It's Not Just the Extreme Heat. It's the Extreme Humidity

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories.Nina Lakhani This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Intolerable bouts of extreme humidity and heat that could threaten human survival are on the rise across the world, suggesting that worst-case-scenario warnings about the consequences of global heating are already occurring, a new study has revealed.Scientists have identified thousands of previously undetected outbreaks of the deadly weather combination in parts of Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, and North America, including several hot spots along the US Gulf Coast.Humidity is more dangerous than dry heat alone, because it impairs sweating—the body’s lifesaving natural cooling system.The number of potentially fatal humidity and heat events doubled from 1979 to 2017 and are increasing in both frequency and intensity, according to the study published in Science Advances.In the US, the southeastern coastal corner from eastern Texas to the Florida Panhandle experienced such extreme conditions dozens of times, with New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi, the hardest hit.The most extreme incidents occurred along the Persian Gulf, where the heat and humidity combination surpassed the theoretical human survivability limit on 14 occasions.