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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."
The human body needs periods of cool temperatures to recover from being in the heat. The effects are also more severe as the heat increases and the humidity reduces the ability of the body to cool itself. When it's very humid, temperatures don't fall as much as night, which prevents the body from recovering during that period. Humans can tolerate periods of hot and even humid conditions, provided they also get time to cool off and recover. The excessive heat and warm nights due to the humidity are a bad combination. While you can tolerate a really hot bathtub, you certainly wouldn't survive being in one all the time.
...and that Angels exist, and Elvis can get your wash whiter with this one weird trick.
Science is INTERESTING, chaos theory even more so, and it's easy to see the changes if you know what to look for. The increased energy in the system is already turning all of weather to a parade of freak outliers and unpredictable quirky events that occasionally spike off the charts, and that's exactly in line with the 'chaotic system' model.
I wouldn't have called the 'Earth turning to an alien planet that doesn't support life' thing in thirty years, but if you specify it's to happen in particular (unusual areas) then I'll believe that. Some areas of the planet are already close to uninhabitable and it doesn't take that much to push 'em over the brink. The thing to watch for is not places being rendered uninhabitable by weather extremes, it's more about masses of people/animals displaced because the change is a new thing that nobody's prepared for.
You can probably, right now, buy a 40-year lease on land that might as well be the Moon in 40 years. If you want a real picture of the plausibility of man-made global climate change, don't check scientists or Al Gore, consult actuaries and insurance companies. Pretty sure you'll find they're believers, because they have to actually pay for it if they choose wrong.
It doesn't matter. By this time the entire population of the middle east will have "moved" to Europe.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Make sh*tloads of money selling fossil fuels to the rest of the world...
Parlay that money, and valuable commodity, into unwarranted global influence...
Have homeland rendered uninhabitable by the consequence of burning said fossil fuels...
Take it on the bright side, we will finally be able to enjoy a nice bottle of English wine.
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!
..thats one way of solving conflict in the Middle East
You mean one way of causing the conflict in the middle east to escalate and start spreading outward.
Right... and if anybody thinks the Middle-East->Balkans->Europe or S-America->Mexico->USA migration is a problem now try to imagine what it will be like when large of South America become deforested and the Middle East becomes an uninhabitable dustbowl. Everytime I hear somebody make that: "It's not our problem, let them kill themselves down there, the best thing we can do is not interfere" like the OP I'm tempted to bring up the mess that is Syria which to a large extent became the mess it is because we listened to people who recommend apathy. Interfering is bad but at least you have some influence on the course of events, not interfering is worse because by not interfering you let the situation spin completely out of control.
All of Syria is already moving to Europe because of political instability. As more muslims arrive, their influence grows in countries like France and England. That will affect the USA as well.
The Persian Gulf is actually hotter and more humid. One city in Iran had the heat index soar to 163 degrees this past summer.
Yes, it gets very hot in parts of the US in the summer. The Gulf Coast states are very humid. It can get just as hot in the Plains, and the evapotranspiration from crops like corn can raise the dewpoints into the low 80s at times. I've experienced this living in Nebraska. But it still isn't as hot and humid as the Persian Gulf.
The other difference is that there's widespread air conditioning in the US. People still die, but it's mitigated because of the air conditioning. There's far less availability of air conditioning in the poorer countries of the Middle East. Sure, the wealthy nations like Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE have plenty of air conditioning. But the same can't be said in places like Iraq and Yemen. Add to it a severe water shortage and there's potentially a big problem. The weather is worse than anywhere in the US, and the socioeconomic issues make it even worse.
They will have to attack neighboring states to "make a hole" and most of the neighboring states are quite strong, militarily. Getting them to commit suicide
...will have substantial fallout, both economic and political, to say nothing of the cost in human lives. It also does not detract from the point.
They all die in a war they start that when they could have just shown up at the border, hat in hand, begging for asylum that would most assuredly be granted,
You haven't been paying attention to world politics, have you? That would most assuredly be granted? What are you smoking, what is it called, how much does it cost, and where can it be purchased?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Its difficult to explain anything to people that can't be summed up into one sentence or a short five sentence anectdotal story.
That said the basic thermodynamics of added CO2 and other heat trapping gasses is simple, well understood, and was settled long ago academically. The real cutting edge research today is determining what will happen on a regional scale. In the above study published in Nature, it's not an increase in temperature so much as its an increase in regional moisture brought on by a slight warming and a shift in climate.
It's not a dust bowl effect, think of how bad that dry heat is going to be if it turns high humidity.
