Guest essay by Eric Worrall

People who work in bakeries, factories or mines deal with 130F / 54C+ on a regular basis. But for climate scientists working in comfortable offices, anything above 122F / 50C seems to represent some kind of death line.

Kuwait is fast becoming unlivable as global warming takes its toll

Temperature records are being smashed all over the world, but Kuwait – one of the hottest countries on the planet – breached 50 degrees Celsius in June, weeks ahead of its usual peak weather.

Fiona MacDonaldJan 20, 2022 – 9.00am

Trying to catch a bus at the Maliya station in Kuwait City can be unbearable in the summer. About two-thirds of the city’s buses pass through the hub, and schedules are unreliable.

Fumes from bumper-to-bumper traffic fill the air. Small shelters offer refuge to a handful of people, if they squeeze. Dozens end up standing in the sun, sometimes using umbrellas to shield themselves.

Global warming is smashing temperature records all over the world, but Kuwait – one of the hottest countries on the planet – is fast becoming unlivable.

In 2016, thermometers hit 54C, the highest reading on Earth in the last 76 years. Last year, for the first time, they breached 50 degrees Celsius in June, weeks ahead of usual peak weather. Parts of Kuwait could get as much as 4.5C hotter from 2071 to 2100 compared with the historical average, according to the Environment Public Authority, making large areas of the country uninhabitable.

For wildlife, it almost is. Dead birds appear on rooftops in the brutal summer months, unable to find shade or water. Vets are inundated with stray cats, brought in by people who’ve found them near death from heat exhaustion and dehydration. Even wild foxes are abandoning a desert that no longer blooms after the rains for what small patches of green remain in the city, where they’re treated as pests.

“This is why we are seeing less and less wildlife in Kuwait, it’s because most of them aren’t making it through the seasons,” said Tamara Qabazard, a Kuwaiti zoo and wildlife veterinarian. “Last year, we had three to four days at the end of July that were incredibly humid and very hot, and it was hard to even walk outside your house, and there was no wind. A lot of the animals started having respiratory problems.”

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Read More: https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/kuwait-is-fast-becoming-unlivable-as-global-warming-taks-its-toll-20220119-p59pha

Humans are well adapted to working in extreme heat.

I have personal experience of working in extreme heat. One of my first jobs was working in a chemical factory in Melbourne, Australia.

Melbourne has scorching hot Summers. The factory floor temperature regularly exceeded 120F in Summer. One week the outside temperature hit 110F every day. There was a factory floor thermometer which hit 130F by 10am every day that week.

The factory floor was wet and steamy like a tropical jungle, because the chemical production line released a tremendous amount of water vapour. The factory also contained lots of ancient steam heated hydraulic presses, fed by leaky pipes, which added to moisture. Conditions were so wet, droplets of water were continuously condensing on some of the machines, even when the shop floor temperature hit 130F.

I’m not sure what the web bulb temperature was on the shop floor that week, but it must have been impressive. Management were very concerned during the heatwave, they made us drink a plastic cup of electrolyte fluid every 5 minutes. There was a well equipped in-house laboratory attached to the factory which performed regular quality assurance on the products, so I think management knew exactly what the wet bulb temperature was on the factory floor. But if they knew they weren’t telling.

How could myself and my fellow workers possibly function in a web bulb temperature which was almost certainly above 35C? The following offers some insights.

Simplicity lacks robustness when projecting heat-health outcomes in a changing climate

Jennifer K. Vanos,¹Jane W. Baldwin,²Ollie Jay,^3,4 and  Kristie L. Ebi⁵Author informationArticle notesCopyright and License informationDisclaimer

Extreme heat adversely affects human health, productivity, and well-being, with more frequent and intense heatwaves projected to increase exposures. However, current risk projections oversimplify critical inter-individual factors of human thermoregulation, resulting in unreliable and unrealistic estimates of future adverse health outcomes.

