Temperatures in the Persian Gulf could reach levels by the end of the century that would be extreme for most people, making some of the poorest regions inhospitable and posing significant challenges to the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.
Could worsening heat make the Persian Gulf uninhabitable?
Based on several climate models, the authors writing in Nature Climate Change Monday predict that temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit would become the norm during the summer in the low-lying region of the Persian Gulf. Kuwait City and the city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates could see temperatures exceed 140 degrees Fahrenheit – so far the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth – during some years. And 2022 World Cup host Qatar, which gets hot dry air from the desert and moist air from the Gulf, could also see extreme temperatures.
“What we are talking about is significantly more severe than what people have experienced anywhere before,” Elfatih Eltahir, a co-author on the study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told reporters when asked to compare it to recent waves like Chicago in 1995, Europe in 2003 and Russia in 2010, during a press conference last week.
Known for its expansive deserts and mostly clear skies, the region that includes the U.A.E., Qatar, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and several other countries is no stranger to heat waves and record breaking temperatures. The summer months from May to September routinely go over 100 degrees, forcing all but the hardiest to spend their days in air conditioned malls and skyscrapers. This summer was among the worst yet, with Iran and Iraq experiencing scorching temperatures and the heat index – a combination of temperature and humidity – that made it feel like 164 F in one Iranian city.
Unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, the researchers are predicting the heat index could go as high as 165-170 F more frequently especially in the summer months of July and August and that a heat index reading of 130-140 F would become an almost daily occurence.
Places like Dubai, home to the world’s tallest skyscraper and the playground for many of the world’s rich and famous, have the resources to adapt to the hotter conditions. But the extreme conditions could be a “serious situation” in places like impoverished and war-torn Yemen, Eltahir said.
“People who have resources could use air conditioning and avoid the outdoors during heat waves but, in some corners of that region, there are communities and people who don’t have resources to do that,” he said. “We pointed to some corners of Yemen along the Red Sea that are not as well off as other parts of the Gulf Region.”
Eltahir and his co-author, Jeremy Pal of Loyola Marymount University in California, said the region’s economy would also take a hit and that the “the most basic outdoor activities are likely to be severely impacted.” Heat waves would take a toll on most work done outdoors, with everything from construction to agriculture to services related to the oil and gas industry suffering.
Sports, too, could be compromised, since football and several other outdoor sports are played at stadiums without any air conditioning. Qatar has twice failed in its bid to host the Olympics due to heat concerns and the 2022 World Cup, awarded to Qatar over bids from the United States, Australia and several other countries, came under fire over fears it could put the lives of players and spectators at risk due to the heat.
As a result, FIFA earlier this year approved moving the tournament to the cooler, winter months.
For the millions who attend the annual hajj in Saudi Arabia, an already crowded and sometimes deadly ritual in Mecca is also likely to become even more dangerous due to the heat. Held annually based on the lunar calendar, the hajj can take place in the summer.
“These extreme conditions are of severe consequence to the Muslim rituals of hajj, when Muslim pilgrims pray outdoors from dawn to dusk near Mecca,” the authors wrote. “This necessary outdoor Muslim ritual is likely to become hazardous to human health, especially for the many elderly pilgrims when the hajj occurs during the boreal summer.”
Christopher Schar, of the Swiss-based Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, who contributed an article accompanying the study, said it highlights the potential dangers to humans from rising temperatures and makes sense given historical trends showing the region getting hotter in recent decades.
“The new study thus shows that the threats to human health may be much more severe than previously thought, and may occur in the current century,” he wrote. “The study also indicates that mitigation measures (reducing global greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation efforts (protecting against heat waves) are essential for the inhabitants of the Gulf and Red Sea regions.”
Persian Gulf: Mega-heat waves forecast by new climate study
We spend a lot of time looking at climate change side effects, such as rising sea levels and abnormal weather events, but a new study reminds us it is also going to get very, very hot.
A new report published in the Nature Climate Change journal suggests many populated cities in the Persian Gulf may be uninhabitable by the end of the century. The two authors, Dr. Elfatih Eltahir from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Jeremy Pal from Loyola Marymount University, calculated future livability in the area through “web-bulb temperature” predictions, “a combined measure of temperature and humidity or degree of ‘mugginess.’”
Without accounting for artificial cooling, the wet-bulb temperature “threshold for survival for more than six unprotected hours is 35 degrees Celsius, or about 95 degrees Fahrenheit,” equivalent to a heat index of 165 degrees Fahrenheit, explains the study’s press release.
This temperature may seem unfathomable, but those living in major Persian Gulf cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha are already feeling the heat.
As The Christian Science Monitor reported in August, the Iranian city of Bandar Mahshahr witnessed one of the most extreme heat indices (or “feels like” temperatures) at 34.6 degrees Celsius, or 165 degrees Fahrenheit, for an hour on July 31. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, another Persian Gulf city, held the previous heat record from July 2003.
Temperatures in this region regularly surpass 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, “because of a combination of low elevations, clear sky, water body that increases heat absorption, and the shallowness of the Persian Gulf itself, which produces high water temperatures that lead to strong evaporation and very high humidity,” says the report’s press release.
But these predicted heat waves are of a different nature, as previously record-breaking will become the norm. The models predict the 35 degrees C threshold will be exceeded several times in a 30-year period before 2100. In a “business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas concentrations,” the researchers’ model suggests that new wet-bulb temperatures will “severely impact human habitability in the future,” in the absence of significant mitigation.
