[Tee tiong huat]

Last summer, while Northern Hemisphere endured record-breaking heat, a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) generated a stir among scientists who study heat’s risks to health. Paper pointed out a startling disconnect between two camps of researchers on whether humidity makes hot weather more deadly.

Physiologists have found strong evidence that humidity matters: at a given temperature, more humidity makes it harder for the body to maintain a safe core temperature & ward off heat stroke. Epidemiologists, by contrast, have concluded that temperature alone accurately predicts heat-related death rates; adding humidity does little to improve their predictions?.

Before the EHP paper, “No one had directly said: ‘Look, these two fields are going along in parallel with entirely different conclusions,’” says its first author, climate scientist Jane Baldwin of the University of California, Irvine, who highlighted the conundrum at a Columbia University workshop on extreme heat last month. “And if this continues, this could be a real problem for projecting impacts of climate change.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/...re-divided