Climate change: Inside the expedition to find out how humans can adapt to extreme heat

TRUDGING by sizzling, crimson sand is tough work, particularly in temperatures above 40°C (104°F). After about 40 minutes, I’m drenched, dehydrated and drained. I can’t think about doing this for 40 days, dragging all my gear behind me – together with 40 litres of water, sufficient for 5 days – on a two-wheeled trolley. However that’s precisely what the folks I’m travelling with have simply carried out.

I’m within the Nafud desert, an unlimited tract of sandy and rocky wilderness in northern Saudi Arabia, to expertise ranges of warmth that I’m not constructed to endure – and to satisfy 20 folks collaborating in an expedition referred to as Deep Local weather, devoted to understanding how people reply to excessive situations. “The thought is to review how human beings can adapt to a brand new form of setting,” says Christian Clot, the chief of the expedition and director of the Human Adaptation Institute in France.

Because the local weather warms, the problem is turning into more and more urgent. Even below essentially the most optimistic eventualities, the scorching warmth seen in southern Europe and throughout the US over the previous couple of months, with temperatures exceeding 40°C, will turn out to be the norm in lots of elements of the world.

Meaning the query of what occurs to our brains and our bodies, and the extent to which human physiology can address excessive warmth, issues for hundreds of thousands of individuals. “You’re going to see an ideal large swathe of very densely populated areas go as much as unprecedented temperatures that no person skilled in …