Is Earth really getting too hot for people to survive?

Many countries have seen extremely hot weather lately, but in most of the inhabited world, it’s never going to get “too hot for people to live here,” especially in relatively dry climates. When it’s hot outside in dry places, our bodies can usually cool off by evaporating water and heat from our skin as sweat.

However, there are places where it occasionally gets dangerously hot and humid, especially where hot deserts are right next to the warm ocean. When the air is humid, sweat doesn’t evaporate as quickly, so sweating doesn’t cool us the way it does in drier environments.

In parts of the Middle East, Pakistan and India, summer heat waves can combine with humid air that blows off the sea, and this combination can be truly deadly. Hundreds of millions of people live in those regions, most without access to indoor air conditioning.

Is it climate change?

When people burn carbon—whether it’s coal in a power plant or gasoline in a vehicle—it creates carbon dioxide (CO2). This invisible gas builds up in the atmosphere and traps the sun’s warmth near the earth’s surface. The result is what we mean by “climate change.”

Every bit of coal, oil, or gas burned raises the temperature a little bit more. As temperatures rise, dangerously hot and humid weather has begun to spread to more places.

Areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas are increasingly at risk of dangerous hot and humid conditions in summer, as are heavily irrigated areas of the desert Southwest where water sprayed over farm fields adds moisture to the atmosphere.

Good news and bad 

There’s both bad and good news about climate change in the future. The bad news is that as long as we keep burning carbon, it will continue to get hotter and hotter.

The good news is that we can substitute clean energy, like solar and wind power, instead of burning carbon to power the products and services of modern life. In the past 15 years, tremendous progress has been made in making clean energy reliable and affordable, and almost every country on Earth has now agreed to stop climate change before it causes too much damage.

Just as our ancestors built better lives by switching from outhouses to indoor plumbing, we will avoid making our world unlivable by switching from coal, oil and gas to clean energy.

Scott Denning is a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.