Longing for days when a cotton field felt comfortable
“I also withheld the rain from you
when there were yet three months to the harvest;
I would send rain on one city,
and send no rain on another city;
one field would have rain,
and the field on which it did not rain would wither.” — Amos 4:7
Having grown-up in the northeastern part of the U.S. I distinctly remember the first time I experienced what I considered to be “oppressive” heat. I was visiting friends in west Tennessee near the Mississippi river and they thought I’d be interested visiting a “real” cotton field. So to humor my hosts I went along.
I’ll never forget opening the door of the air-conditioned car in which we were traveling. I literally couldn’t breathe! Didn’t think it could get worse but it did when I agreed to “take a walk around”. I have memories of the heat being so intense my nostrils started to shrivel and my mouth went dry. It was “interesting” all right.
Then there was the time I was quite bit older and had a real life, “paying” consulting client in Charleston SC. My client’s office was just off Broad Street almost to the end of the peninsula of downtown Charleston from where you can see Fort Sumter at the opening of the Charleston Harbor.
My hotel was only a block away from my client’s office, on Meeting Street, so I would walk to their office in the morning and back to the hotel in the evening.
Today everyone goes to work in “business casual” attire but then all the men work jackets and ties. I quickly learned there was no reason to put my jacket on until I actually entered my clients air-conditioned office. I carried my jacket over my shoulder from the hotel to the office but by the time I reached the office I noticed my shirt was drenched in perspiration. I would immediately go to the mens room to splash cold water on my face before attending any meetings.
At the time both trips seemed like extraordinary climactic events in my weather-cloistered life in the northeast. Then twenty years later my wife and I moved our family from Philadelphia to Atlanta, where I now think nothing of Georgia heat. I must say, however, I’ve found the trick to dealing with heat is all about “acclimatization”. You must get out in it and let your body’s survival processes take control, illustrated nicely in this graphic.
I’ve played golf and fished in Georgia and Florida regularly for the last twenty-five years or so and many times my outings extended well into the afternoon but after moving to GA I let myself get out in the heat much more than during my very cloistered trips to West Tennessee and Charleston. I now find myself enjoying the heat and certainly prefer it to the last winter l lived I the northeast when we had six monster snow storms within three months. The wind out in the country where we lived would feel like it was actually cutting through your legs from the bottom of your coat to your feet, which were always covered by heavy boots of some kind.
A new global study now projects that in coming decades the effects of high humidity, as a result of climate change, in many areas will dramatically increase. Potentially affected regions include large swaths of the already muggy southeastern United States where I live and thousands of families move each year.
In the southeast United States, wet-bulb temperatures now sometimes reach an already oppressive 29 or 30 degrees Celsius (85–87 degrees Fahrenheit ); by the 2070s or 2080s, well within he lifetimes of our children and especially or grand children, such weather could occur 25 to 40 days each year. Needless to say all the acclimatization a human body can muster will likely not make those kinds of temperature livable. This presents the very real possibility that North America will not be habitable for our children.
Only a few weather events like those being projected have ever been recorded. Most recent was in Iran’s Bandar Mahshahr, on July 31, 2015. The city of more than 100,000 sits along the Persian Gulf, where seawater can warm into the 30s Celsius (90’s Farhenheit), and offshore winds blow moisture onto land. On that day, the “dry” air temperature alone was 115 degrees Fahrenheit; saturated with moisture, the air’s wet bulb reading neared the 35 C fatal limit, translating to a heat index of 165 Fahrenheit.
There are places in the Middle East where it will be even hotter for longer periods. Human cells start to die around 41°C (106°F) to 45°C (113°F) but humans can survive much higher air temperatures; a healthy person could make a day trip to Death Valley on one of its hottest days– 55°C (131°F)– and, so long as he avoided dehydration, would probably not die.
With humid air, the limits are much lower. Human beings can withstand 45°C (113 °F) at 100% humidity in the short term (e.g. steam room) although we wouldn’t last a night in there, but around 50 °C (122 °F) it becomes acutely fatal (or, at least, dangerous enough that people who expose themselves to such environments must be protected to survive because the water vapor can condense in your lungs. Our children may need to dress like this to make a trip to the grocery store.
Prolonged periods of abnormally hot and humid weather that last anywhere from three days to several weeks — kill more people in the United States on average per year than any other single weather disaster. In temperatures like that forget the “acclimatization”! It’ll be all about getting out of the heat and wearing protective clothing, maybe like the suit Neil Armstrong wore on the Moon, for any time that must be spent outside. May not be long before we are all watching videos like this and longing for those days when a trip to a cotton field felt comfortable.
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Notes:
1 Ethan David Coffel et al. “Temperature and humidity based projections of a rapid rise in global heat stress exposure during the 21st century”, Environmental Research Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1088/1748- 9326/aaa00e
2 https://phys.org/news/2017-12-south-china-stress-human.html
3 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-temperature-a-human-being-can-survive
Originally published at neutec.wordpress.com on August 6, 2018.