…

Capturing these complexities allows researchers to understand the level of heat strain that eventuates from heat stress, and by extension heat-related health outcomes. These complexities are currently neglected within common heat-related health projections. For example, the most commonly used metric for projecting future heat-related mortality is the wet-bulb temperature (T_w) threshold of 35 °C (e.g.¹⁰,), which is based on a thermodynamic limit to heat exchange whereby the human body becomes an adiabatic system (Table 1). The conservative assumption that this value must be reached to cause widespread death is only valid under a specific set of conditions, i.e., the person is completely sedentary, unclothed, maximally heat acclimatized, and an average-sized adult free from any thermoregulatory impairments. These assumptions are implausible in the real-world, and severe illness and death can occur at much lower heat stress levels when considering realistic metabolic heat loads, clothing, population demographics, and health status. In essence, using this T_w threshold without questioning such implicit assumptions could result in substantial underestimation of the future range and potential severity in heat-related outcomes. Conversely, the single threshold can also overestimate risk as humans are known to live in harsh climates through buffering the effects of climate extremes using adaptive innovations. Often these innovations involve technological, infrastructural, and behavioral adaptations that support minimizing extreme exposures and/or the amount of time an individual is exposed to the given extreme¹¹.

…

The general applicability, and thus usability, of projections are questionable when they are based on a single ambient threshold at which mortality is presumed to occur applied to an inanimate unclothed human (e.g., T_w of 35 °C) versus a range of outcomes with underlying uncertainties. Moreover, without considering the temporal duration of exposure, space, activity, clothing, behavior, and most of all, individual physiology, the mismatch between complex climate models and over-simplified human models fails to provide useful information for decision-makers. Embedding more sophisticated human heat stress models into climate projections would provide relevant health projections across a more realistic and therefore diverse population than an assumed idealized individual.

…

Read more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7695704/

My point is, if you are used to extreme conditions, like people who work in hot factories, or people who live in very hot places like Kuwait, those extreme conditions are normal and bearable. I’m confident we regularly exceeded 35C wet bulb on the hottest days for most of our 8 hour work day, given the extreme temperature and the beads of water condensing on the machines – but we were fine.

The most interesting part of the experience, when the work shift ended at 3pm, and I walked out into the 110F outside temperature covered in sweat, I sometimes started shivering. For a few minutes I felt freezing cold on a 110F day, as my body re-adjusted back to cooler outside conditions.

If I walked into that factory today, without adapting to the heat, I would find it very difficult to function. But if you build up to it, work for months in slightly cooler temperatures as outside temperatures build up to peak Summer, most people’s bodies can adapt.

Scientists claim that old people have more trouble adapting to heat. But a lot of the people working in that factory were old. From memory the shop floor people I worked with were half a dozen ageing chain smoking East Europeans, a pregnant Pacific islander and a couple of Asians. Most of them had worked there for years and some were now close to retirement. None of them had any problem coping with the heat.

So why do climate scientists assume 35C web bulb is a hard limit?

I suspect the reason is studying the true limits of human endurance is kindof difficult. It would be highly unethical to put people into a test oven and crank up the heat and humidity until they pass our or die. In any case test subjects would need weeks of adaptation to cope with the kind of temperature and humidity I’m describing, to produce a representative result.

Studying people in Kuwait is also an issue. Ever notice those picturesque towers on top of buildings in the middle east? Medieval air conditioning (see the picture at the top of the page). Even the houses of poor people often had small wooden wind catchers before the advent of modern air conditioning. People in hot climates are not stupid, they don’t prance around in the midday sun testing their personal physiological limits unless they have to – even though they could if they had to.

Scientists could try to find workplaces where people already regularly endure extreme conditions beyond 35C web bulb limits, but getting a company manager to admit such extreme workplace conditions exist might be an issue. Workplace regulations are written by people who believe in hard wet bulb limits, so it seems likely the factory where I worked was seriously breaching health and safety laws by continuing to operate during a heatwave, even if none of us actually suffered any harm.

