Dr. Theodora Sutton ✨

So here's how we should look at all this temperature stuff. The fundamental thing to understand is that there is a cut off point where the human body dies in 6 hours (Wet Bulb Effect)- around 35C to 50C, depending on the humidity. As I keep reminding people, when people die they do not come back - unlike just being ill. These are the two key facts. So really the thing to think about is not, hey it is now 30C at night in Crete in March every year or two. The KEY THING is how often is it going to be 50C at night in Crete? Let's say that is every 20 years - so half the population dies in one day every 20 years. This is why THE AVERAGE is completely irrelevant - the horror is in how often the long tail happens - how often a place hits the "all humans die in one day" point. So if at 1C it is once in 10 000 years - at 2C it might be once in 100 years - at 3C once in 20 years (i.e., effective human extinction). At 1C things are tricky - at 2C things are super risky - at 3C half the world has to move because every 20 years they all die if they stay put. Of course you are going to say well people will adapt (have underground shelters etc). Sure some people survive in the Sahara. But try doing that in an area such as France! The biggest social shock of human history is going to be when the first mass mortality event happens suddenly and what I have written in this post will become the most important information in the world. And then everyone will go - oh fuck fuck fuck. The door of the gas chamber has closed. In case you are interested in how this has worked in history you can read the "general crisis" on the 1C drop in temperatures in the seventeenth century when the global population dropped by a third. You can see that the mass death events happened all in one go when extreme climate events happened - droughts and extreme cold temperatures. When these happened two years in a row it took generations for the population to recover. And it did of course. But this time round it will never change. It will just get worse. The researchers concluded: “The geographic range and frequency of non-compensable heat extremes will increase rapidly, given only moderate continued increase in global average temperatures. This implies that, in the near future, a substantial portion of the world’s population will be exposed to these non-compensable environmental conditions.” “a real risk” of widespread exposure with “hundreds of millions of people” affected before they were sufficiently heat-adapted to avoid attendant increases in deaths and illness." theguardian.com/environment/….