A wet-bulb temperature of 35°C is regarded as the theoretical limit of what humans can endure
heatwave hits India’s northern plains, some 20m people are killed by persistent “wet-bulb” temperatures of more than 35°C . That is the plot of “The Ministry For the Future”, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel about climate change. The scenario is fiction but similar temperatures have been briefly recorded in the real world. And as the globe warms they will become more common.
Warm-blooded animals need to keep their internal temperatures reasonably constant. If it is too hot, most use some form of evaporative cooling to do this—functioning, in essence, as living wet-bulbs. Dogs pant, pigs wallow in mud and humans sweat. Ambient humidity changes how efficient these processes are, which is why muggy Singapore would feel much hotter than dry Sydney at the same ambient temperature.
Such extremes of heat and humidity are not common. But in 2020 researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University and Loughborough University found that a handful of weather stations—in South Asia, the Persian Gulf and the southwest coast of North America—have occasionally recorded wet-bulb temperatures close to or above 35°C between 1979 and 2017, though only for a couple of hours at a time.
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