The article is about an experiment, where people are exposed to 35°C wet bulb temperatures, but in different settings. Sometimes lower temperatures but higher humidity, sometimes vise versa, but always 35°C wet bulb temperature.

So far the assumption was, that humans can’t survive a 35°C wet bulb temperature for longer than 6 hours. And at current warming this is unlikely to be naturally the case within this century.

However the experiment gives hints to believe that humans can’t survive at lower wet bulb temperatures either. It looks like with lower temperatures and higher humidity, humans can get very close to that 35°C wet bulb temperature, however people seem to struggle more with higher temperatures and lower humidity.

A possible explanation could be, that while more sweat evaporates in lower humidity, the body has a limit for how much sweat it can produce. And if you keep raising the temperature, that the human body simply can’t produce enough sweat to cool itself.

That’s pretty much what I took away from the article. They mentioned they experiment with several people, however the article was mainly about on person in the experiment, a 30ish year old, athletic male.

Edit: add some graphs from the article. Sorry for low quality, but as you said, the layout is quite atrocious and on my phone it keeps jumping around on it’s own, so I lost patience.

“Humid conditions have their own sort of more perceptual limitations, that difficulty breathing, because it feels so claustrophobic,” Dr Cheng says.

“But in the dry environment, so far, the rate at which [their core temperature] is rising can be one-and-a-half to two times what we’re seeing with the more humid conditions.”

“It’s really for a lot of those nations, that don’t have a choice but to actually live in these conditions 24/7 … or for people in circumstances where air conditioning is not an option, or areas of the world where manual labour in the field is just sort of their way of life,” Dr Cheng says.

“A lot of those parts of the world that are most affected by it, are also the ones that have the least resources, I think, to deal with it.”

The researchers will keep testing the conditions on people until the end of the year.

But in the meantime, it’s given both the researchers, and Owen, an important glimpse into where the heat threshold of the human body lies.

Hot temperatures are bad, humidity is bad, but it turns out hot temperatures at lower humidity is seemingly even worse. And we’re all fucked because climate change models show us likely hitting the temps this guy was exposed to if we don’t fix some shit fast.

Oh my God what is this shit

If you scroll down, you’ll find out!