Soaring heat and humidity pose deadly threat
Working outdoors in places such as Dubai could become seriously life threatening.
Image: Carter S’ via Flickr
Parts of the Arabian Gulf region – prime source of the oil that helps fuel climate change – are most at risk of becoming uninhabitable for humans unless global warming is tackled.
A lethal combination of temperature and humidity may make some parts of the planet intolerable to human life before the end of the century − if we go on burning fossil fuels at the present rate.
New research indicates that the thermometer may climb to what meteorologists call a “wet bulb temperature” of 35°C − the temperature of human skin. At this point, people in the region would be unable to keep cool, and after prolonged exposure, even young, healthy, fit people could die.
There is no record that such temperatures have been reached anywhere in the world in human history. But the scientific report in Nature Climate Change suggests that under the “business as usual scenario” − whereby no steps are taken to address climate change, and the expanding the use of coal, oil and natural gas dumps ever greater quantities carbon dioxide in the atmosphere − then such conditions could occur once every decade or so before 2100.
Catastrophic change
In one of geography’s ironies, the region most at risk is the Gulf − the prime source of the crude oil that first began to fuel the world’s accelerating economies in ways that have returned massive quantities of fossil carbon to the atmosphere and precipitated the threat of catastrophic climate change.
The Arabian Gulf – also widely known as the Persian Gulf, and usually and diplomatically known just as “the Gulf” – is home to millions of people, and to billions of dollars’ worth of business and infrastructure investment.
It is simultaneously peopled by some of the world’s wealthiest citizens, and some of the world’s poorest workers already most at risk from heat exposure.
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