As temperatures continue to rise, we're reaching extremes past which the human body may not be capable of adapting in order to survive.
July 7, 2023 – If you clicked on any major news site this week, there was one consistent headline that would be difficult to miss, let alone ignore: “Hottest Day Ever Recorded on Earth.”
Mora and his colleagues have spent decades modeling that risk of extreme heat as it relates to global climate change, showing that in the last decade, the planet has warmed by about 1 C , resulting in a greater than 2,300% increase in the loss of human life to heat waves alone.When most people think about the effects of extreme heat, they naturally consider things like fatigue, headaches, or feeling a bit faint or nauseated.
“Wet-bulb temperature is a given temperature of the air when it’s 100% saturated. And so, if your skin is 35 C , and the air temperature is 35 C but completely saturated with humidity, vapor, sweat, can’t evaporate anymore. And so, we lose our primary means of cooling the body,” Kenney said.In a 2017 review, Mora and his colleagues identified 27 ways that heat exposure can lead to organ failure and death.
The result is devastating. When the body’s core gets too hot during extreme heat events – such as the one that Texas and other states are experiencing – a vicious cycle of multiorgan breakdown and failure ensues, causing permanent disability and death.On June 23 of this year, a 31-year-old man and his 14-year-old stepson died in Texas’s Big Bend National Park, where air temperatures had reached 119 F.
“You see things like dysfunction in how people think. They might not answer questions, they can . I always tell parents, if you see your kids really irritable and they’re not acting like themselves, that can be a sign [of heat-related illnesses], because they're not able to verbalize what’s going on,” she said.
Older people are also more vulnerable to extreme heat because they can't get around as well, limiting their ability to move to dissipate heat from their bodies. Some prescription medications also interfere with temperature, including certain drugs for depression and high blood pressure.
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