https://www.wired.com/story/climate-change-is-turning-cities-into-ovens/
"To calculate how much city temperatures might rise, Zhao and his
colleagues from a number of institutions, including Princeton University
and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, built a statistical model for
the climate of urban regions, focusing on changing temperatures and
humidities. These two factors are the conspiring menaces of extreme
heat: Our bodies respond to high temperatures by perspiring, which is
more fancily known as evaporative cooling. But humidity makes this
process less efficient, because the more moist the air is, the less
readily it accepts evaporating sweat from our bodies. That’s why humid
heat feels so much more uncomfortable than dry heat.
Heat and humidity are not only uncomfortable; they can be dangerous.
Mora has identified 27 ways heat can kill a person. When your body
detects that it’s overheating, it redirects blood from the organs at
your core to your skin, thus dissipating more heat into the air around
you. (This is why your skin turns red when you’re hot.) In extreme heat,
this can spiral out of control, resulting in ischemia, or the critically
low flow of blood to the organs. This can damage crucial organs like the
brain or heart. In addition, a high body temperature can cause cell
death, known as heat cytotoxity. Humidity compounds the risk of
overheating and organ failure, since you can’t sweat as efficiently to
cool down."
Via Ted Kahn.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
