A16 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
yette opened in a shopping mall
that features stylish air-condi-
tioning grates in the broad cob-
blestone walkways outside. Each
of the vents, about 1 by 6 feet, h as
a decorative design. Many of
them hug the outside of build-
ings, cooling off window shop-
pers looking at expensive fash-
ions. 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
Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius), Aida
Adi Baziac, an interior designer,
was sharing 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 nega-
tively.”
But it allows them to enjoy the
outdoors in the summer, she
added. “We can sit outside in an
air-conditioned, 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, ex-
ecutive director of Arab Youth
Climate Movement Qatar, said:
“That’s about survival. It’s too
hot. That’s the reality.”
Qatar already has the distinc-
tion of being the largest per
capita emitter of greenhouse g as-
es, 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 mis-
leading. Qatar’s huge exports of
liquefied natural gas (LNG) 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 60 per-
cent of the country’s electricity is
used for cooling. By contrast, air
conditioning accounts for barely
15 percent of U. S. electricity de-
mand and less than 10 percent of
China’s or India’s.
And higher temperatures
combined with a growing popu-
lation will mean greater energy
demand, primarily for fossil
fuels. While native Qataris num-
ber r oughly 300,000, t he number
of foreign workers in Qatar has
grown by a million just in the
past decade, pushing the popula-
tion to 2.7 million.
Qatar is adding natural gas
capacity faster than it’s adding
solar — and at low prices. The
country’s new dairy farm, a natu-
ral candidate for solar power,
uses 35 megawatts from the
natural-gas-fired grid to keep the
cows cool enough to survive the
SEE QATAR ON Agreat effect at home, where
11 winners of the prestigious
Pritzker Architecture Prize have
built striking high-rises and sta-
diums. The result is a strange
combination of avant-garde ar-
chitecture, oil wealth, Islamic
conservatism, shopping malls
and climate change that Qatari
American artist Sophia al-Maria
has dubbed “Gulf Futurism.”
“With the coming global envi-
ronmental collapse, to live com-
pletely indoors is like, the only
way we’ll be able to survive. The
Gulf’s a prophecy of what’s to
come,” s he said in an interview in
Dazed Digital, an online maga-
zine covering fashion and cul-
ture.
So far, Qatar has maintained
outdoor life through a vast ex-
pansion of outdoor a ir c ondition-
ing. In the restored Souq Waqif
market, a maze of shops, restau-
rants and small hotels, three- to
four-foot-high 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 possi-
ble in a place where overnight
low temperatures in summer
rarely dip below 90 degrees.
Recently, the luxury French
department store Galeries Lafa-utes and drink two bottles of
water an hour. People doing
heavy work in the fire depart-
ment or aircraft repair may work
for only 10 minutes at a time,
followed by 50 minutes of rest,
according to a spokesman for the
379th Air Expeditionary Wing.
In early July, Qatar’s Civil
Defense Command warned
against doing outdoor work be-
tween 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., putting
gas cylinders in the sun, turning
on water heaters, completely fill-
ing fuel tanks or car tires, or
needlessly running the air condi-
tioner. It urged people to drink
plenty of fluids — and to beware
of snakes and scorpions.‘Expect Amazing’
For now, managing climate
change in a place like Qatar,
whose slogan for the World Cup
is “Expect Amazing,” i s primarily
a matter of money. A nd Q atar has
plenty. Its sovereign wealth fund
is worth about $320 billion.
A few of its stakes include
Harrods department store, Lon-
don’s gigantic Canary Wharf, the
Paris Saint-Germain soccer club,
the CityCenterDC office and resi-
dential development and a
10 percent stake in the Empire
State Building.
Qatar has used its riches tochemist at the Max Planck Insti-
tute for Chemistry in Germany
who is an expert on Middle East
climate.
That became abundantly clear
in late September, as Doha host-
ed the 2019 World Athletics
Championships. It moved the
start time for the women’s mara-
thon 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 Fahr-
enheit (32.2 Celsius) and 28 of
the 68 starters failed to finish,
some taken off in wheelchairs.
Workers are particularly 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 mi-
grants 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 sta-
tioned at al-Udeid Air Base. Per-
sonnel conducting patrols or
aircraft maintenance work for
20 minutes, then rest for 40 min-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.
By the time average global
warming hits 2 degrees Celsius,
Qatar’s t emperatures w ould s oar,
said Mohammed Ayoub, senior
research director at the Qatar
Environment and Energy Re-
search Institute. In rapidly grow-
ing urban areas throughout the
Middle East, some predict cities
could become uninhabitable.
“We’re talking about 4 to 6 de-
grees Celsius (7.2 to 10.8 Fahren-
heit) increase in an area that
already experiences high tem-
peratures,” Ayoub said. “So, what
we’re looking at more is a ques-
tion 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 rela-
tive humidity is close to 100 per-
cent, you can die from the heat
you produce yourself,” said
Jos Lelieveld, an atmosphericeven 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 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahr-
enheit) 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 1.5 degrees Celsius
(2.7 Fahrenheit).
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 tempera-
tures are also rising because
Qatar, slightly smaller than Con-
necticut, 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 50.4 degrees Celsius
(122.7 Fahrenheit).
“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 green-
house 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 gobs of money
and a little technology.
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. “If you turn off air
conditioners, it will be unbear-
able. You cannot function effec-
tively,” says Yousef al-Horr,
founder of the Gulf Organization
for Research and Development.
Ye t outdoor air conditioning is
part of a vicious cycle. Carbon
emissions create global warm-
ing, which creates the desire for
air conditioning, which creates
the need for burning fuels that
QATAR FROM A
Fueling a vicious cycle: Qatar’s attempt to stave off warming
PHOTOS BY SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: Solar panels dot the rooftops around a large air-conditioning building in heart of the Msheireb neighborhood of Doha, Qatar.
ABOVE: Construction workers near Lusail Stadium, which will host important World Cup games, wear headgear to ward off the sun.