 100% (literally no thermodynamical possibility to "sweat", that's why the theoretical limit is probably at 35, 2 centigrade away from the core body temperature of 37).
Here an easy to grasp article [1] describing the much commonly used WBGT ("Wet Bulb Globe Temperature") in professional settings (marathons, army ...).
>>But in their new study, the researchers found that the actual maximum wet-bulb temperature is lower — about 31°C wet-bulb or 87°F at 100% humidity — even for young, healthy subjects
This is exactly what I had figured from first principles.
Our skin temp is about 86°F (an interesting corrolary to this is that it is the temperature that we set a waterbed thermostat, and +/- tenths of a degree make a huge difference in comfort regardless of blankets).
By sweating we can use evaporation to cool. However, that cooling effect is eliminated in 100% humidity, when evaporation will not happen (or is equaled by condensation).
It just seems obvious that when one cannot cool, and the surrounding temp is higher than the body's external temp, the body will inevitably gain heat. With no relief, there is no other consequence than overheating.
It's interesting that many/most organisms are more sensitive to heat than cold. Cattle, dogs and whatnot usually enjoy room temperature, 20C-25C... like us. At 30-35, may will start to struggle. At 40-45, deaths start. Even heat adapted desert species need shade, burrows and such to survive 40+ temps.
Meanwhile, life at cold temperatures goes on. A lot of animals can adapt to a temperate 0C-20C conditions, and colder. Humans adapted and thrived, like many/most megafauna to pretty cold conditions. The far north has been inhabited by people for half a million years. You can get a lot further from comfort and still make it in the cold.
And you can insulate from cold with fat, but insulating against heat is difficult because you have to get rid of the waste heat from muscles and other body functions somehow.
How is "land which is too cold to use now might be useable on a warmer world" and "human beings aren't as tolerant to higher heat as we once thought" the 'exact opposite' of each other?
Almost (?) all life runs off chemical reactions that are temperature sensitive and produce heat. In a closed system these reactions stop, they are able to continue (and so life continues) only within a context where the heat is lost.
You can adjust the gradient so as to change the rate of heat loss, you can grow fur, shunt blood flow away from outer surfaces - or the reverse. Humans have clothes and even buildings to do this even more. Say you're losing 10K per hour and producing 5K per hour, if you cut the gradient to 50% you break even and your temperature remains viable indefinitely.
But that only works when you're losing heat. If you can't lose heat, this doesn't help. You will die.
A body can burn energy to create heat. But it can't burn energy to remove heat.
That's a fundamental asymmetry.
Maybe it's also the reason why body core temperature is close to environment maximum temperature - since you can't really decrease your temperature you might as well learn to live at the upper extreme.
Indeed, it's why sweat was such an evolutionary leap for humankind. Our species didn't necessarily invent the sweat gland, but we certainly did become the sweatiest of the Great Apes -- by an order of magnitude in some measures.
I wonder how much of the species' worldwide dominance can be attributed to the evolutionary diceroll that placed our ancestors in subsaharan Africa? Could we have survived in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India without sweat?
In the sweatiest of those places, our sweaty strategy is imperfect.
Sweating works well in dry climates, not as well in humid ones. In high enough humidity, the sweat doesn't evaporate, doesn't cool you, and the whole system becomes a moist, messy loop.
In dry, hot climates sweating works well, but increases our water consumption... these are the habitats where water is often scarce.
Are there better natural responses to heat that we see in mammals?
I know sweating isn't perfect, for the reasons you mentioned, but do we see nature evolving any better solutions at a mammalian level?
My armchair understanding is sweating is a natural marvel with nothing else like it seen in creatures as large as us. That it truly is a differentiator between humans and other animals (or mammals at least). Sweating is the foundation of humans ability to engage in long-distance endurance running which is one of our unique features, also called persistence hunting[0]. You can easily draw a line between this sweating and our ability to travel large distances and hunt the way we did, which in turn can be connected to humanity's success as a species on earth.
In general there is no single reason for our success.
Some argue sweating, others that we outsourced digestion (fire cooked food), others that we are bipedal, ... not to mention later stuff like language/intelligence.
All true, and impressive considering that we recently evolved from tree dwelling primates but... There are plenty of animals adapted to heat, and can perform similar feats.
African wild dogs, dingos and other canines can persistent hunt in similar hot conditions. They're much faster than us, so it's not as extreme a strategy as human "track and spook" methods... but arguably better.
Elephants manage to carry those huge, heat retaining bodies. Our Savannah nurseries are full of megafauna like us that live in these conditions effectively.
I don't think there are any coolants that would be appropriate for life's temperature ranges at the right pressures that can be synthesized biochemically.
It isn't though, because powered mechanical compression and decompression is what allows a heat pump to outperform the inherent thermodynamic limit of evaporative cooling.
