By Caroline Delbert, Women’s Health | In Andy Weir’s 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, the dimming of the sun by 5 to 10 percent is enough to cause a collapse of the entire global ecosystem and food chain. Earth’s governments act with urgency to make and send a spacecraft to save humanity. This seems more fictional than ever when politics take precedent over the science of climate change, with even the U.S. going back and forth on the Paris Accord.
In the era of human-caused climate change, you may be used to seeing headlines and news stories about what will happen to the ice caps and lower-lying land areas around the world. There are new or expanding diseases because of microscopic pathogens that emerge or thrive in the warming climate. And more places around the world are experiencing more severe storms.
But what about the human body itself? We take hot baths, play sports outside on hot days, and even live in the hottest climates on Earth. At the same time, hot weather is a killer: The EPA says there were 11,000 deaths in the U.S. directly caused by heat exposure between 1979 and 2018, and likely more where it was not listed or understood as the cause of death.
What does extreme heat do to your body?
Inside our bodies, there are multiple reasons hot weather can be deadly. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are serious conditions caused by heat, and these can be fatal on their own. Heat is also an exacerbating factor for certain preexisting conditions or cardiovascular diseases, the category that includes strokes and heart attacks. And there’s a separate form of heat stroke that affects athletes, because the way exercise works in the body can become a runaway heating process that must be stopped by medical professionals.
The major way heat causes injury to the body is through water. The body’s water equilibrium is precise and temperamental, and it’s highly exposed to the surrounding air through our skin and respiration. In hot weather, and especially hot and dry weather, water can evaporate from the skin and through respiration so rapidly that it can’t be replaced in time. Evaporating sweat cools the body, but too much water lost through sweating leads to dehydration.
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It’s hard to imagine a way in which the human body will adapt to the simple, biological facts of heat and evaporation. Our bodies rely on maintaining a very precise equilibrium, and the outcomes from extreme heat could become the next mass extinction event for living things on Earth. It’s time to “go with speed” in our efforts to halt and reverse climate change.
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Read the rest of this article here – it may SAVE YOUR LIFE:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/hottest-temperature-human-survive-much-130000930.html
The Hottest Temperature A Human Can Survive Is Much Lower Than You Think
