Global Warming

A mechanical engineer at Qatar University used giant tanks of cold water to create a cooling system in one of the hottest places on the planet.DOHA, Qatar — Saud Ghani knows cool.In his air-conditioned Porsche, he pulled up to a shady spot at Qatar University. He entered one of the many laboratories in the engineering department where he studies thermal dynamics — mainly, how to keep people comfortable in a warming world.Even his title is cool: professor and chair of air conditioning.The university’s campus was empty because the semester had been suspended for the World Cup. The temperature outside was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The indoor labs were noticeably chilly.This was the quiet epicenter of what became a global story of audacity. This is where Ghani and his associates oversaw the design of systems that dared to air-condition the eight outdoor World Cup stadiums in and around Doha, one of the world’s hottest big cities.“People think, oh, you have too much money and you’re just pumping cold air,” Ghani said. “That is not it at all. But what can you do? If people want to criticize from the sideline, I think that’s an oversight. But if they want to learn, they are 100 percent welcome here.”So Ghani set off on a private tour.He wanted to show the scaled replicas of each stadium, most of them tweaked during the design stages — at Ghani’s behest and to the architects’ chagrin — to better keep out hot air. He wanted to show the garage-sized wind tunnel and smoke and laser lights used to examine how air would circulate through each design. He wanted to show the miniature model of bleachers, with little hollow humans made on a 3-D printer and steadily injected with warm water — at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — to simulate body temperatures, and where infrared cameras could tell which of the fake people were too warm or too cool.“I want people to feel neutral,” Ghani said. “I don’t want them to feel cold. I don’t want them to feel warm. It’s about perception. It’s not just temperature. But how do they feel?”This Goldilocksian pursuit raised plenty of questions. Not the least of them are two big ones:Did this man, in these labs and at this World Cup, just alter the future of stadium design in a warming world?Could open-air stadiums that keep athletes and spectators comfortable at room temperature, no matter the heat of the day, exist?Ghani shrugged off the first one. He said yes to the second.A City Humming With CoolSaud Ghani, center, explaining the cooling system to visiting journalists in June. Ghani has said he wants people to feel “neutral,” neither warm nor cold.Tasneem Alsultan for The New York TimesGhani, 52, is from Sudan and got his doctorate in mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham in England. Married with three children, he came to teach at Qatar University in 2009, just as the country was preparing its long-shot bid for the World Cup.One day he got a call from Qatar’s highest levels: Can you design a system that keeps people cool, even in an outdoor stadium, even in Doha, even in the summer? The bid’s success, or failure, might rest on it.Sure, Ghani said.In 2010, Qatar won the right to host this year’s tournament, for reasons that have to do with corruption more than thermal dynamics.In 2015, acknowledging that scorching temperatures, in and out of stadiums, could be both miserable and dangerous, FIFA moved the competition from its traditional summer dates to late fall. The change may have made Ghani’s mission easier, with daytime temperatures in the 80s and 90s instead of 110 or higher, but he insisted that it did not matter.These eight stadiums of various sizes and designs were not just for the World Cup. One will be dismantled, but seven will be used, year-round: for big events, for club teams, for university athletics, maybe even as part of a bid for the Olympics. (Such promises for everyday uses can go unfulfilled, as the ghost venues of past Games attest.)In Qatar, the heat for nine months of the year is almost unbearable, Ghani said. And it is not going to get better.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More