How Your Body Deals With Heat… Or Doesn’t.
When it’s hot, we sweat. That’s not news. But it may be news that it’s not the sweat itself that cools us; it’s not like diving into a cold pool. LOSING the sweat through evaporation is what does it. It’s easier for things to evaporate when the air is dry (the evaporating liquid has somewhere to go) or moving (a slight breeze moves humid air and replaces it with dry), but global warming is making that harder. As heat rises around the world there are some places that will become unsurvivable because the heat and humidity make it impossible to cool the human body through sweat. “In the future, parts of the world will become so hot and humid that healthy adults sitting in the shade will die within a matter of hours. It’s hard to imagine, and yet that’s where Earth’s climate is headed, perhaps sooner than expected. New research, published Wednesday in Science
Advances, found that 75 percent of the population of South Asia will experience extremely dangerous heat waves by 2100 if no action is taken to fight climate change. Four percent will experience unsurvivable heat — that’s 69 million people at today’s population level.The choice becomes leave or die.”
For your Health this month, let’s start with a great article from Washington Post that describes, in detail with wonderful explanatory graphics, how your body deals with heat
Beyond human endurance- How climate change is making parts of the world too hot and humid to survive, Ruby Mellen and William Neff in Washington Post, July 2021
Then, knowing that, we’ll direct you to the parts of the world that will be facing this problem directly in a very few years.
People In These Regions Will Face ‘Unsurvivable’ Heat By 2100, Jaqueline Ronson in Inverse, Aug 2017
Humidity and heat extremes are on the verge of exceeding limits of human survivability, study finds, Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow in Washington Post, May 2020
First recorded unsurvivable heat and humidity episodes, Phil Rosenberg in YourWeather.UK, May 2020