While results like these could be more accurately modeled, say by having better satellites, far more money is spent arguing than buying hardware and funding research. The possible doomsday scenerio isn't a whole planet that's too hot - its far more likely a slightly insane nuclear arms bearing nation essentially being locked inside a car with the windows rolled up in a Flordia kmart parking lot in July.
Refusing to sell the oil certainly didn't work out too well for them either.
You really only have one choice for "interfering", and that's gearing up for a massive ground invasion with the troops and manpower to militarily occupy the region at a troop scale similar to the European theater of WWII.
And you have to do it with a mindset that we're not there to build schools or make friendly with the locals, but to suppress resistance with maximum force and minimal-to-no concern for civilian casualties and collateral damage. This isn't a "police action" or "counter-insurgency" it's more Caesar's Conquest of Gaul.
You have to break the culture's will to resist. You move forward and obliterate anything that offers resistance. Use every tool in the toolkit -- carpet bombing, firebombing, internment camps. You don't avoid hospitals, power plants, water plants, food warehouses -- you hit those FIRST. You advance systematically in this manner, willing to inflict total destruction and maximum death until the people and culture recognize that further resistance is futile.
Then you occupy the territory for at least a generation, gradually, over 20 or 30 years, returning them to some kind of self rule, but all the while willing to demonstrate that resistance will not be tolerated.
Anything else is totally ineffective and produces no lasting change, at huge cost.
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.
No we weren't. The "coming ice age" thing was an article written in the popular press and was never supported by climate science.
In reality, climate science was already talking about anthropogenic global warming way back in the 1970s.
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Those cities are currently, probably, about as bad as the Middle East when worst cases are considered and, currently, are not particularly close to "limit of survivability" levels.
Some bits of Northern India are currently amongst the "worst" areas. The ME is geographically close but currently not so bad as they're drier.
But if the ME gets wetter then the problems there could get worse to the point where it's impossible to survive without aircon.
http://www.city-data.com/forum...
35C wet bulb temperature is about the limit of survivability. You don't die instantly but unless you get somewhere cooler (lower wet bulb temperature, not necessarily absolute temperature) you will die.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
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.
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And anyway, Jesus built the pyramids as cooling centers for Middle-Eastern senior citizens.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think this is a fine point to interject. I am not, nor do I claim to be, a climate scientist. I am, on the other hand, a mathematician. My career was based on modeling from very large data sets. I modeled vehicular and pedestrian traffic. It's akin to attempting to model chaos.
I'll try to keep this simple.
See, you collect a whole bunch of data - everything from weather to time of day to a single individual can have an impact on the throughput of traffic. Then, you crunch this data and you end up with a model and can make predictions on it. Well, you shouldn't. This is why I'm retired today. See, you don't actually make predictions at that point. Instead - you return to the actual data and go out and make physical observations to confirm that your modeling of the existing data is accurate. If it's not then you change your algorithms AND manipulate the data until it matches reality.
Then, and only then, when you've managed to get them "close enough" can you make meaningful predictions and accurate proposals for things like route changes or configurations. You do, indeed, manipulate the data and the math used to crunch that data (an example is dropping outlying data points or optimizing for a specific period of time) until the data matches what you can verify as existing. The world is more than data points... At some point, it becomes so complex that there's absolutely zero chance at achieving perfection. That will not happen.
Now, I don't know shit about climate. I don't know if they're doing this right or wrong or if we're all going to die tomorrow. But I do know that massaging numbers and tweaking models to reflect reality is actually a damned good thing to do. In fact, doing so is why I'm retired and the company is still alive today. Not doing so is why you get some pretty screwed up traffic patterns that looked good on paper but suck in reality. That's what they get for hiring the least expensive companies. Yes, it takes more time, yes, it is more expensive. However, it's not at all unusual to manipulate data to make a model match reality. In fact, if you want to do a good job, it's pretty much a requirement and no - it will never be perfect. We simply can't account for all eventualities. You aim for a 95th percentile or greater in traffic modeling (even less for pedestrian traffic) and call it good.
So, there are probably all sorts of legitimate complaints about climate science. Data manipulation is not one of them. I'd be much more concerned to find out that they were relying on raw data without any manipulation and then comparisons with reality to determine which adjustments need to be made. If no adjustments had to be made, I'd call it straight up bullshit.
Err... End rant! Carry on with the bitch fest but, really, unless you've attempted to model a chaotic system, you're probably not actually aware of the process. I can assure you that, mathematically, this must be a similar process to what I'm most familiar with. If they were working with raw data that had not been manipulated then you'd probably end up with predictions of the climate being toadstool hamburger no later than last purple Wednesday. It's not a perfect world and there are near infinite data points to be considered if you want to try for perfection - good luck with that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
your misusing and abusing information to make a flawed point.
