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When W. Larry Kenney, professor of physiology at Pennsylvania State University, began investigating how extreme heat harms humans, his research focused on workers at the disaster-affected Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, where temperatures were as high as 165 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the years that followed, Dr. Kenney looked at how heat stress affects a range of people in intense environments: football players, soldiers in protective suits, distance runners in the Sahara.

Recently, however, his research has focused on a more mundane subject: ordinary people. Doing everyday things. As climate change scorches the planet.

Heat and extreme temperature warnings were in effect in most of the eastern interior of the United States on Monday. a record-breaking hot weekend in the southwest of the country. Over the next few days, the temperature will move further northeast, into the upper Mississippi Valley, the western Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley, according to the National Weather Service.

With severe heatwaves now affecting many parts of the world with startling regularity, scientists are investigating how life in a warmer world could make us sick and kill us. The goal is to better understand how many more people will be affected by heat-related ailments, and how often and how severe their pain will be. And to understand how to better protect the most vulnerable.

One thing is for sure, scientists say: The heat waves of the past two decades are not good predictors of the risks we will face in the coming decades. The link between greenhouse gas emissions and sweltering temperatures is already so clear, some researchers say Trying to determine whether today’s most extreme heatwaves occurred two centuries ago, before humans started warming the planet, may be pointless. None of them could.

Climate scientist Matthew Huber of Purdue University said that if global warming is not slowed, the hottest heatwave many people have experienced will become the new summer norm. “This won’t be something you can escape from.”

Dr. What’s more difficult for scientists is how these climatic changes will affect human health and well-being on a large scale, especially in developing countries where large numbers of people are already suffering but good data is scarce, Huber said. . Heat stress is the product of many factors, including humidity, sun, wind, hydration, clothing, physical fitness, and causes such a variety of harms that future effects can be difficult to project with any precision.

Dr. There isn’t enough work on living full-time in a hotter world, either, Huber said, rather than experiencing the occasional scorching summer. “We don’t know what the long-term consequences are of getting up every day, working three hours in near-fatal heat, sweating like crazy, and then coming home,” he said.

The growing urgency of these problems has led to Dr. It attracts researchers like Kenney. For a recent study, he and his colleagues placed young, healthy men and women in specially designed rooms where they pedaled a low-intensity exercise bike. Then the researchers turned the heat and humidity.

They found that their subjects began to overheat dangerously at much lower “wet-bulb” temperatures (a measure that describes both heat and fogging) than they expected based on previous theoretical predictions of climate scientists.

Effectively, in steam bath conditions, our body absorbs heat from the environment faster than we can sweat to cool ourselves. Dr. “Unfortunately for humans, we’re not pumping a lot of sweat to keep up,” Kenney said.

Heat is climate change in its most devastating form, destroying not only landscapes, ecosystems and infrastructure, but also the depths of individual human bodies.

Heat’s victims are often die alone, in their own homes. Apart from heatstroke, it can cause cardiovascular collapse and kidney failure. It harms our organs and cells, even our bodies. DNA. The damage increases exponentially in the very old and very young, in people with high blood pressure and asthma. multiple sclerosis and other conditions.

When the mercury is high, we are not as effective at work. Our thinking and motor functions are impaired. Extreme heat is also associated with more. crimeanxiety, depression and suicide.

The toll on the body can be strikingly personal. George Havenith, director of the Environmental Ergonomics Research Center at Loughborough University in England, recalled an experiment he conducted with multiple subjects years ago. They wore the same clothes and did the same job for one hour at 95 degrees Celsius and 80 percent humidity. But in the end, their body temperature ranged from 100 degrees to 102.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“A lot of the work we do is try to understand why a person is on one side of the spectrum and the other on the other side,” he said.

Vidhya Venugopal, a professor of environmental health at Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, India, has spent years researching what heat does to workers in India’s steel mills, car factories and brick kilns. Many suffer from kidney stones caused by severe dehydration.

An encounter ten years ago remained with him. He met a steelworker who has been working 8-12 hours a day next to a furnace for 20 years. When asked how old he was, he said 38-40.

He was sure he had misunderstood. His hair was half white. His face had shrunk. She didn’t look younger than 55.

So she asked how old her child was and how old she was when she got married. Mathematics checked.

Dr. “It was a turning point for us,” Venugopal said. “That’s when we started thinking, heat ages people.”

Adelaide M. Lusambili, a researcher at Aga Khan University in Kenya, studies the effects of temperature on pregnant women and newborns in Kilifi County on the Kenyan coast. In communities there, women bring water for their families, which can mean long hours of walking in the sun, even while pregnant. Studies have shown that heat exposure is linked to preterm births and low-weight babies.

Dr. Lusambili said the most heartbreaking stories are of women suffering after childbirth. Some have carried 1-day-old babies long distances on their backs, causing the babies to develop blisters on their bodies and mouths, making breastfeeding difficult.

He said it was all enough for him to wonder if climate change was reversing Africa’s progress in reducing neonatal and child mortality.

Considering how many people don’t have access to air conditioners, it consumes air conditioners, making the planet hotter. large amount of electricitySocieties need to find more sustainable defenses, said Ollie Jay, professor of heat and health at the University of Sydney.

Dr. Jay studied the body’s responses to sitting near a person. electric fanwearing wet clothes and sponge down with water. Recreated it for a project. Bangladeshi garment factory in his lab to test low-cost ways to keep workers safe, including green roofs, electric fans, and scheduled water breaks.

People have the ability to adapt to hot environments. Our heart rate drops; More blood is pumped with each beat. More sweat glands are activated. But scientists primarily understand how our bodies adapt to heat in controlled laboratory environments, not in the real world where many people can get in and out of air-conditioned homes and cars, Dr. jay.

Doing exactly this to his subjects, Dr. To trigger such changes, even in the lab, requires subjecting people to hours of uncomfortable exertion over weeks, Jay said.

“It’s not particularly pleasant,” he said. Not a very practical solution for living in a suffocating future or an increasingly overwhelming present for people in some places. Deeper changes in the body’s adaptability will only occur on the timescale of human evolution.

Dr. When asked about his research on Indian workers, Venugopal replied, “India is a hot country, so what’s the point?”

No one asks how important a fever is, but heatstroke puts the body in a similar state.

“This is human physiology,” said Dr. venugopal “You can’t change that.”