Notably, these new, regular temperatures will not discriminate. “The focus of the Pal and Eltahir study concerns another category of heat waves – one that may be fatal to everybody affected, even young and fit individuals under shaded and well-ventilated outdoor conditions,” explains Christoph Schar, a professor of climate science, in his commentary accompanying the study.
“Although it may be feasible to adapt indoor activities in the rich oil countries of the region,” such as Saudi Arabia, explain the scientists, common outdoor occupations such as agriculture or construction will be impossible for more than a few hours at a time. “In contrast, the relatively poor countries of Southwest Asia with limited financial resources and declining or non-existent oil production will probably suffer both indoors and outdoors,” because of electricity demands for air conditioner use.
In the coastal region of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, the area around the cities of Al-Hudaydah and Aden is expected to reach 33 degrees C. And Qatar, often ranked as the world’s richest country, could experience even hotter temperatures above the 35 C threshold.
Deadly Heat Is Forecast in Persian Gulf by 2100
By the end of this century, areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life, according to a study published Monday. Because of humanity’s contribution to climate change, the authors wrote, some population centers in the Middle East “are likely to experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans.”
The dangerously muggy summer conditions predicted for places near the warm waters of the gulf could overwhelm the ability of the human body to reduce its temperature through sweating and ventilation. That threatens anyone without air-conditioning, including the poor, but also those who work outdoors in professions like agriculture and construction.
The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, was written by Jeremy S. Pal of the department of civil engineering and environmental science at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previous studies had suggested that such conditions might be reached within 200 years. But the new research, which depends on climate models that focus on regional topography and conditions, foresees a shorter timeline.
The researchers resolve the old argument over whether the source of summer misery is the heat or the humidity by saying that it is both. They rely on a method of measuring atmospheric conditions known as wet-bulb temperature, which, while less well known and understood than the standard method of measuring temperatures, describes the extent to which evaporation and ventilation can reduce an object’s temperature. A wet-bulb thermometer has, literally, a wet bulb: It is wrapped in a moistened cloth.
If the wet-bulb temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius), even a person drenched in sweat cannot cool off. Wet-bulb readings are not the same as the heat-index measurements used by the National Weather Service, Dr. Eltahir said. (This is the figure used by weather forecasters to say what a hot day “feels like” when the humidity is added.)
A wet-bulb measure of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, he estimated, would roughly translate to a heat-index reading of 165 degrees. Since even today’s heat waves cause premature deaths by the thousands, mainly affecting very young, elderly and infirm people, the more extreme conditions envisioned in the new paper “would probably be intolerable even for the fittest of humans, resulting in hyperthermia” after six hours of exposure.
Erich M. Fischer, a senior scientist at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at the science and technical university ETH Zurich who was not involved with the paper, explained the role of humidity.
“Anyone can experience the fact that humidity plays a crucial role in this in the sauna,” he said. “You can heat up a Finnish sauna up to 100 degrees Celsius since it is bone dry and the body efficiently cools down by excessive sweating even at ambient temperatures far higher than the body temperature. In a Turkish bath, on the other hand, with almost 100 percent relative humidity, you want to keep the temperatures well below 40 degrees Celsius since the body cannot get rid of the heat by sweating and starts to accumulate heat.”
As climate change causes temperatures to rise around the world, it should come as no surprise that the warm-water coasts in the Middle East could be the first to experience brutal combinations of heat and humidity. The conditions would not be constant, but spikes would become increasingly common.
A temperature that today would rank in the 95th percentile “becomes approximately a normal summer day” by the end of the century, the researchers said. Wet-bulb temperatures that even exceed the 95-degree threshold could be expected to occur once every 10 or 20 years, Dr. Eltahir said. “When they happen, they will be quite lethal,” he said.
The research raises the prospect of “severe consequences” for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage that draws roughly two million people to Mecca to pray outdoors from dawn to dusk. Should the hajj, which can occur at various times of the year, fall during summer’s height, “this necessary outdoor Muslim ritual is likely to become hazardous to human health,” the authors predicted.
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If the nations of the world reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, the authors concluded, the predicted disasters can be prevented: “Such efforts applied at the global scale would significantly reduce the severity of the projected impacts.”
An essay published with the new paper by Christoph Schär of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich said the message of the new research is clear. “The threats to human health may be much more severe than previously thought, and may occur in the current century,” he wrote.
A heat wave in July of this year got very close to the 95-degree wet-bulb threshold described by the authors, reaching about 94.3 degrees. “It is credible that it will sometimes rise above 35 °C within this century,” he wrote.
In an interview via email, Dr. Fischer said that he found the research “robust and noteworthy,” though he said some uncertainties remain in the temperature measurements and the models. “Whether it exceeds or just gets close to the adaptability limit and for what period (which is probably quite relevant) may need further research,” he wrote.
Steven Sherwood, a researcher whose work in 2010 suggested that parts of the world could become uninhabitable within 200 years if fossil-fuel burning continued unabated, said he saw no reason to doubt the results of the new study. However, he added that “we really need to learn how to improve these models” to build confidence in the results.
Still, he said he was startled by the prediction that many cities on the Persian Gulf coast could be essentially uninhabitable by the end of the century for those without air-conditioning. “That is truly shocking,” he wrote in an email exchange, and added that he found it ironic, “given the region’s importance in providing fossil fuels.”
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| • Advocacy • Climate change • Displaced • Displacement • Environment (Sustainable) • ESC rights • Other • Regional • SDGs&MDGs |
