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Humid heat and climate change
journal contribution
posted on 2018-07-17, 14:58 authored by Tom MatthewsExtreme heat events cause significant societal impacts, prompting much concern and research about possible changes to their frequency and intensity as the climate warms. However, to date, extremes in air temperature have been emphasised at the expense of ‘heat-humidity’ indices, measures which incorporate the effect of atmospheric latent heat content on heat stress and provide a more complete picture of the thermal environment for human thermoregulation. This progress report restores balance by reviewing recent developments in the understanding of how heat-humidity indices have changed, and may continue to, as the climate warms further. The literature indicates that a concurrent rise in temperature and absolute humidity has already increased the frequency of potentially deadly conditions, and has reduced labour potential worldwide. More serious consequences may result if mitigation efforts are unsuccessful. The energetic basis of a heat-humidity perspective has permitted researchers to identify, for example, that by the end of the century, substantial parts of the Earth’s surface may be too hot and humid for human thermoregulation. Such consequences are avoided for less pessimistic scenarios of climate warming, but the societal impacts may still be very severe, as densely-populated low-latitude environments emerge as particularly at risk when a humid heat perspective is adopted. Counter to air temperature, changes in mean heat-humidity indices are actually amongst the largest worldwide at lower latitudes, where only small increases in the mean may be required to substantially enhance the frequency of dangerous conditions. The report concludes by outlining areas requiring improved process understanding, and it highlights the urgent role for societal adaptation if the worst impacts from rising humid heat are to be avoided.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and EnvironmentVolume
42Issue
3Pages
391 - 405Citation
MATTHEWS, T.K.R., 2018. Humid heat and climate change. Progress in Physical Geography, 42 (3), pp.391-405.Publisher
SAGE © The AuthorVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2018Notes
This paper was published in the journal Progress in Physical Geography and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0309133318776490.ISSN
0309-1333eISSN
1477-0296Publisher version
Language
- en