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.
i was interested, thank you.
I appreciate the precision AND pedantry of your response. Great, concise explanation of exactly what that term means.
only needs to be 25.8C for a health younger person, or 21.9C for an elderly person
That’s disturbingly low
So… only slightly related to the headline?
Headline was obviously false from the start, but it turns out it was just clickbait?
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.
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.
If you scroll down, you’ll find out!
I will not.
Then I guess you’ll live in suspense.
Instead I am going to draw a picture of a toe:
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.
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.
That’s some awful website design.
It’s a fairly standard format for news articles to be in.
That doesn’t make it any less awful.
Thankfully, a lot of browsers have a reader mode to undo such sins.
I feel like this is not the first time this has happened.
This is literally the kids sauna in Scandinavian countries
