Oh my god this article lay out. Just put sand in my eyes.
What was their conclusion?
Reader mode of Firefox helped me be able to read the content of the article, despite the unacceptable layout.
Here’s the short version:
Wet-bulb weather is when, because of a combination of humidity and heat, you can’t naturally cool off with things like sweat.
There are certain combinations where the weather only needs to be 25.8C for a health younger person, or 21.9C for an elderly person for “wet-bulb” to be achieved.
Climate change is real, and it’s causing more instances of “wet-bulb” weather.
Outside activities may not be possible in the summer in certain parts of the world, people will die, the rich will move.
Wet-bulb weather is when, because of a combination of humidity and heat, you can’t naturally cool off with things like sweat.
This isn’t quite right, even though the gist of it ends up being right. This is one of very few things I’m legitimately an expert in, so I don’t want to let it go uncorrected not because it makes a big difference, but because it just feels weird not to and maybe somebody will be interested.
Dry bulb temperature is what you typically read when you’re looking at a thermometer. The bulb, the thing that’s checking the temperature, is literally dry. To get a wet bulb reading, you essentially put a wet sock around a thermometer (to get a “psychrometer”) and swing it around for a while, because you get a different reading when the water is evaporating off it. So when the air is fully saturated (100% humidity, standing in a cloud), your wet bulb and dry bulb readings will be the same. In all other cases, your wet bulb temperature will be lower.
“Wet bulb weather” isn’t really a phrase people use. High wet bulb, high relative humidity, high absolute humidity - all the same thing (and in fact, if you have just one of those and the dry bulb temperature, you can calculate the others). They just measure how wet the air is in slightly different ways.
only needs to be 25.8C for a health younger person, or 21.9C for an elderly person
That’s disturbingly low
It’s also at 100% humidity in case that wasn’t clear.
Edit: ok so what he posted wasn’t wrong but the study said that it could be as low as that for some groups of people. For the average person it’s almost 10 degrees C higher which is lower than it used to be.
However for heat sensitive people (not sure what that means) it can be disturbingly low
So… only slightly related to the headline?
Headline was obviously false from the start, but it turns out it was just clickbait?
Not clickbait at all.
Wet-bulb is the combination of heat and humidity, and it is deadly in 6 hours. The article is about the first time they have lab tested the conditions on humans to determine the exact numbers, instead of just using the 35C estimate that we have been using.
The article is about an experiment, where people are exposed to 35°C wet bulb temperatures, but in different settings. Sometimes lower temperatures but higher humidity, sometimes vise versa, but always 35°C wet bulb temperature.
So far the assumption was, that humans can’t survive a 35°C wet bulb temperature for longer than 6 hours. And at current warming this is unlikely to be naturally the case within this century.
However the experiment gives hints to believe that humans can’t survive at lower wet bulb temperatures either. It looks like with lower temperatures and higher humidity, humans can get very close to that 35°C wet bulb temperature, however people seem to struggle more with higher temperatures and lower humidity.
A possible explanation could be, that while more sweat evaporates in lower humidity, the body has a limit for how much sweat it can produce. And if you keep raising the temperature, that the human body simply can’t produce enough sweat to cool itself.
That’s pretty much what I took away from the article. They mentioned they experiment with several people, however the article was mainly about on person in the experiment, a 30ish year old, athletic male.
Edit: add some graphs from the article. Sorry for low quality, but as you said, the layout is quite atrocious and on my phone it keeps jumping around on it’s own, so I lost patience.
As I understood it, the dashed line is just the 35°C wet bulb temperature line.
I think it’s the “old assumed border of survivability” and don’t know if it is based solely on mathematics or on other experiments as well.
I also don’t know on how many individuals the new line is based and what age group the older people one is.
“Humid conditions have their own sort of more perceptual limitations, that difficulty breathing, because it feels so claustrophobic,” Dr Cheng says.
“But in the dry environment, so far, the rate at which [their core temperature] is rising can be one-and-a-half to two times what we’re seeing with the more humid conditions.”
“It’s really for a lot of those nations, that don’t have a choice but to actually live in these conditions 24/7 … or for people in circumstances where air conditioning is not an option, or areas of the world where manual labour in the field is just sort of their way of life,” Dr Cheng says.
“A lot of those parts of the world that are most affected by it, are also the ones that have the least resources, I think, to deal with it.”
The researchers will keep testing the conditions on people until the end of the year.
But in the meantime, it’s given both the researchers, and Owen, an important glimpse into where the heat threshold of the human body lies.
Hot temperatures are bad, humidity is bad, but it turns out hot temperatures at lower humidity is seemingly even worse. And we’re all fucked because climate change models show us likely hitting the temps this guy was exposed to if we don’t fix some shit fast.
I feel like this is not the first time this has happened.
Have they asked Charles Koch and the other oil men to sit for this experiment? They should have a taste of the future they’re forcing us to endure.
Will not defend the oil men, they don’t need it. But we’re all complicit, quit your high horse and look around at all the plastics, electricity and fuel you’re using in your day-2-day.
I know, I know, they’re literally forcing you to do so. If you really wanted to remain pure, you’d have to act as the protagonist of the Brave New World, though, when he just ends up going to live in a secluded forest by himself.
C’mon mate, this is decades old fossil fuel industry propaganda - making people blame themselves for the mess they got us all into. There’s no benefit from beating ourselves up - as individuals we hold no power over the industry. We need to work together and build an organised movement if we want to change things, we can’t change our behaviour individually to change the system.
Reader mode exposes a much better headline:
Scientists testing deadly heat limits on humans show thresholds may be much lower than first thought
I live in The South.
My air conditioner broke 3 years ago. This year we got a small window unit. It’s not enough to cool the whole house. But it does provide the very important feature of dehumidifying the house. The temperature in the house and outside can both be in the high 90s. But it is so much less oppressive inside the house where the humidity has been stripped out.
Get a good dehumidifier with a drain hose option so that you don’t have to keep emptying the tank. It will produce some heat, so placement is important, but it will pull moisture from the air more efficiently than the AC and that will improve the cooling.
We have a pretty decent one located in Mt wife’s room which is basically sealed off from the rest of the house. It runs into the shower. But despite its size it is inadequate for the whole house. I don’t have the money to buy a dedicated one for the whole house.
But this little window AC is doing a really excellent job. Set it to 80 and it keeps going and drying the air.
