Earth’s increasingly hot, wet climate has cut the amount of work people can do in the worst heat by about 10 per cent in the past six decades, and that loss in labour capacity could double by mid-century, US government scientists reported on Sunday.
Because warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air, there is more absolute humidity in the atmosphere now than there used to be. And as anyone who has sweltered through a hot, muggy summer knows, it’s more stressful to work through hot months when the humidity is high.
Tocalculate the stress of working in hotter, wetter conditions, experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at military and industrial guidelines already in place for heat stress, and set those guidelines against climate projections for how hot and humid it is likely to get over the next century.
Their findings were stark: “We project that heat stress-related labour capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate,” said the lead author, John Dunne of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton.
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