Soup or fried?

The other day I saw on the news that temperatures in some areas in Pakistan reached 52 degrees Celsius. When Manila temperature reached 38 degrees last week, it already was unbearable and I found myself doing something uncommon in our public life — listening and talking about the weather with strangers in stores and elevators.

Everyone is now aware of climate change and the impact it would bring to the planet and the way we live. We congratulate ourselves in our little self-declared ingenuities, both practical and theoretical, on how we can cope with climate change. Science and technology are trying to marathon with global temperatures in the race to outwit each other. But will we really always find ways of coping with climate change or is there a limit?

There is a limit, because the human body has limits within which it can survive. And humans cannot deal with heat stress beyond a certain level. A new study that came out May 30 2010 in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA is not the kind of reading material that would comfort you when you are seating in a café outdoors in these current sizzling temperatures. The study is entitled “An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress” by Steven C. Sherwood, and Matthew Huber of Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales and the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Purdue University, respectively. 

The human body is supposed to maintain a core body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius with slight variations among individuals. In order to do that, it has to be able to cool itself since the work that the body does to produce energy (metabolism) produces heat that needs to dissipate. The skin, however, has to be cooler — 35 degrees C — if it would be able to sustain a living human for extended periods. The human body cannot cool itself if the environment’s temperature is hotter than the body. It is against the law of nature. Thus, this would mean, according to the study, that if forecasts would prove to be correct that global temperatures will increase from 6 to 11 degrees C within the next century or so, then we as humans, with other mammals would be literally be on a frying planet.

The study looked at global temperatures now and what would happen to human populations around the world in the event of increases from 7 to 12 degrees C. At 7 degrees, there will already be pockets where it will be uninhabitable for humans and a warming of 11 to 12 degrees would include almost all the areas that humans inhabit now. If the worst predictions are to be believed about temperatures, in the next 30 years where it could increase by 10 degrees C, the planet will just be too hot for humans and other mammals to live on.

Some would probably say that we can just somehow all live in airconditioned spaces day in and day out. That oversimplification is self-defeating since unless we can think up of clean and free energy to do that, all the fossil energy we need to burn to cool ourselves will just warm the planet even more. Very few could also afford airconditioning round the clock. The researchers also warned us that this scenario would imprison us in our homes, cause power outages. It also forgets that there are jobs that are necessarily done outdoors. There is also the requirement of our food sources like livestock that can also only live within certain temperatures. The researchers even went so far as to say that the impact of heat stress on human populations may be worse than the impact of sea levels rising. 

Here we were thinking climate change will have us all as ingredients to nature’s soup, engulfed by rising seas only to find out we are in greater danger of melting. Unless some aliens visit us and share some information they may have on how they were able to save themselves from a melting planet, we are stuck here with each other to come up with solutions to cool ourselves. We are in desperate need of literally cool solutions because right now, it seems we are moving only in two directions: either we drown or we melt. Pick your pickle.

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