Climate change to force people indoors earlier than expected (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Today I have some really bad news. So, you know, grab a cup of tea, or maybe scotch. Ready? A new study says that climate change will make big parts of the world uninhabitable much faster than expected. And I think they’re making a very good point.

Have you ever wondered why, if our body temperature is about 37 degrees Celsius, do we not find that same temperature comfortable as room temperature? It’s because to work properly, the human body needs to cool. We constantly produce energy to power our muscles and brain. Well, at least some of us do. This energy production generates heat. This keeps the body at the right temperature, but it’s actually too much heat. So we need to get rid of it, constantly.

This is why a comfortable air temperature for humans is well below body temperature. It’s so we can get rid of this excess heat. If we can’t get rid of the excess heat, it’ll build up and, within a few hours, lead to organ failure and death.

How well we can get rid of this excess heat depends both on the temperature and the humidity of the air. The higher the humidity, the less we can cool by sweating. Meteorologists measure this by what’s called the “wet bulb temperature”.

This wet bulb temperature is measured by covering the thermometer in a water-soaked cloth. If the air is dry, the cloth will cool the thermometer because the water evaporates and that carries away energy.

The water-soaked cloth simulates sweating, basically. The limit of survivability for humans is usually said to be a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius. This temperature, humans can survive up to 6 hours.

The authors of the new paper now say, that in reality trouble starts at far lower wet-bulb temperatures.

The authors say that the assumptions for this threshold temperature are unrealistic. Because these assumptions are that people are indoors or shaded, naked, completely sedentary, fully used to the local heat, and are neither over- nor underweight.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend my summers sitting naked indoors, so I think they’re making a good point. They then went and calculated new thresholds for wet-bulb temperatures for diverse people under realistic circumstances. Old people, overweight people, people with clothing who still want to go outside.

There are a lot of numbers in this paper, so I’ll just give you some examples:  people ages 18 through 40 can survive those six hours indoors temperatures at up to about 34.1 degrees Celsius of that wet-bulb temperature and for those age 65 and up it’s 33.7 in the best case. If they still want to go outdoors the threshold drops further.

Now, those 1.3 degrees might not sound like much of a difference, but global average temperatures continue to rise, this threshold will be crossed more frequently much earlier.

The impact will be felt particularly hard in India, Saudi Arabia and central Africa where we might soon see large numbers of people die from heat stroke.

Yes, we’ll all die, but some ways to die are more pleasant than others, and overheating isn’t one of them, just ask my old Honda that sadly deceased on the way from Arizona to California. Well, we’ll all die, except of course Bryan Johnson because plasma facials are going to keep him young forever, I’m sure.