Can’t stand the heat
Facing unbearable temperatures, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors
DOHA, Qatar — It was 116 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade outside the new Al Janoub soccer stadium, and the air felt to airconditioning expert Saud Ghani as if God had pointed “a giant hair dryer” at Qatar.
Yet inside the open-air stadium, a cool breeze was blowing. Beneath each of the 40,000 seats, small grates adorned with Arabic-style patterns were pushing out cool air at ankle level. And since cool air sinks, waves of it rolled gently down to the grassy playing field. Vents the size of soccer balls fed more cold air onto the field.
Ghani, an engineering professor at Qatar University, designed the system at Al Janoub, one of eight stadiums that the tiny but rich Qatar must get in shape for the 2022 World Cup. His breakthrough realization was that he had to cool only people, not the upper reaches of the stadium — a graceful structure designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and inspired by traditional boats known as dhows.
“I don’t need to cool the birds,” Ghani said.
Qatar, the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, may be able to cool its stadiums, but it cannot cool the entire country. 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. It is now scheduled for November, during Qatar’s milder winter.
The change in the World Cup date is a symptom of a larger problem — climate change.
Already one of the hottest places on Earth, Qatar has seen average temperatures rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial times, the current international goal for limiting the damage of global warming. The 2015 Paris climate summit said it would be better to keep temperatures “well below” that, ideally to no more than 2.7 degrees.
Over the past three decades, temperature increases in Qatar have been accelerating. 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. 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.
In a July 2010 heat wave, the temperature hit an all-time high of 122.7 degrees.
“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. “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.”
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. And it can be addressed, at least temporarily, with a lot of money and a little technology
To survive the summer heat, Qatar air-conditions not only its soccer stadiums, but also the outdoors — in markets, along sidewalks, even at outdoor malls so people can window shop with a cool breeze.
“If you turn off air conditioners, it will be unbearable. You cannot function effectively,” said Yousef al-Horr, founder of the Gulf Organization for Research and Development.
Yet outdoor air conditioning is part of a vicious cycle. Carbon emissions create global warming, which creates the desire for air conditioning, which creates the need for burning fuels that emit more carbon dioxide. In Qatar, total cooling capacity is expected to nearly double from 2016 to 2030, according to the International District Cooling & Heating Conference. And it’s going to get hotter. Bythe time average global warming hits 3.6 degrees, Qatar’s temperatures would soar, said Mohammed Ayoub, senior research director at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute. In rapidly growing urban areas throughout the Middle East, some predict cities could become uninhabitable.
“We’re talking about a (7.2 to 10.8 degrees) increase in an area that already experiences high temperatures,” Ayoub said. “So, what we’re looking at more is a question of how does this impact the health and productivity of the population.”
The danger is acute in Qatar because of the Persian Gulf humidity. The human body cools off when its sweat evaporates. But when humidity is very high, evaporation slows or stops.
“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.
That became clear in late September, as Doha hosted the 2019 World Athletics Championships. It moved the start time for the women’s marathon to midnight Sept. 28. Water stations handed out sponges dipped in ice-cold water. First-aid responders outnumbered the contestants. But temperatures hovered around 90 degrees and 28 of the 68 starters failed to finish, some taken off in wheelchairs.
A lot of employees are at risk. A German television report alleged hundreds of deaths among foreign workers in Qatar in recent years, prompting new limits on outdoor work. A July article in the journal Cardiology said that 200 of 571 fatal cardiac problems among Nepalese migrants working there were caused by “severe heat stress” and could have been avoided.
The U.S. Air Force calls very hot days “black flag days” and limits exposure of troops stationed at al-Udeid Air Base. Personnel conducting patrols or aircraft maintenance work for 20 minutes, then rest for 40 minutes and drink two bottles of water an hour. People doing heavy work in the fire departmentoraircraft repair mayworkfor only 10 minutes at a time, followed by 50 minutes of rest, according to a spokesman for the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing.
For now, managing climate change in a place like Qatar, whose slogan for the World Cupis “Expect Amazing,” is primarily a matter of money.
And Qatar has plenty. Its sovereign wealth fund is worth about $320 billion. A few of its stakes include Harrods department store, London’s gigantic Canary Wharf, the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club, the CityCenterDC office and residential development, and a 10 percent stake in the Empire State Building.