> since you can't really decrease your temperature you might as well learn to live at the upper extreme
There is a MinuteEarth video about this YouTube if I remember correctly and the reason is well.. more reasonable. Our body works better at higher temperature, but of course if it gets too high everything breaks down. So the optimum temp is somewhere closer to the upper limit.
The human body needs to maintain core body temperature at 37°C. Whenever we extract energy from our food to do stuff, some of that energy gets dumped into heat. If we assume (just for round numbers) that we eat 2000 Calories/day, and that 10% of that energy is heat, then that's 200 Calories/day of heat that needs to be dumped into our environment. Abusing units somewhat, if a human being is 100 kg of mostly water, that's 2°C/day of heat. If we didn't dump that heat, in a day, core body temperature rises to 39°C and we get heatstroke.
Heat naturally flows from hot to cold at a rate proportional to the difference in temperature. If we're fully passively cooled at an environmental temperature 25°C at a rate of 2°C/day, then at 1°C, we'd be passively cooled at 6°C/day. However, we can also modulate heat flow by introducing some thermally nonconductive layers--or, in layman's terms, put on a sweater. When it's cold, all you have to do is slow down the rate of heat flow.
But hotter temps are more difficult. We can't take off thermal insulators or modulate the main thermal barrier between core body temperature and the outside world (i.e., skin). At 31°C, passive cooling is down to 1°C/day, and we need to turn to active cooling. Sweating is the main mechanism for humans: it takes heat for liquid water to become water vapor, and this heat is drawn from your skin surface, cooling it (this kind of allows heat to move from a colder to a hotter environment, unlike passive cooling). At 37°C, there's no longer any passive cooling, and active cooling needs to handle 2°C/day.
But hotter than that, and things get worse: the environment is now passively warming you up. By 43°C, that's now 3°C/day of heat that needs to shed, and 49°C ups it to 4°C/day. At some point, you're going to overwhelm the ability of active cooling to cool you down, and the passive heating is still going to warm you up even if you shut down metabolism. Even worse is if sweating isn't effective at cooling down--at high humidities, the sweat won't evaporate and the cooling effect won't happen. (This also illustrates why heat-and-humidity can be deadly even at below-body-temperature environments.)
This analysis was purely done for humans, but it's pretty similar for most organisms, just with different set points for core body temperature and active cooling mechanisms. Fundamentally, extreme cold is "easy" to handle--just slow down heat loss; extreme heat requires developing ways of pumping heat from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir, which thermodynamics does not look kindly on.
Highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson(author of Red Mars..and Blue Mars and Green Mars..the Mars trilogy) latest The Ministry For The Future. It begins with a devastating imagining of how wet bulb temperature deaths might unfold.
I'm stuck about halfway, started reading another book for now.
Some slight spoilers since this is still fresh in my mind -
The long economic expositional passages are boring me and the use of cryptocurrency as one solution just threw me as implausible. The setup and initial attempts at solutions though is intriguing as is the thought it's going to take some other country (not USA/Western europe) to come up with solutions/be motivated to take steps, the terrorism angle seems interestingly uncomfortably close to a Ted Kaczynski or even bin Laden movement that is not explored enough in the first half (there's one mass attack that changes daily life globally).
This seems to be a misuse of the term “endure”. I spent most of my childhood in a place that frequently got hotter than the numbers quoted in this article.
But was it hotter at the relative humidity numbers they state in the article (50% and 100% relative humidity?)
I also grew up in a place that routinely saw triple-digit Fahrenheit temps, but the RH was < 20%. RH has a huge impact on the evaporative cooling capacity of the human body.
262 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadWet bulb is what for those 35C? There appears to be a consensus that it's not the actual temperature that matters most. Even discounting this study on only 24 people.
30C in dry Arizona will not have the same effects on one’s body that 30C will in a humid Florida.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/delhi-news/at-40-c-cap...
Cites 32 °C wet bulb as the peak measured in Delhi so far.
There will be a lot of climatic migrants, I guess many more than the ones caused by the Syrian civil war or the invasion of Ukraine. Just imagine people fleeing the heat.
I live in the south of france, and I already want to move out to a colder place. Summers are too long.
Maybe there is a taboo about heat, because heatwaves are just not bearable, at least for me.
I mean obviously you cannot seriously doubt this right??
EDIT: I should clarify, climate change definitely is real, it has huge scientific consensus, and not believing in it is pure conspiracy
Are you saying we should literally wait for billions of people to die?
I know it's trite but, don't look up
We literally try to build models to make predictions, that claim is nonsense
Of course, the whole point of science is to make predictions. Kind of like “global warming will increase the probability of heat waves significantly in the near future” they were saying 10 years ago.
