So, you think sea-level rise will be our worst global warming problem? SUCKER!
The Uninhabitable Earth
By David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine
Over the past few decades, the term Anthropocene has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination a name given to the geologic era we live in now, and a way to signal that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep history by human intervention. One problem with the term is that it implies a conquest of nature (and even echoes the biblical dominion). And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term global warming, means when he calls the planet an angry beast. You could also go with war machine. Each day we arm it more.
Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planets equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when its over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.
Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the worlds population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly wont get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees. The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as its swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.
Actually, were about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planets hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans. The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.
It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
Shout-out to DUer turbinetree, who also has a post concerning Wallace-Wells' article here, though he came to it through a different source.
The piece is very long, but believe me, if you have children or grandchildren, read it! And BE Alarmed! Be scared shitless! That's the ONLY way to regard the situation!
Warpy
(111,254 posts)After all, Kalahari Bushmen routinely hunt in heat and humidity and manage to sweat their body temperature down to normal.
No, the worst part will be that a lot of crops we depend on for food will have their growing areas sharply restrcted. Gonna be a hungry few hundred years, folks unless vulcanism picks up to cool things down.
BigmanPigman
(51,590 posts)Overpopulation has to be addressed aggressively by all countries (religion is no excuse anymore).
MontanaMama
(23,313 posts)The Duggar's will not subscribe to this logic... Birthin' babies for jeezus!
pansypoo53219
(20,974 posts)Hestia
(3,818 posts)a novel about it - Cujo - the region east of the Rockies was under a blanket of heat until October. That was the real beginning and we do not have the machinery or the population like we do today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_heat_wave
pansypoo53219
(20,974 posts)Doug the Dem
(1,297 posts)pansypoo53219
(20,974 posts)Doug the Dem
(1,297 posts)Message received! Both times!
Moral Compass
(1,520 posts)As a species we are suddenly at an inflection point.
As unattractive as it is if we are to survive we will be forced to attempt global climate engineering.
We've already performed accidental climate engineering--now we will be forced to do it deliberately to compensate for the accidental engineering.
There will, inevitably, be unintended consequences. But the alternative is to passively cook.
hatrack
(59,584 posts).
Moral Compass
(1,520 posts)If you'd read the post you would realize that I've already addressed that...
It is a very complex topic, but there are things we could do to reflect off some of the solar radiation, and absorb carbon dioxide (carbon sequestration).
Ultimately I don't think we'll have a choice but to try to engineer compensating climate solutions.
hatrack
(59,584 posts)Last edited Wed Jul 12, 2017, 11:49 PM - Edit history (1)
Simpler solutions are at hand, of course:
1. Stop driving so much
2. Stop eating so much
3. Stop having so much
4. Stop fucking so much
5. Stop believing our own PR
But since changing human behavior will never, ever, ever, ever be tried in a million years, let alone happen, let's try out some shiny new technologies.
Sulfate aerosol injection (which will do zero for ocean acidification) and which may lead to, as you put it, unintended consequences, like changes in crop weather, alterations in cloud formations and rainfall. If it worked, it would also give rich nations a permanent whip hand over the poor global majority, since they would be the ones paying for and implementing the aerosol technology ("Nice country you got there - wouldn't want anything to happen to your harvest, so support our trade treaty, m'kay?";
Carbon sequestration (which could best be leveraged by, oh, I don't know, LEAVING EXISTING FORESTS THE FUCK ALONE, but I digress), and assumes that either bio-sequestration will use trees/biological systems that can survive a rapidly destabilizing climate while avoiding conversion to plywood, or that a global system of (undefined) carbon-sucking machines will vacuum a minimum of 6 billion tons/year from the atmosphere, a capacity which must always increase in tandem with our economic growth;
Reefs, fisheries and oceans - not sure how that would work here - maybe putting giant cooling coils in coral reefs? Dumping vast quantities of lime in the oceans to fight acidification? Scooping up algae and jellyfish blooms with nets? Oh, almost forgot to mention that since oxygen content drops as ocean temperatures increase, it might be a little late in terms of actually saving species we've grown accustomed to eating.
Ocean Warming - Lots more heat here than in the atmosphere, as you know, so much more thermal inertia to deal with. All the way back in 2014, ocean sunfish were confirmed in Prince William Sound, skipjack tuna caught off Yakutat Bay and Humboldt Squid off Sitka. All tropical species, all found in Alaskan waters, but no worries- we've got . . . technology! Maybe tow some icebergs to the right spots?