Qatar has used its riches to great effect at home, where 11 winners of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize have built striking high-rises and stadiums. The result is a strange combination of avantgarde architecture, oil wealth, Islamic conservatism, shopping malls and climate change that Qatari American artist Sophia al-Maria has dubbed “Gulf Futurism.”
“With the coming global environmental collapse, to live completely indoors is like, the only way we’ll be able to survive. The Gulf’s a prophecy of what’s to come,” she said in an interview in Dazed Digital, an online magazine covering fashion and culture.
So far, Qatar has maintained outdoor life through a vast expansion of outdoor air conditioning. In the restored Souq Waqif market, a maze of shops, restaurants and small hotels, small air-conditioning units blow cool air onto cafe customers. At a cost of $80 to $250 each depending on the quality, they are the only things that make outdoor dining possible in a place where overnight low temperatures in summer rarely dip below 90 degrees.
Recently, the luxury French department store Galeries Lafayette opened in a shopping mall that features stylish air-conditioning grates in the broad cobblestone walkways outside. Each of the vents, about 1 by 6 feet, has a decorative design. Many of them hug the outside of buildings, cooling off window shoppers looking at expensive fashions. Though nearly deserted in the heat, by 5 p.m. some people begin to emerge to sit outside places like Cafe Pouchkine.
One recent afternoon as the temperature eased to 110 degrees, Aida Adi Baziac, an interior designer, wassharing iced lattes with a friend. They had just finished work and were perched over a cooling grate at an outdoor table at Joe’s Cafe.
“I would say it’s wasteful,” Adi Baziac said. “I know how it impacts the environment negatively.”
But it allows them to enjoy the outdoors in the summer, she added. “We can sit outside in an airconditioned, controlled area, and we sit and mix and mingle.”
Even Qatar’s small band of climate activists sympathize. Asked about the outdoor air conditioners, Neeshad Shafi, executive director of Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar, said, “That’s about survival. It’s too hot. That’s the reality.”
Qatar already has the distinction of being the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the World Bank — nearly three times as much as the United States and almost six times as much as China.
Many Qataris believe that the
World Bank’s accounting is misleading. Qatar’s huge exports of liquefied natural gas are burned by distant customers across the globe. The bank’s methodology charges Qatar for those emissions, rather than its fossil-fuel-gobbling customers.
Even so, Qatar emits a lot of greenhouse gases. About 60percent of the country’s electricity is used for cooling. By contrast, air conditioning accounts for barely 15 percent of U.S. electricity demand and less than 10 percent of China’s or India’s.
In the Middle East, concerns are rising that the combination of heat and humidity will one day exceed the capacity of humans to tolerate the outdoors. In such conditions, air conditioning would no longer be a convenience; it would be essential to survival.
“I often get asked: ‘ Can we reverse whatever is happening in the climate?’ ” said Abdulla alMannai, director of the Qatar Meteorology Department. “I ask: Can you turn off air conditioning and refrigeration and stop using cars? Nobody will say yes.”
Late last year, the government announced that the World Cup would be carbon neutral. That means that for every mile flown from overseas, for every mile driven between venues, for every factory that produced construction materi-. als, and for every air conditioner running overtime, there should be an offsetting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Qatar’s government says the carbon emissions will be smaller than those at other World Cup venues where stadiums were far apart or even spread across different countries. The distance between Qatar’s stadiums is never more than 35 miles and as close as three. Five of the eight stadiums will be connected to new metro lines still under construction. Both could trim spectators’ global travel, which accounted for about 57 percent of the carbon emissions at the games in Russia.
Shafi, the climate activist and environmental engineer, said that the government is undercounting the cost of the World Cup, making it easier to become carbon neutral. Manybig ticket infrastructure items are not being counted as World Cup projects because they are considered to be part of the country’s preexisting 2030 building plan, he said.
The government recently unveiled a plan to plant 1 million trees in Qatar. Shafi calls it “unrealistic,” and said, “10 saplings are planted by VIPs and then they go home.”
Nevertheless, the committee is pushing ahead. It says it will rebuild one stadium using construction waste for 88 percent of its materials. Another will be made of shipping containers and modular steel components so it can be broken down and sent to a country that needs stadiums more than Qatar will after the games. Thousands of seats at other stadiums can be relocated, too.
“We don’t want to be left with white elephants,” said the committee official.
“They will be very easy to undo and take apart,” Ghani said. “Like Lego.”