EUROPE: A new study carried out by two American researchers suggests that the temperatures in the middle East Counties – particularly the countries in the Persian Gulf – may increase so high by the end of this century that it would become difficult for humans to live in this region.
The study was conducted by Professor Alfatih Althir from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Jeremy Pal from the Loyola Marymount University of Los Angeles and has been published in the Journal Nature Climate Change.
It is commonly known that sweating helps a human body tolerate high temperatures in dry conditions by lowering the body temperature via evaporative cooling.
“The human body regulates its core temperature to around 37 degrees Celsius, and its skin to a cooler 35 degrees.” explained co-author Jeremy Pal.
However, this ability of the body reduces when high temperatures are accompanied by high levels of humidity, and after reaching a threshold, “the body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat.” This threshold, dubbed as “wet-bulb” temperature, would be crossed, if, for example, temperature of 46 degrees Celsius is combined with humidity level of 50 percent. Increasing the temperature and lowering the humidity, or vice versa, would generate the same effect. Under such conditions and without air conditioning, a human body would survive for about six hours and then would begin to shut down, according to the authors.
The highest temperature ever recorded on Earth (58 degrees Celsius) was in Libyan Desert, and to date, no place on Earth has ever touched the deadly “wet-bulb temperature.” However, some exiting climate models suggest that temperatures in some regions of the world would increase to reach the threshold of human survivability in the distant future.
The current study suggests that a deadly combination of rising temperatures and humidity could be experienced in the Persian Gulf in next thirty years, much earlier than previously anticipated, thus making this region inhospitable to humans.
