Northern China’s dry summer will be gone as climate change hits hard: study

Heat stress will become a fact of life across the country by the end of the century, with the north to see the biggest change, scientists warn

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By the end of the century, scientists predict rising temperatures plus rising humidity will see heat stress become a fact of life across large parts of China. Photo: AP

Published: 8:00am, 22 Jun 2024

Widespread heat stress will be felt by most of China’s population by the end of the century due to climate change, with the north of the country expected to be hit hardest, a study has found.

While the whole country has experienced rising heat and humidity over the last few decades, a team of researchers from China and the US found that the rates at which it has occurred differed in the north and south of China due to atmospheric features.

“The acceleration of wet bulb temperature increases in northern China challenges the conventional understanding of China’s regional summer climates, which historically categorised the south as hot and humid and the north as dry,” the team wrote in a paper published in peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications last month.

Wet bulb temperature is a measurement used to characterise extreme heat events that combines dry air temperature with humidity, which has a human health threshold of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), the team wrote in the paper.

“The wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached under current ambient conditions by the evaporation of water only,” said Wang Fan, co-author of the paper and a PhD candidate at Baptist University in Hong Kong and visiting student at Harvard.

Wang said that the higher the actual water vapour pressure – or amount of water vapour in a volume of air – the harder it was for water to evaporate.