I saw you eating that cheeseburger with a milkshake, using your fossil fueled vehicle to drive you to and fro during your lunch hour, using evil air conditioning at the same time
Climate change: Summers could become ‘too hot for humans’
Millions of people around the world could be exposed to dangerous levels of heat stress – a dangerous condition which can cause organs to shut down.
Many live in developing countries, and do jobs that expose them to potentially life threatening conditions.
These include being out in the open on farms and building sites or indoors in factories and hospitals.
Global warming will increase the chances of summer conditions that may be “too hot for humans” to work in.
When we caught up with Dr Jimmy Lee, his goggles were steamed up and there was sweat trickling off his neck.
An emergency medic, he’s labouring in the stifling heat of tropical Singapore to care for patients with Covid-19.
See? It never used to get hot in Singapore, but, you take long showers and refuse to unplug all your appliances before going to work, so, climate doom!
There’s no air conditioning – a deliberate choice, to prevent the virus being blown around – and he notices that he and his colleagues become “more irritable, more short with each other”.
And his personal protective equipment, essential for avoiding infection, makes things worse by creating a sweltering ‘micro-climate’ under the multiple layers of plastic.
“It really hits you when you first go in there,” Dr Lee says, “and it’s really uncomfortable over a whole shift of eight hours – it affects morale.”
It’s summer. Summer. It gets uncomfortable when there’s no AC.
Prof Richard Betts of the UK Met Office has run computer models which suggest that the number of days with a WBGT above 32C are set to increase, depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions are cut.
How many more days? That’s missing.
And he spells out the risks for millions of people already having to work in the challenging combination of extreme heat and high humidity.
“We humans evolved to live in a particular range of temperatures, so it’s clear that if we continue to cause temperatures to rise worldwide, sooner or later the hottest parts of the world could start to see conditions that are simply too hot for us.”
A minor rise of 1.5 Fahrenheit is not an sort of doom. Humans have adapted to warm periods an cool periods. We adjusted to an ice age. We’ve dealt with warmer Holocene periods than the current one, with no air conditioning, no fans, and no ice makers. We’ll do just fine.
I’d be irritable too if my bosses decided to shut off the AC in the summer IN THE TROPICS over some hard to prove benefit like invisible diseases. Working for stupid people makes me irritable.