Are you a flat earther too? Might as well be if you're trying to maximize the volume of evidence you're ignoring
It seems to me that you don't take these variables into consideration and just assume they would remain constant or follow their historical trend into the future which needless to say is shortsighted to say the least.
Like what does population growth have to do with people dying from heat? Okay so the population is growing, that didn't stop the extra deaths from happening.
Why does life expectancy matter? Obviously that's going to change rapidly in these circumstances, but again, still not changing the number of deaths
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-f...
Edit: possibly a better source describing some of the correlations between extreme climate events and recent global food shortages, and its adverse impact on Middle East and Northern Africa.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-arab-spring-and...
It's a major dispute. Turkey basically took advantage of the wars to reneg on previous agreements to allow water flow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
I can imagine it has big impact on productivity of anybody not under 24h AC, but there is still construction, roadwork, maintenance etc. work done. I guess a mix of adaptation from birth plus suffering through work thats just harder than elsewhere, but still possible.
As things get hotter places like Iran and Pakistan can adapt with more AC. The problems will be worse for places without electricity grids and a population that is too poor for alternative means like running AC from solar.
The entire point is that it will be.
I believe it's been demonstrated and accepted by the science community that there is "concrete evidence of temperatures" (short of waiting for it to happen) that this level of change can happen and is now likely unavoidable.
This world is full of hyperbole but this looming change is not an obvious exaggeration. We've seen it in action already and we know where its going.
"Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths / An increase of 1°C could mean thousands of additional deaths on very hot days, according to a new study" - https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-temperatures...
"The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838 : "The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36)."
"Increases of extreme heat-humidity days endanger future populations living in China" - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac69fc/... : "Many urban population centers in eastern China are expected to frequently experience the extreme heat-humidity events featured by the TWmax well beyond the survivability threshold of 35 °C by the end of this century under SSP5-8.5 scenario"
Don’t take for granted the status quo. It’s already yesterday, and the systems we’ve been depending on to tolerate and supply us with viral services haven’t been respected. What happens when the next famine hits India? What happens when South Africa has no water left? It might not be the spark on another regional conflict, but it certainly adds lots of potential for another conflict.
That will almost always be long the weather in that specific area really shocks everyone, because the food and energy come from a different place where there was a weather shock.
With climate change the risk is that we will increasingly experience such temperatures.
That's 80 million people. That's more than 10 times the number of Syrian refugees.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1603322
That's at least part of why professional basketball is so black--there is a tiny difference in average height between white and black, small enough that on average you won't notice it at all. At the very end of the tail, though, it has a big effect.
That’s a very mild summer, I’m located in Southern California where my nights are warmer than your peak day temperatures. During daytime it can be over 45 degrees Celsius. But ACs are everywhere so it makes it livable. I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that.
Edit: Never mind, seems to be very humid North, and fairly average South.
Also because the water off the coast is cold, it never gets very hot and humid at the same time anywhere in the western US. For that you need to be near a large body of very warm water.
Specifically, in all of the west coast of the US except the bottom quarter of CA (where the ocean is a little warmer) the weather is cool and humid when the wind is blowing from the west (which it is most of the time) and dry and potentially very hot when it is blowing from the east.
Well, it is a little more complicated than that because every morning the sun heats the land, but not the ocean, which causes wind to flow from ocean to land, then every evening that flow is reversed, so my previous statement refers to the general flow of air masses in the absence of this diurnal coastal wind.
Except for outside. Also what do you hope to achieve with playing misery poker over this.
It is not a competition, you know? There’s nothing to win if you have the worst climate.
> I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that
No, and that is a good thing because AC for whole cities in arid regions is a big part of why we are in this situation in the first place. California is pretty much the illustration of how not to build a country.
So... north of almost the entire continental United States?
Ironically, you may want to move to a hotter place where AC is pervasive. I was suffering from the hot French summer too, but doing fine in NYC or Singapore.
French summer is too short so people haven't been using AC traditionally. Conversely, some warmer countries like Greece or Taiwan don't always have heaters and live in coldish houses in winter.
Whenever I'll buy, I have to consider that in 30 years it's going to be hotter and I'll be 65 years old.
I used to live in Italy, it's going to be up to 39C in Rome the next two weeks.
I'll miss the sea and the food by staying north, though we'll be planting cantaloupes and prickly pears here in England in 3 decades.
A lot people like it but I would miss actual summer.
Increasing frequency and severity of heat waves are definitely a noticeable thing. My parents actually lived in the South of France for a few years after their retirement. They were there in the last few weeks for a brief vacation and temperatures went well over 40 degrees in June. That used to be unusual even in the hottest month (July) and is now a yearly recurring thing. Luckily, humidity tends to be quite low in that particular area. But still, 40-45 degrees is a lot to deal with for people.
