Water stations handed out sponges dipped in ice-cold water. It moved the start time for the women’s marathon to midnight Sept. That became abundantly clear in late September, as Doha hosted the 2019 World Athletics Championships. “If it’s hot and humid and the relative humidity is close to 100 percent, you can die from the heat you produce yourself,” said Jos Lelieveld, an atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany who is an expert on Middle East climate. But when humidity is very high, evaporation slows or stops. The human body cools off when its sweat evaporates. The danger is acute in Qatar because of the Persian Gulf humidity. “So, what we’re looking at more is a question of how does this impact the health and productivity of the population.” “We’re talking about 4 to 6 degrees Celsius (7.2 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in an area that already experiences high temperatures,” Ayoub said. In rapidly growing urban areas throughout the Middle East, some predict cities could become uninhabitable. In Qatar, total cooling capacity is expected to nearly double from 2016 to 2030, according to the International District Cooling & Heating Conference.īy the time average global warming hits 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), Qatar’s temperatures would soar, said Mohammed Ayoub, senior research director at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute.
Carbon emissions create global warming, which creates the desire for air conditioning, which creates the need for burning fuels that emit more carbon dioxide. Yet outdoor air conditioning is part of a vicious cycle. Small vents push cool air at ankle level inside the stadium. You cannot function effectively,” says Yousef al-Horr, founder of the Gulf Organization for Research and Development. “If you turn off air conditioners, it will be unbearable. To survive the summer heat, Qatar not only air-conditions its soccer stadiums, but also the outdoors - in markets, along sidewalks, even at outdoor malls so people can window shop with a cool breeze. And it can be addressed, at least temporarily, with gobs of money and a little technology. While climate change inflicts suffering in the world’s poorest places from Somalia to Syria, from Guatemala to Bangladesh, in rich places such as the United States, Europe and Qatar global warming poses an engineering problem, not an existential one. “Changes there can help give us a sense of what the rest of the world can expect if we do not take action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.” “Qatar is one of the fastest warming areas of the world, at least outside of the Arctic,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate data scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit temperature analysis group. In a July 2010 heat wave, the temperature hit an all-time high of 50.4 degrees Celsius (122.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperatures are also rising because Qatar, slightly smaller than Connecticut, juts out from Saudi Arabia into the rapidly warming waters of the Persian Gulf. That’s because of the uneven nature of climate change as well as the surge in construction that drives local climate conditions around Doha, the capital. Over the past three decades, temperature increases in Qatar have been accelerating. The 2015 Paris climate summit said it would be better to keep temperatures "well below" that, ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The change in the World Cup date is a symptom of a larger problem - climate change.Īlready one of the hottest places on Earth, Qatar has seen average temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial times, the current international goal for limiting the damage of global warming. It is now scheduled for November, during Qatar's milder winter. Fears that the hundreds of thousands of soccer fans might wilt or even die while shuttling between stadiums and metros and hotels in the unforgiving summer heat prompted the decision to delay the World Cup by five months. Qatar, the world's leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, may be able to cool its stadiums, but it cannot cool the entire country. “I don’t need to cool the birds,” Ghani said. His breakthrough realization was that he had to cool only people, not the upper reaches of the stadium - a graceful structure designed by the famed Zaha Hadid Architects and inspired by traditional boats known as dhows. Ghani, an engineering professor at Qatar University, designed the system at Al Janoub, one of eight stadiums that the tiny but fabulously rich Qatar must get in shape for the 2022 World Cup.
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