|
REPORT ABUSIVE REPLY
|
|
Message Subject
|
Energetic Sites
|
|
Poster Handle
|
Coming Into Existence |
|
Post Content
|
[ link to www.sciencenews.org (secure)] Human beings have a superpower — sweating.
When temperatures rise, beads of sweat exude from our pores and evaporate, releasing energy that cools the skin and keeps our bodies from overheating.
This self-cooling mechanism has helped humans spread to every hot and humid corner of the globe. But that sweating superpower has a theoretical upper limit: When it gets too hot and humid, the laws of physics inhibit sweat from cooling skin. That limit is hit when a bulb thermometer wrapped in a wet towel (a measure of heat and humidity known as “wet-bulb” temperature) reads 35° Celsius, or 95° Fahrenheit. Even the fittest human supplied with unlimited water would probably die after a few hours in these conditions.
Scientists have thought that this temperature extreme occurs rarely, if ever, on Earth. But as the globe warms, wet-bulb temperatures around 35° C could become more common toward the end of the century in certain regions, endangering hundreds of millions of people, recent climate simulations suggest (SN: 8/2/17).
It turns out we won’t have to wait that long.
An analysis of global weather station data shows that this human survivability limit has been briefly surpassed at least a dozen times in the last four decades at sites along the Persian Gulf and Indus River Valley in India and Pakistan, researchers report May 8 in Science Advances. Slightly lower, but still dangerous, wet-bulb temperatures are increasingly familiar features of summer across larger swaths of the Middle East, South Asia and the U.S. Gulf Coast, the study shows.
|
|
|
Please verify you're human:
|
|
|
Reason for reporting:
|