I think migration will be more an indirect consequence of local economies collapsing when e.g. agriculture becomes hard/impossible due to rising temperatures. People tend to move for economic reasons. Any mass casualties in a wet bulb heat event might of course cause people to panic. But richer countries would be able to compensate with technology by e.g. desalinating water and having buildings with AC. It's poor countries that lack the means for this that are going to suffer most.
Neal Stephenson has some nice perspective on this in his latest novel Termination Shock where people in e.g. Texas are dealing with temperatures that are basically not survivable without a so-called earth suit, which is a battery powered cooling solution people wear to be able to be outside in 50 degree+ Celsius heat. Those might become an actual thing people would need to own pretty soon in some places.
Where I live, in the southern US, it'll be a while before wet bulb temperatures top 35C in the hottest weeks of the summer. But they already hit those lower temperatures in the article (31C) quite often (e.g., 35C with 70% humidity), and last week a couple days were over 38C (wet bulb temperature of 33C assuming 70% humidity, though luckily so far it's usually less humid when it's that hot - around 55%).
Wet bulb calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb
https://kuchoufuku.com/
Am I wrong in believing that people can find some low tech inexpensive solutions to the problem of overheating?
Obviously, physical work becomes harder and correspondingly less productive during heat. But I also notice a considerable degradation of mental work. Personally, I notice the first symptoms at around 25 degrees. From there on my overall mental performance decreases with every degree.
I have never quantified this. So this is pure anecdotal evidence. But I am pretty sure, that more heat correlates with less overall performance and thus leads to a reduction of the GDP.
Assuming brain is an organ that consumes so much energy, maybe it's about that. Even if it's not that I'm sure that there's a correlation.
"We provide the first evidence that cumulative heat exposure inhibits cognitive skill development and that school air conditioning can mitigate this effect. Student fixed effects models using 10 million PSAT-takers show that hotter school days in the year prior to the test reduce learning, with extreme heat being particularly damaging and larger effects for low income and minority students. (...) Without air conditioning, each 1°F increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by one percent. "
[0]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/w24639...
That's a suspiciously tidy and headline-friendly ratio.
Not to mention the extra heat.
Lee Kuan Yew considered air conditioning to be one of the most important inventions in history (and the most important invention for Singapore) for this reason.
Stable temperatures make it much, much easier for people to work consistently. The gains from being able to work from the morning into the mid-late afternoon are under-appreciated and accumulate relatively quickly.
What works for a 5 something million populated island won’t work for 1.4 billion strong India. Cars and air conditioners are luxuries of sparsely populated states and can’t be globally adopted.
We are measuring quality of life with wealth and not living conditions. The tragedy of india is that they are adopting first world criteria as a benchmark. Yet, Singapore’s birth replacement rate is most dire of all the countries in the world.
I feel there is something to unpack here but I am not sure I was able to articulate my point correctly. Did I make any sense or should I try again by rephrasing? Thoughts?
Below 18 degrees my hands start to get too cold to type, above 22 and I cannot think any more (thoughts slow down until my brain is muddy).
It's a studied thing, and people write papers anticipating how far it can go before it shuts down any daytime activiy.
eg: About the weather in the Kimberley (readable overview) https://kimberley-australia.com/about-the-kimberley/weather-...
Heat, health, and humidity in Australia's monsoon tropics: a critical review of the problematization of ‘heat’ in a changing climate https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.4...
This just seems too close to racist theories about why the north hemisphere is richer than the south.
A lot of people confirming with anecdotes in the comments. Consider that any drastic temperature changes affect humans. Until they adapt. So I bet all this confirming anecdotes are from people used to lower temperatures facing, occasionally, higher temperatures. The opposite happens as well. When you live in places where the winter is almost never lower than 20 degree Celsius, when you get to 10 degrees, people only worry are about supporting the new low temperature. Their focus on surviving the new temperature is more important than any other thing. I am certain get a lot of anecdotes that low temperatures diminish their cognitive skills and productivity.
First, you can’t deny that different counties have different economy structure. And before you put a racist label on me, remember, that correlation is not causation.
Second, I bet that office workers in Vietnam have a decent air conditioning. Their northern hemisphere counterparts might not. Germany is a prime example. I have flashbacks of working in a hot sauna of an office in Berlin.
Not sure if this is satire, but I'll bite.
Rascist is saying "these people are worse because of their intrinsic properties". Saying "these people are worse because of the circumstances they happen to be born into" is the opposite of racist, surely?
In many places, due humidity, architectures, trees, dressing culture etc... 27-30 degrees is super comfortable.
Anecdotally, I'm completely unprepared for anything lower than 22 degrees, it makes my life absolutely miserable.
