Climate change is making extreme heat more common and more severe, as we've seen in the heat waves that have swept the western US for the past two weeks. Some climate models predict that swaths of the globe will become inhospitable to humans in the next century, writes Casey Crownhart for the MIT Technology Review.
But what makes a place unlivable isn’t as straightforward as a specific temperature, and even accounting for humidity doesn’t fully explain the limits of the human body in extreme heat. Tolerance can vary from person to person, and someone’s ability to withstand heat can change. Understanding our limits and what determines them will be more important as global temperatures creep upward and extreme weather events become harder to predict.
“You would think that, at this moment, we will have choices between the good and the bad,” says Camilo Mora, a climate researcher at the University of Hawaii. But now, when it comes to extreme heat, “the choices are more of this or a lot more of this.”
Read the full article at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/10/1028172/climate-change-human-body-extreme-heat-survival/
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