My factory job was by no means unique – talking to friends, there are plenty of factories and other workplaces which quietly ignore the alleged limits to human survival.

On 10^th January 2022, the Copernicus Climate Change Service issued a press release relating to its report on the climate in 2021. It struck me as being deliberately alarmist in terms of the findings it stressed, and this duly enabled the usual suspects, such as the Guardian and the BBC, to give it significant publicity and use it to hype up the threat of “climate chaos”. It received a heck of a lot of media interest. I covered it in Top Spinⁱ on the same day.

It seemed to me that it was only a matter of time (and a short time at that) before other climate data organisations (such as NOAA and NASA) released something similarly alarmist, and the opportunity would be taken by the media to rinse and repeat. But something strange happened. When NOAA and NASA produced a joint reportⁱⁱ, they did their best to sound alarmist, but they couldn’t match the job done by Copernicus. Consequently, it didn’t make the BBC at all (unless I missed it, but if I missed it, it could only be because it was very low key). Of course the Guardian did its best to make something of it, although in doing so it really relied instead on information from the Berkeley Institute. The NOAA/NASA report, despite doing its best to be alarmist, wasn’t sufficiently so – good news is no news.

Berkeley Earth Report – No News

Inevitably, the Guardian’s headline was alarmist: “Nearly quarter of world’s population had record hot year in 2021, data shows”ⁱⁱⁱ.

That rather dodgy and inaccurate headline was based on this:

A total of 1.8 billion people, approaching a quarter of the world’s population, live in countries that did experience the hottest year on record, according to a separate analysis released on Thursday by Berkeley Earth.

No link was offered up to substantiate that claim, but a quick search online revealed the methodology, by reference to Berkeley Earth’s own report^iv on 2021, which has this to say on the subject:

In Berkeley Earth’s estimation, 2021 had the warmest annual average since instrumental records began in the following 25 countries:

Bangladesh, Bahrain, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, China, Ghana, Guinea, Iran, Kuwait, Liberia, Malta, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Togo, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates

This is fewer than the 45 countries that experienced record warming in 2020, but especially with the inclusion of China this still represents a substantial fraction of the world’s population that has just lived through the warmest year in their local history. We estimate that approximately 1.8 billion people live in areas that observed their locally warmest year during 2021.

I have to say I’m mightily unconvinced by this methodology. Many of those countries will have had meaningful and accurate temperature gauges and records over substantial parts of their land areas (the only way in which the claim can mean anything) for relatively short periods.

So far as I can gather (following a determined if amateurish search of the internet), meaningful records go back among those countries, to the following dates:

Bangladesh: 1901.

Bahrain: 1902.

Benin: 1941.

Bhutan: I simply can’t find out, but with a population of less than 1 million, it doesn’t contribute much to claims about nearly a quarter of the world’s population.

Burkina Faso: 1920 (partial); 1960 (more comprehensive?).

China: Difficult to say, but the World Data website^v says this:

In the years 1985 to 2020 there were only these 3 weather stations in the whole country, which reported continuous temperature values (Beijing, Yinchuan, Wu Lu Mu Qi).

Ghana: 1886 (3 stations only). Thereafter:

By 1957 there were 14 synoptic stations, which had a full range of normal meteorological instruments and equipment, manned 24 hours a day. These were supported by app. 350 stations measuring precipitation, temperature, humidity, wind, clouds etc. taken one [sic] or twice per day. The 1960s saw rapid expansion but the economic troubles in the 1970s and the early 1980s caused a decline in the number of meteorological stations operating. In the late 1990s a [sic] upgrading has started…

Guinea: ?

Iran: 1956? I did find this (at the CORE website): “Weather stations are sparsely distributed and access to complete weather data is limited”.

Kuwait: Kuwait Meteorological Department of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation was established in 1953.

