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Persian Gulf Temperatures May Be At the Edge of Human Tolerance In 30 Years (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to a new climate study the Persian Gulf may become so hot and humid in the next 30 years that it will reach the threshold of human survivability. Ars reports: "Existing climate models have shown that a global temperature increase to the threshold of human survivability would be reached in some regions of the globe at a point in the distant future. However, a new paper published by Jeremy Pal and Elfatih Eltahir in Nature Climate Change presents evidence that this deadly combination of heat and humidity increases could occur in the Persian Gulf much earlier than previously anticipated."

9 of 488 comments (clear)

  1. *POP* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Did you hear that? That was the Dubai housing bubble that burst.. :-)

  2. Re:I can tolerate a really hot hottub by reboot246 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You should try living in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, or Florida during the Summer. The heat and humidity combine to make it stiflingly hot, so much so that you practically have to swim instead of walk. You sweat just standing in the shade, but the sweat can't cool you off because of the high humidity.

    Yet people do live there and surprisingly do well. In fact, more and more people are moving there, especially Yankees moving south to retire. Sometimes I wish air conditioning had never been invented!

  3. Missing the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It's just not survivable long term. This isn't 'the old and the weak might be in danger', it's 'you will die'.

    Yes, technology will keep you alive short term.

    A/C fails, you all die.
    Water supply fails, you all die.
    Power fails, you all die.
    You have to leave town in a hurry, you all die. Look at how many people in that region are in refugee camps - all dead.
    Can't grow food - O.K. import it. Ships late, you all die.

    When they are talking about unihabitable they mean in. And the ground temperature thing, well bad news, it's average temperature, days are 50c, nights 30c, average is 40c, still unsurvivable.

    This is NOT a problem technology will solve.

  4. Re:The general consensus amongst many Americans by moehoward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, we already did enjoy nice bottles of English wine. In the medieval warming period, vineyards were all over northern England. Today, many street names still have names of grape varieties as a result of those times.

    Oh, crap. We can't talk about that. Nevermind.

    --
    "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
  5. Did they have a choice? by evanh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Refusing to sell the oil certainly didn't work out too well for them either.

  6. Re:I can tolerate a really hot hottub by sumdumass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've seen more intense hate coming from supposedly educated people like you than i have from southerners as a whole. I think your worldview is skewed by hate to some degree.

  7. Re:I suppose by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't what planets WWII you have been reading about but I have news for you. While we certainly did fight a total war targeting civilian sites with industrial applications like factories etc we most certainly did not target hospitals and civilian food stocks (with some notable exceptions). We did hit many of these things because bombing with WWII technology had about a 24% accuracy. The British actually counted success has hitting the correct city, at least for night raids. Hitting them and targeting them are not however the same thing.

    When occupying territories we did usually install our own safety force and disarm local government employees. We did however in many case leave local governments and civil machinery intact for administrative purposes. We certainly did not inflict maximum death anywhere after the surrender or withdraw of military forces in the area. Oh and we hung around and rebuilt the place when we were done.

    The problem in the middle east is that there isn't any working civil machinery and what of there is antithetical to our deeply held beliefs about justice and freedom among other things. I don't agree with your read of WWII at all. I would suggest occupied Germany isn't a good analog for anything having to do with post invasion strategy in the middle east. Where I can agree with you is about the need to occupy the territory, if you are going to invade. I would still argue that we should simply not accept refugees and invest all the money we would otherwise spend invading and occupying into simply securing our boarders and making damn sure we know everything there is to know about anyone we are permitting to enter instead but that is another discussion.

    What is needed in the middle east if you are going to invade is a British colonial style system. We need to bring in our own civil infrastructure and system of law. That needs to be setup as superlative to any existing civil infrastructure, but we should leave whatever does exist intact as long as its complicit and willing to operate as our client. We need to spend 20 or 30 years ensuring that people who get with our program enjoy comfort and success and people who don't are pushed to the margins. That is how you change a culture, slowly and by making it apparent clinging to the old ways means being a nobody.

    --
    Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
  8. Re:Whatever. by ArsonSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And here is a huge problem, disagree with the solution and you are a "denialist."

    --
    Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  9. Re:So fuckin' what by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Without the discoveries of the Arabs and Africans before them our current civilization would be nothing.

    Arabs were a conduit for discoveries made in China and India, but they made no significant discoveries themselves. By burning some of the ancient world's greatest libraries, they likely destroyed far more knowledge than they created. Some great discoveries were made in pre-Islamic North Africa while it was part of the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations, but it is silly to call those "African" when at the time it was part of European civilization. Can you name a single scientific discovery made in sub-Saharan Africa?