As expected per your hypothesis, my productivity drops like a rock during summer.
well if someone is cutting your leg while you are typing, you are less productive due to being uncomfortable, not due to missing a leg as you dont need a leg to type.
since evntually the heat kills you, it stands to reason that the condition is not only 'dead' and 'alive', but also includes 'barely surviving', and that condition is not productive.
If the heat makes me feel uncomfortable, thus making me less productive, it is still the heat that causes the decline of productivity.
I was like this for probably 20 years. I had resigned myself to the notion that this was an immutable fact. During COVID, I stayed for 6 months somewhere with a gym and sauna. I began doing cardio for 1 - 1.5 hours per day and 45 minutes in the sauna. I am shocked at how this year, with already intense heat, how little the temperatures affect me.
100% anecdata, and I don’t know if it is the cardio or the sauna, but it has totally changed my enjoyment of this season.
I'm typing this with the a/c set to 26 degrees. But I'm in my home office and definitely not wearing a suit and tie. I feel just fine(tm).
Your mileage is obviously different.
Edit: there's also the cultural thing of setting the a/c in offices to 18 C because that's where a man in a 3 piece suit would feel comfortable. Just drop the 3 piece suit if you're still wearing it :)
Same as someone else in this thread: I get very unproductive when it's too cold. If my fingers feel cold, it just becomes much less pleasant to use they keyboard. It's one of the reasons why I emigrated from a Northern European country to Thailand.
Western Europeans at least either have decent tolerance to high temperature, or have low tolerance due to the weather itself being colder
Sauce: spent the first 25 years of my life in a tropical country, then moved to north-ish of England. My tolerance to high temperatures got way, way lower and the only place I've been with AC were a couple of car rides
Air conditioning was far more common back home
You're aware that barely anyone in Europe even own AC-units?
During winter it will heaten the place and during summer I can use the same pipes to pipe cool water around the house. Therefore, I will have a warm place during winter and a fresh place during summer.
Long story short: we can't survive anyway if nature can't with us.
I feel kind of fine, but I’m unable to do anything that requires creative or technical thought.
(with around 50-60% humidity)
With the exact same preconditions (clothing, etc.) you'll find it's a 10 degree window, if not less.
Austria's Federal Statistical Office reported this week[0] that there is a significant increase in the number of road traffic accidents in Austria on days with a top temperature of 30°C or above. They report a corresponding increase of the proportion of road accidents caused by "distraction" or "carelessness" on these hot days.
[0] https://www.diepresse.com/6157876/ein-viertel-mehr-verkehrsu...
I can manage being hot while awake, as long as I can sleep in the cold. If I'm hot while sleeping it's almost like I never slept at all.
The tropics don't usually get as hot as the worst days in the midlatitude zones; what defines the tropical zone is temperature consistency. This means that many species won't adapt to serious climate change if it happens so rapidly, but it also means we can expect labor productivity to drop by 50% or more, because if tropical locations start posting 31-32 WBTs, they won't be doing it once per year (as you see on the hottest days in the midlatitudes) but hundreds of days per year.
If corporate workers become 50% less productive, that just means fewer passive-aggressive emails get sent; but if global farm labor becomes 50% less productive, we're in a shitload of trouble.
This is an angle I've taken with people who don't believe human activity increases temperatures. A small intelligence hit applied to literally every single human is a big thing. And it's hard for people to deny we're increasing CO2 levels.
The Impact of Different Environmental Conditions on Cognitive Function: A Focused Review
Lee Taylor, Samuel L. Watkins, Hannah Marshall, Ben J. Dascombe, and Josh Foster
Front Physiol. 2015; 6: 372.
Published online 2016 Jan 6. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2015.00372
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701920/
Abstract:
Cognitive function defines performance in objective tasks that require conscious mental effort. Extreme environments, namely heat, hypoxia, and cold can all alter human cognitive function due to a variety of psychological and/or biological processes. The aims of this Focused Review were to discuss; (1) the current state of knowledge on the effects of heat, hypoxic and cold stress on cognitive function, (2) the potential mechanisms underpinning these alterations, and (3) plausible interventions that may maintain cognitive function upon exposure to each of these environmental stressors. The available evidence suggests that the effects of heat, hypoxia, and cold stress on cognitive function are both task and severity dependent. Complex tasks are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat stress, whereas both simple and complex task performance appear to be vulnerable at even at moderate altitudes. Cold stress also appears to negatively impact both simple and complex task performance, however, the research in this area is sparse in comparison to heat and hypoxia. In summary, this focused review provides updated knowledge regarding the effects of extreme environmental stressors on cognitive function and their biological underpinnings. Tyrosine supplementation may help individuals maintain cognitive function in very hot, hypoxic, and/or cold conditions. However, more research is needed to clarify these and other postulated interventions.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ambient+temperature+effects+cognit... A Google Scholar search of the same terms produces over 283,000 results and might be worth exploring as well: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ambient%20temperature%2...
