Another glimpse of how profoundly climate change will reshape Middle Earth

When laboring outside is just plain dangerous across lower latitudes

Hat tip to Bruce Whitehill (I misspelled him as Whitehall in my email so correcting here), my favorite water expert out of Sydney. He consistently counsels me on science, keeping me straight.

The driving article here is a study: Impacts of warming on outdoor worker well-being in the tropics and adaptation options.

From the summary:

Over a billion outdoor workers live in the tropics, where nearly a fifth of all hours in the year are hot and humid enough to exceed recommended safety thresholds for workers conducting heavy labor. Reviews have focused on heat impacts on worker health, well-being, and productivity, but synthesis on how to increase resilience to heat for outdoor workers is lacking.

Billion workers likely indicates a wider population of about three billion, which is a number you see a lot when it comes to Middle Earth populations coming under extreme duress from climate change, so that tracks.

But see the usual lack of knowledge, which this study tackles: we focus on near term impact (in addition to mitigation of climate change in general) but no so much on how we must adapt. So we’re still in discovery mode, which drives mitigation mode, and yet we need to simply embrace this oncoming reality and focus so much more on adaptation.

And now, that’s not climate defeatism but a human-centric grand strategy.