Liberia: ? But in 2010, the Norwegian Government helped set up a National Hydrometric Network & Database. “As the project started, the Liberian hydrometric network was non-operational and LHS for nearly 30 past years did not collect any hydrological data.”^vi

Malta: 1922? But note this qualification:

This document identifies a number of discontinuities in the trends of various weather elements. Such discontinuities occur at a change-point when the sequence of values stops sharing a statistical distribution evident in previous years. The most common change-point involves a discontinuity in the mean. However, other ‘external’ factors can contribute to discontinuities in climate-related time series, such as the movement of weather station location, or changes in type of instrumentation or recording practices. These factors must be considered in any climate analysis. Another aspect could be the effect of urbanisation change patterns around Luqa Airport on the local climate. The most noticeable change since 1951 is the gradual replacement of rural and agricultural areas with new urban settlements. Concrete and asphalt heat-up during the day cool only slowly at night. Buildings and structures also change the ground-level wind flow and create eddies. However, the impact that encroaching urbanisation has on our local meteorological variables such as ambient temperature is hard to quantify.^vii

Myanmar: 1873.

Nigeria: ? However, the NiMet (Nigerian Meterological Agency) website^viii observes that the World Meteorological Organisation requests member countries to ensure adequate monitoring of weather by ensuring that the gap between two weather stations is not more than 50km. “NiMet is yet to attain this level in our station network density”.

North Korea: Good luck with that!

Oman: 1986?

Qatar: 1901?

Saudi Arabia: 1946.

Senegal: 1961?

Sierra Leone: 1923.

South Korea: 1948. “In South Korea, the number of stations operated over 50 years is less than 15…”^ix

Togo: 1888.

Tunisia: 1943.

Turkmenistan: Another “good luck with that”. This is a country under fire for under-reporting covid cases and under-reporting greenhouse gas emissions.

United Arab Emirates: 1944?

As regards national average temperatures, I can’t resist adding in this quote (contra Berkeley Earth) from the World Data website’s page^x on Benin’s climate:

In contrast to single record values, a long-term development cannot simply be brought about by all weather stations in the country. Both the number and the locations are constantly changing. A simply calculated average value would give a falsified result. If several measuring stations in particularly cold mountain or coastal regions are added in one year, the average would already decrease as a result of this alone. If a station fails during the summer or winter months, it does not provide any values and falsifies the average again. The subsequent long-term development was therefore reduced to only 2 measuring points in order to have actually comparable data over as long a period as possible. In the years 1960 to 2020 there were only these 2 weather stations in the whole country, which reported continuous temperature values (Save, Cotonou).

This is a very real problem in attempting to ascertain climate trends, especially in Africa. The first problem is that before the late 19^th century data-recording over much of the continent was virtually non-existent and that during the first half of the 20^th century it was patchy at best. The second problem is the paucity of information available even now, compared to much of the rest of the world:

Africa has just one-eighth the minimum density of weather stations recommended by the World Meteorological Organization, which means there is a problematic lack of data about dozens of countries that are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

On the ground, the dearth of data has meant inaccurate forecasts and poor or nonexistent early-warning systems for people increasingly experiencing [sic] deadly cyclones, prolonged droughts and intense floods. In the academic world, researchers say the lack of data has led to challenges in measuring the extent of climate change. And for leaders preparing for the United Nations climate summit this fall, the absence of hard numbers could make it difficult to prove global warming’s impact on the continent, said Izidine Pinto, one of the authors of a recent landmark U.N. Climate report.

“This is one of the biggest problems in Africa,” Pinto said of the data inequity, which is also notable in large parts of South America and increasingly drawing international attention. “You cannot research without data. You cannot do anything.”^xi

Nowhere (so far as I can see) are Berkeley Earth claiming individual record temperatures. No, just that in their “estimation” those countries “had the warmest annual average since instrumental records began”. Of course, including China gets you to the Guardian’s headline about nearly a quarter of the world’s population having a record hot year. Let’s get real – they didn’t. Even Berkeley Earth has this to say about China:

The annual average in China during 2021 set a new record high, exceeding 2.0 °C (3.8 °F) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. This record warmth occurred over many of the most populated regions of China and contributed to more than 1 billion people experiencing their locally warmest year.

