Millions of people already live in these conditions (temperature in the low 30s, constant high humidity) in the tropics so I am skeptical about that study.
It sucks for me in those conditions but a lot of locals say they're used to it. The general strategy without AC is to minimize activity during the hottest part of the day and keep a fan on you.
With high enough heat, a fan will only make things worse, no?
I can only report what I see, which is that in many parts of the world including where I live, it's always in the 30s, humidity levels are high, a lot of people can't afford air con, and there are no mass heat deaths.
If they don't have access to AC they run fans all the time, and they stay indoors or in the shade.
In fact in the cold months where it dips under 30 the local news always runs a story or two about the (small) wave of cold deaths. (I think usually in parts of the country where it gets down to 15-20 at night)
Today it was 35 in the afternoon and about 70% humidity. I went outside for a swim. There were probably over a million people in my city who were sitting outside all day because their jobs required it. It was a somewhat hot but otherwise completely ordinary day. If you said they're on the brink of heat death they'd say you're crazy.
It may be that people who sit in air conditioned offices in cold countries are translating that one study into some hysteria. It may be they will have the "opportunity" to learn to live in a hot climate like the rest of us, rather than die by the millions.
I can report that the science is pretty solid.
35° at 70% (your peak today) is wet-bulb 29.8°.
45° at 20% (desert) is wet-bulb 24.3°.
32° at 100% is wet-bulb 31.8°.
At 100% sweating is useless. You can't lose heat through evaporation.
https://www.mit.edu/~eltahirgroup/calTW.html
Thank you for that. I guess where I have a problem is the notion that 2.2 degrees higher on the wet bulb than where we were earlier this week is going to lead to millions of deaths. Like, this is the tropics, it's always hot. It's been a lot hotter than it was this week, and yet there was no extinction event. It's very hard for me to parse this idea from an Internet forum filled with white dudes in air conditioned NA/EU offices saying that millions of us are going to die because the weather will be basically the same as it's always been here. There has got to be some breakdown in the logic between the observations about the wet bulb and the conclusion that humanity will go extinct because it can't sweat or whatever. There are like a billion people sweating in temperatures around what this study says will kill them.
Bezos said if your data and anecdotes disagree, it's usually your data that is wrong
If the wet bulb temp is above (say) 40C, definitely yes.
I can only reply with my experience, if you had access to water to put on your body in a hot area with a fan, you would get some evaporation. If there's no easy access to water, then shade, IMO, is the best option. Hot, blown air on a very hot day is almost painful.
So do any of the people who downvoted this into oblivion actually live in the tropics? I mean I don't know about 35 at 100% humidity, but like 32 at 75% humidity is the daytime average for some months where I am, and it gets higher when there are heat waves, and many people don't own fans. None of this is new. No mass heat deaths yet. But hey there's one study so the apocalypse is around the corner right