They'll be ok because they're sitting in air conditioned offices telling the peasants to turn off their lights and air conditioners. If people don't comply they can send out the law enforcement, maybe one day will be robots. Already started happening [1]
[1] https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan's-june-heatwa...
This article should be more to your liking.
I can't track it down in English but there are guidelines people need to follow, turning lights off during certain times and having air conditioners set to > 28c and not at unless required.
Japanese follow rules unlike many other cultures, they won't take these requests lightly and will be pretty uncomfortable doing what they're told.
The point is that Western politicians don't care about the climate catastrophe. For a data point, my own government (Germany) magically conjured up a €100bn emergency defense budget for the Russian war in Ukraine in addition to a promise to boost its defense budget to the NATO recommendation of 2% of GDP (over €70bn in 2020[0]). In contrast, total government budget for "ecological protection" in 2019 was €79bn[1], but more than 2/3rds of that is just waste and water management -- less than €2bn ended up in research and development. The federal budget in 2021 only allocated €2.7bn[2] to the "Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection" either. Even the "The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action" only had a budget of €10.4bn (it was called "... and Energy" at the time).
If German politicans took the climate catastrophe as the world-ending threat serious that it is according to researchers, how come they haven't assigned a similar 2% of GDP or a similar "emergency budget" to preventing it? Instead solar subsidies have been cut, subsidies for sustainable private building development have been slashed and a conservative-led (not even the Greens!) coalition decided to shut down nuclear power in favour of coal and (Russian) gas.
There's no will to address the climate catastrophe among Western governments and there never has been. The only climate action you see are concessions to voter demographics that maintain minimal impact to the economy. Your mistake is to believe that the effects you're seeing are the consequence of politicans in power actually cracking down on something.
FWIW the effect of sanctions, since you mention them, are always delayed and always affect the weakest members of society first. We've already seen moderate capital flight in Russia (e.g. foreign companies extracting their local talent or simply shutting down their Russia offices with mass layoffs). The problem is that much like trickle down economics, "trickle up sanctions" have never been shown to work. Individual seizures of oligarch properties have been vastly more effective than blanket bans that mostly hit the middle and lower classes.
Plus, of course, the sanctions are ridiculous when the same countries enacting those sanctions still pay Russia billions of dollars for resources like gas that they depend on and can't just give up. And of course other countries like China take this opportunity to offer loans and cheap buyouts with zero competition.
[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp
[1]: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/umwelt-wirtschaft/ausga...
[2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeshaushaltsplan_(Deutschla...
You only need to propagandize about 40% of the electorate to completely sink the chances of making real political action on an issue.
Add to that the fact that elected leaders don’t really represent the majority of their “constituents,” they represent the interests of whichever corporations fund them. Democracy has been bought and sold and is controlled by an unaccountable minority, at least in America.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31894308
If only you can knock some sense into this guy.
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/japplphysiol...
Is there any characterization of genetic adaptions to temperature ? I live in Spain, but I have a pretty bad heat intolerance and an equally good cold tolerance. Same for 2 of the 6 brothers and 1 of my 2 sons.
Only 24 people. Do we also know the geographic breakdown of the participants? I would be interested in seeing how African, Indian, and other groups who live in high heat regions adapt.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01405-3
My lived experience of growing up in a 95+ percent humid city that had 85-100 degrees day time temperatures in summer remembers that the saving grace of the coastal city was the sea breeze setting in at 5.30ish without fail everyday.
During my time in this southern city(I hear that it isn’t so anymore), there was an aggressive tree planting agenda so much so that if they laid down a road, it would go around the older trees.
And when I first came to America and landed in Southern California, I experienced the zero humidity dry desert heat that made every inhale so piercingly painful with bloody crusts blocking my nostrils.
I still have trouble maintaining/regulating core body temperature because I am primed to sweat but there is no humidity. My blood is also thicker which made higher altitude sports more challenging for me because this genetic factor designs your heart and lungs to work differently.
Wet bulb temperatures will wipe out millions of people overnight if we don’t bring down global temperature. Yes, we haven’t understood climate science properly. But there is no denying that one can’t go wrong with planting more trees.
India, for example is more green precisely because of global warming but that’s because trees thrive in the tropics, soaks in the carbon and there is an almost fanatical reverence for trees(iirc). But not everywhere. Wet bulb temperatures will kill Indians in a narrow northern swath precisely because it’s land locked and parched that trees can’t thrive.
So there will always be hostile and unhabitable land in our world where it takes more resources than it would be worth to make it human friendly. Where net net, it contributes more to global warming that we are only hastening our eventual demise.