Did the Guardian exclude the 450 million or so Chinese who weren’t included in that statistic, when making their claim?

What do warmest year claims mean in the context of countries with sparse weather data over only relatively short periods? Not enough to justify either Berkeley Earth’s claims or the Guardian’s headline, in my assessment.

NOAA – Good News

Let’s take a look at what the NOAA summary^xii tells us. I’ll be honest, I’m going to concentrate on the non-alarmist data, since the joint NASA/NOAA report and the Guardian article have already concentrated (solely) on the rest of it. In fact, so far as I can see, most of it is non-alarmist, which is why, I imagine, it didn’t make much of a splash in the mainstream media. Here are some of the main points:

The year culminated as the sixth warmest year on record for the globe

The 2021 Northern Hemisphere surface temperature was also the sixth highest on record.

Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere had its ninth warmest year on record.

North America had its seventh warmest year on record

The Hawaiian region’s yearly temperature was the coolest since 2012

The Caribbean region had its eighth warmest year on record.

The year 2021 was South America’s sixth warmest year on record

The year 2021 was Europe’s ninth warmest year on record

Although Europe’s April 2021 temperature was above average, it was Europe’s coldest month of the year and it was the coldest April since 2003. Similarly, May 2021 was Europe’s coldest May since 2004. Several European countries had their coldest April or May in at least 10 years.

Parts of western and central Europe experienced really cold temperatures during the first week of April, with several locations setting new low minimum temperatures. Of note, there were several locations across Slovenia that had their coldest April temperature in over 100 years. The weather station in Nova Vas, southern Slovenia, recorded a minimum temperature of -20.6°C (-5.1°F) — a new all-time national record for April, exceeding the previous record of -20.4°C (-4.7°F) set on April 9, 1956 at Pokljuka. Vegetation across these areas was damaged due to the really cold temperatures. [Not that this is good news!].

Austria, as a whole, had its coldest year since 2010, with a temperature that was 0.1°C (0.2°F) below the 1991–2020 average.

With a yearly continental average temperature of 1.33°C (2.39°F) above average, Africa had its third warmest year (tying with 2019) in the 112-year record. [Which reinforces my point about the limited temporal nature of much data].

Asia had its seventh warmest year on record

Oceania had an above average temperature of +0.67°C (+1.21°C). Despite it being a warmer-than-average year, it was the coldest year since 2012…Although the year began with an above-average temperature for Oceania, the months of January through April had a temperature that was the coldest for their respective month since at least 2015.

Global cyclone activity: 94 storms, including 37 hurricanes/cyclones/typhoons. The number of global hurricane-strength storms was the lowest in the 41 year record.

Arctic sea ice extent: During its growth season, the Arctic had its seventh-smallest annual maximum extent (tied with 2007) on record. During its melt season, the Arctic had its twelfth-smallest annual minimum extent on record.

Antarctic sea ice extent: During its growth season, the Antarctic reached a maximum extent that was near-average. During its melt season, the Antarctic had its 12^th smallest minimum extent on record.

So there you have it – the climate news from 2021 that wasn’t of much interest to the mainstream media. Good news is no news.

Endnotes

i https://cliscep.com/2022/01/10/top-spin/

ii https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/briefings/20220113.pdf

iii https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/13/hot-year-temperatures-climate-crisis-2021

iv http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2021/

v https://www.worlddata.info/asia/china/climate.php

vi https://lhsliberia.com/operational-hydrology/about-the-project/

vii https://nso.gov.mt/en/publicatons/Publications_by_Unit/Documents/B3_Environment_Energy_Transport_Agriculture_Statistics/The_Climate_of_Malta.pdf

viii https://www.nimet.gov.ng/

ix https://iwaponline.com/jwcc/article/10/3/504/38953/Comparative-study-on-long-term-climate-data

x https://www.worlddata.info/africa/benin/climate.php

xi https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/24/africa-climate-weather-data/

xii https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202113