SHUTTERSTOCK
If you have ever languished in a sauna, you’ll know how enervating the combination of extreme heat and high humidity can be. Now, imagine being in a sauna wherein the temperature and humidity just keep climbing and climbing. Very quickly the experience will stop being relaxing and become deeply unpleasant. You’ll manage to lose some heat to begin with by sweating, but ultimately a threshold will be reached beyond which sweating is no longer physically possible. You try the door and it’s locked. There’s no escape – and you have just hours to live.
It’s a nightmare vision, but such a conspiracy of heat and humidity is increasingly being encountered in the hottest parts of our world. It’s slated to become ever more common as global heating continues to build in the decades ahead, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people.