Opinion | Heat and Humidity Are a Killer Combination – By Ethan Coffel, Radley Horton and Colin Raymond – NYT

I am sorry to report that there is some very bad news for Vietnam and Southeast Asia in this science report from the NYT.

Photo, a man in India suffers heat exhaustion, NYT

I predicted in 2014, that in the next five years, the US would get serious and wake up about climate change. Unfortunately, this scientific news will help the prediction. It also explains yesterday. Connecticut had high humidity and high temperature, which explains why playing tennis in the late afternoon and then morris dancing made me feel severly exhausted.

The authors are climate scientists at Dartmouth College and Columbia University.

“After enduring another scorching summer — the fourth-hottest on record for the contiguous United States — it may be hard to imagine conditions getting much worse. But as a new report from the United Nations’ panel on climate change warns, we are locked in to additional warming and other changes like sea level rise. And we are running out of time to avert potentially catastrophic outcomes.

One critically important and underreported fact is that as temperatures rise, absolute humidity, the total amount of moisture in the air, will also increase. That may create combinations of heat and humidity so extreme that the evaporation of human sweat won’t sufficiently cool our bodies, leaving even healthy adults at risk of death from overheating.

Our research suggests that in about 50 years, these deadly conditions — almost unknown on the planet today — could occur once per decade in parts of the world. Millions of people could be exposed to these extreme conditions if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise following historical trends.”

Source: Opinion | Heat and Humidity Are a Killer Combination – The New York Times