By the end of this century, areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life, according to a new study published Monday. That heat wave killed more than 70,000 people.
Advertisement
“Some of the scariest prospects from a changing climate involve conditions completely outside the range of human experience”, Carnegie Institution for Science climate researcher Chris Field, who wasn’t part of the study, wrote in an email to AP.
“What we are talking about is significantly more severe than what people have experienced anywhere before”, Elfatih Eltahir, a co-author on the study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told reporters when asked to compare it to recent waves like Chicago in 1995, Europe in 2003 and Russian Federation in 2010, during a press conference last week. “In a Turkish bath, on the other hand, with nearly 100 percent relative humidity, you want to keep the temperatures well below 40 degrees Celsius since the body can not get rid of the heat by sweating and starts to accumulate heat”. A wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees is regarded as the survivability limit for healthy people.
Already legendary for its searing combination of torrid temperatures and crushing humidity, heat in the Persian Gulf is forecast “to approach and exceed a threshold of human tolerance within this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase on their current trajectory”, the study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience said.
“Our results expose a regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future, ” the authors write. But that day could come much sooner for cities in the Persian Gulf, where temperatures soar well beyond 110 degrees in the hottest summer months, the researchers said.
Howard Frumkin, dean of the University of Washington school of public health, who was not a part of the study, said: “When the ambient temperatures are extremely high, as projected in this paper, then exposed people can and do die”.
It would still be rare, and cities such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha wouldn’t quite be uninhabitable, thanks to air conditioning. The implications of this paper for the Gulf region are frightening. Heat waves would take a toll on most work done outdoors, with everything from construction to agriculture to services related to the oil and gas industry suffering.
Advertisement
The Hajj, the annual pilgrimage that draws millions of Muslims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, could “become hazardous to human health” given that it occurs during the summer, especially for elderly or unfit travelers.
