This summer's extraordinary heat is but a preview of what's to come: Humidity not only makes daytime highs more miserable, it extends the hotness through the night.
Meanwhile in California, Gershunov’s research has confirmed that heat waves are. “It's not just more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting heat waves, like is the case all over the world with the warming climate,” says Gershunov. “Here, the heat waves are also changing flavor. They're becoming more expressed disproportionately in nighttime temperatures. It turns out it's because of humidity, and that's related to the warming of the ocean.
If you’re in a desert and suffering days of 110-plus-degree heat, you can at least look forward to those temperatures coming down at night, as the landscape sheds built-up heat. But when it’s humid, the atmosphere stubbornly holds onto that heat. “With more and more humidity, more people will be impacted during the night. And I don’t think we’re ready at all for that,” says Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at the UC San Diego.
The more humid it gets, the harder it is for water to evaporate off the body and the less effective sweating becomes. “If that’s not effective, the only way is to have more and more exchange between the blood and the skin,” says Benmarhnia. “To do that, our body sends more blood, faster and faster.” That’s why skin flushes if it’s hot out—the body is trying to expel heat via the water in the blood. That means blood is diverted from vital organs to the skin, a sort of physiological panic that’s especially dangerous for people with cardiovascular disease. “But if it's not effective, we just waste a lot of energy, and our circulation system is going to be overwhelmed and lead to very severe complications,” says Benmarhnia.
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