This is one of the reasons for two of my very deeply held core beliefs: 1. We are past carrying capacity. 2. Not all land is viable and no amount of ‘high density housing’ hacks will solve the resource allocations/scarcity equations.
That’s why I feel so helpless when in California there is so much misguided illiterate enthusiasm for high density housing projects at government level. And that magically rearranging world population distribution through migration is somehow feasible. These politicians and policy makers have never travelled outside the USA or lived anywhere else. They don’t understand that just because India or China has 1+ billion people, we can replicate those numbers and enjoy a better quality of life just because California is richer.
Even between India and China, there are so many variables and that’s why India is the largest producer of wheat and is largely food sufficient while China has depleted aquifers and relies on the rest of the world for its calorie needs. Latitude, longitude matters.
One needs a long perspective. We need to curb population growth stat and maintain a healthy breeding population. This is for 120-150 years ahead. In that time, we need to rebuild resources and learn to use resources effectively.
The world was 500 million in 1600 and 3.5 billion in 1975. We will be 9-10 billion by 2050 and we are burning through planetary resources. We are setting ablaze our only home. Time to hit the brakes and reset.
The solution is two fold: 1. Bring population a little below carrying capacity. This can be anywhere between 1-3 billion. We will live longer. We should live healthier. 2. Rebuild resources and find alternative renewable energy for our way of life. This is a true emergency.
In the short term, healthy procreation done responsibly starting with removing social/religious/cultural pressure to have more babies. Secondly, trees. One can’t go wrong with planting more trees. It could be the only solution. This means for long periods of time, a lot of land mass has to be giv...
They are talking about enduring as surviving, not "putting up with". Wow, talk about willful blindness.,..
That said, most people in the world cannot afford to sit on their couches to wait out the heat. Agricultural workers will start dropping dead once we see 30 WBT on a regular basis. If things get bad enough, we'll see a collapse in food productivity that will utterly destroy the global system, and while the downfall of corporate capitalism is something all people of conscience want, I don't think any of us want it to happen in that precise way, because it'll be replaced by something worse (widespread war and slavery).
Why are they having people do "light physical activity"? The 35C number they're comparing to is for someone generating as little heat as possible (resting).
Short answer: Next time you get DoorDash or Uber Eats, ask the delivery guy about this.
Sweaty buttcrack almost ended my run with Lyft & Uber prematurely. My passengers were fine with the a/c on max, but I was getting more sun & moving around more. What saved my ass was a fan-infused car seat cushion powered off a standard car outlet. It's most effective once you've already started sweating, but it changed the game for me. I now consider it essential equipment.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/funds/australian-billionaire...
To exemplify the range:
[...] Meteorologists measure the heat/humidity effect on the so-called "wet bulb" Centigrade scale; in the United States, these readings are often translated into "heat index" or "real-feel" Fahrenheit readings. Prior studies suggest that even the strongest, best-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities when the wet bulb hits 32 C, equivalent to a heat index of 132 F [~56 C]. Most others would crumble well before that. A reading of 35—the peak briefly reached in the Persian Gulf cities—is considered the theoretical survivability limit. That translates roughly to a heat index of 160 F [~71C]. (The heat index actually ends at 127 F, so these readings are literally off the charts.)[...] [0]
A 3 centigrade difference at the end of the wet bulb spectrum (from 32 to 35) could be translated roughly to an estimated 15 centigrade difference from 56C to 71C (or a delta of 28F from 132F to 160F, respectively) in the heat index where it not to end at 127F. That's quite a divergence resulting from the differernt formulas (from the quick look on it: polynomial vs exponential function). At even 95% humidity one fares far better than at 100% (literally no thermodynamical possibility to "sweat", that's why the theoretical limit is probably at 35, 2 centigrade away from the core body temperature of 37).
Here an easy to grasp article [1] describing the much commonly used WBGT ("Wet Bulb Globe Temperature") in professional settings (marathons, army ...).
[0]https://phys.org/news/2020-05-potentially-fatal-combinations...
[1]https://www.dtn.com/forget-heat-index-wet-bulb-globe-tempera...
This is exactly what I had figured from first principles.
Our skin temp is about 86°F (an interesting corrolary to this is that it is the temperature that we set a waterbed thermostat, and +/- tenths of a degree make a huge difference in comfort regardless of blankets).
By sweating we can use evaporation to cool. However, that cooling effect is eliminated in 100% humidity, when evaporation will not happen (or is equaled by condensation).
It just seems obvious that when one cannot cool, and the surrounding temp is higher than the body's external temp, the body will inevitably gain heat. With no relief, there is no other consequence than overheating.
Am I missing something here?
