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 labor capacity could double by mid-century, US government scientists reported on Sunday.
Because warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air, there's more absolute humidity in the atmosphere now than there used to be.
To figure out 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's likely to get over the next century.
Their findings were stark: "We project that heat stress-related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate," said lead author John Dunne of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton.
Because warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air, there's more absolute humidity in the atmosphere now than there used to be.
To figure out 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's likely to get over the next century.
Their findings were stark: "We project that heat stress-related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate," said lead author John Dunne of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton.
