Climate Change Is Expected To Turn The Persian Gulf Into an Intolerable Kiln Where People Can't Go Outside
Thanks to the oil-thirsty countries of the world, the Persian Gulf is expected to become a blistering, red-hot convection oven in less than a century, much earlier than scientists thought.
A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that by the year 2100, the region is expected to experience normal summer temperatures of around 113 degrees. To make matters worse, a deluge of humidity in the area will deliver heat indexes of 165 to 170 degrees, conditions that are considered uninhabitable for humans.
With these threats combined, the researchers wrote, the region encompassed by the countries of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will be turned into a place “where climate change, in the absence of significant migration, is likely to severely impact human habitability.”
“When they happen, they will be quite lethal,” Dr. Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the New York Times.
Most heat waves today are lethal to sick people, the very old and the very young. But some of the most temperatures outlined by the paper, combined with the staggering levels of humidity, “would probably be intolerable even for the fittest of humans, resulting in hyperthermia.”
In other words, the countries that produce some of the largest quantities of oil in the world will one day be uninhabitable because of the burning of that oil.