Meanwhile, life at cold temperatures goes on. A lot of animals can adapt to a temperate 0C-20C conditions, and colder. Humans adapted and thrived, like many/most megafauna to pretty cold conditions. The far north has been inhabited by people for half a million years. You can get a lot further from comfort and still make it in the cold.
Heat is deadly.
It might also be necessary for many people to migrate to cooler areas than where they currently live.
You can adjust the gradient so as to change the rate of heat loss, you can grow fur, shunt blood flow away from outer surfaces - or the reverse. Humans have clothes and even buildings to do this even more. Say you're losing 10K per hour and producing 5K per hour, if you cut the gradient to 50% you break even and your temperature remains viable indefinitely.
But that only works when you're losing heat. If you can't lose heat, this doesn't help. You will die.
That's a fundamental asymmetry.
Maybe it's also the reason why body core temperature is close to environment maximum temperature - since you can't really decrease your temperature you might as well learn to live at the upper extreme.
I wonder how much of the species' worldwide dominance can be attributed to the evolutionary diceroll that placed our ancestors in subsaharan Africa? Could we have survived in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India without sweat?
Sweating works well in dry climates, not as well in humid ones. In high enough humidity, the sweat doesn't evaporate, doesn't cool you, and the whole system becomes a moist, messy loop.
In dry, hot climates sweating works well, but increases our water consumption... these are the habitats where water is often scarce.
Tradeoffs.
I know sweating isn't perfect, for the reasons you mentioned, but do we see nature evolving any better solutions at a mammalian level?
My armchair understanding is sweating is a natural marvel with nothing else like it seen in creatures as large as us. That it truly is a differentiator between humans and other animals (or mammals at least). Sweating is the foundation of humans ability to engage in long-distance endurance running which is one of our unique features, also called persistence hunting[0]. You can easily draw a line between this sweating and our ability to travel large distances and hunt the way we did, which in turn can be connected to humanity's success as a species on earth.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Some argue sweating, others that we outsourced digestion (fire cooked food), others that we are bipedal, ... not to mention later stuff like language/intelligence.
African wild dogs, dingos and other canines can persistent hunt in similar hot conditions. They're much faster than us, so it's not as extreme a strategy as human "track and spook" methods... but arguably better.
Elephants manage to carry those huge, heat retaining bodies. Our Savannah nurseries are full of megafauna like us that live in these conditions effectively.
Also, cats and dogs do sweat a little, mostly through their paws.
I don't know about the other part (temperature/pressure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
There is a MinuteEarth video about this YouTube if I remember correctly and the reason is well.. more reasonable. Our body works better at higher temperature, but of course if it gets too high everything breaks down. So the optimum temp is somewhere closer to the upper limit.
Heat naturally flows from hot to cold at a rate proportional to the difference in temperature. If we're fully passively cooled at an environmental temperature 25°C at a rate of 2°C/day, then at 1°C, we'd be passively cooled at 6°C/day. However, we can also modulate heat flow by introducing some thermally nonconductive layers--or, in layman's terms, put on a sweater. When it's cold, all you have to do is slow down the rate of heat flow.
But hotter temps are more difficult. We can't take off thermal insulators or modulate the main thermal barrier between core body temperature and the outside world (i.e., skin). At 31°C, passive cooling is down to 1°C/day, and we need to turn to active cooling. Sweating is the main mechanism for humans: it takes heat for liquid water to become water vapor, and this heat is drawn from your skin surface, cooling it (this kind of allows heat to move from a colder to a hotter environment, unlike passive cooling). At 37°C, there's no longer any passive cooling, and active cooling needs to handle 2°C/day.
But hotter than that, and things get worse: the environment is now passively warming you up. By 43°C, that's now 3°C/day of heat that needs to shed, and 49°C ups it to 4°C/day. At some point, you're going to overwhelm the ability of active cooling to cool you down, and the passive heating is still going to warm you up even if you shut down metabolism. Even worse is if sweating isn't effective at cooling down--at high humidities, the sweat won't evaporate and the cooling effect won't happen. (This also illustrates why heat-and-humidity can be deadly even at below-body-temperature environments.)
This analysis was purely done for humans, but it's pretty similar for most organisms, just with different set points for core body temperature and active cooling mechanisms. Fundamentally, extreme cold is "easy" to handle--just slow down heat loss; extreme heat requires developing ways of pumping heat from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir, which thermodynamics does not look kindly on.
But you can't take off your skin to sleep on a very hot night.
All in all I would say the temperature tolerance is the same in both directions.
https://www.ancientpages.com/2016/09/19/mystery-yaghan-peopl...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future ( has plot spoilers)
I also grew up in a place that routinely saw triple-digit Fahrenheit temps, but the RH was < 20%. RH has a huge impact on the evaporative cooling capacity of the human body.