• beigeoat@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    I mean to say that the wet bulb temperature at which most will die is ~31.5°C, the gaurdian report I linked is saying that the 35°C number comes from a 2010 study, whereas the findings of the 2022 study found the number to be much lower ~31.5°C.

    • fearout@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s probably a measure for persistent temperature then. Like, if you lock someone in a room at that temperature (or if it wouldn’t cool down at night, for example), then that person would be dead no matter what after some amount of hours or days.

      35 is more of a real-life guideline, since it does cool down at night and you don’t need to withstand this temperature persistently and indefinitely.

      And for the last several years there have been lots of places that exceeded 31.5 WBT during the day. Hell, you can probably find several places with that WBT right now. But since people don’t drop dead immediately and need time to heat up, it’s still survivable.

      Think about it in terms of a 2D graph. You need to know the duration in addition to temperature to gauge survivability. A million degrees is survivable for a femtosecond, 35 for an average earth day, and ~31 indefinitely.