"geological global average was higher than today" .... when you use a 600 million year time period.
hint: 600 million years ago complex multicellular life (things above bacterial mats and algae) didn't even exist yet.
And why just 600 million years? If we're going to geological time scales, why stop there? Why not go back further? to the cooling earth after its molten formation? Or was it just to conveniently leave out the 200 million year long glaciation period that occurred just before the arbitrary 600my cut off?
same for CO2 levels. yes, it was warmer and higher CO2 millions of years ago....and life that evolved for those conditions existed. the problem is the current situation is in not operating on evolutionary time scales. its not just the existence of the conditions, but the speed. those prior conditions occurred over hundreds of millions of years, which is actually a point supported by the very things you mention, and unlike the current conditions and trends.
and further: you're using geological time scale global averages, when the article in question is talking about a specific point in time at a specific place...the total opposite. The fact that the global average is ok for humans doesn't contradict or prevent the existence of locations not habitable by humans, places like Antarctica or the Middle East.
in short: just more unscientific denier BS.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It's pretty easy for you to condemn him when the most angst you have in your life is not hearing your name called in Starbucks... You have no idea what he had to go through, yet you think you can judge a guy's actions and motives because of a snippet on the TV? That speaks more to your willingness to condemn than it does the honour (or lack thereof) of the guy being condemned.
So basically, you want the Americans to channel the shittiest of all dictators and along with their bombings, occupy and terrorize a population. And this is marked insightful? Disgusting.
I get it. That barbaric culture is scary. You're afraid of them breeding like rabbits and establishing sharia law after immigrating to your country. If you react in this way, there is literally nothing separating you from the terrorists. Their ideas are your ideas. You literally WANT TO TERRORIZE THEM INTO SUBMISSION.
How the fuck is this insightful? Consider if someone was saying this about the US. You just know that even though you'll subjugate the majority, you will always have an armed rebellion for as long as you're there. Legitimately fighting their brutal occupiers. If The US saw Russia doing that, they'd call them brutal aggressive occupiers and that's what you'd be.
There are better options. They are harder, complex and don't give you the satisfaction of the genocide you crave. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. It may be from a movie but it's the goddamn truth. Real solutions are harder than that but maybe we humans haven't reached a level of emotional or intellectual maturity to use them yet.
But it won't kill everyone as you suggest.
You missed his point - If you can't survive for more than a few hours at a time outside, what happens when you lose power for a week?
Answer: Everyone dies. Or at least, a high enough percentage of the population to make the distinction irrelevant.
In reality, climate science was already talking about anthropogenic global warming way back in the 1970s.
In reality, it was being discussed in Los Alamos during the 1940's. Early climate models suggested that we hadn't even begun to notice the effects [of all the deforestation during the Industrial Revolution over a century earlier]... but that we certainly would. It should be noted that this "braintrust of brilliance" (the world's top physcists were of course gathered there) was also discussing what we might be able to do to offset the effects...
No we weren't. The "coming ice age" thing was an article written in the popular press and was never supported by climate science.
In reality, climate science was already talking about anthropogenic global warming way back in the 1970s.
In reality, scientists have been talking about since the 19th century. Svante Arrhenius developed the first climate model demonstrating how increases in CO2 from can warm the planet, and he did that back in the 1890's.
~X~
Err not not really. There is plenty of debate about the causes. It is a long way from settled science.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Your exact argument has been made before. Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority, lest your argument look like this:
No one is asking for theological debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants priests to stop investigating the scriptures in order to better interpret them. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating religion they know nothing about.
Theology is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon theological understanding because it might someday change. When determining which theology to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand religion enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
That argument would be similar to mine if only 97% of people agreed upon the basic tenants of their religion. Since there is no where near consensus on whether there even is a creator god, how many gods there are, and what the most important commandments of these gods are, this is a red herring. And don't go saying that all major religions agree upon the important stuff either, because many religions such as Buddhism have very little to do with religions such as the Abrahamic ones.
This isn't a situation where there are 3-4 different factions of scientists who agree with 97% of other members in their faction, but only agree on 80% with members of other factions. Then it would be similar to the major religions of the world. Here we have a situation where there is no sizable disagreement among qualified individuals.
Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority
Science does its best to do away with appeals to authority when actually doing cutting edge scientific research. But research would grind to a halt if no one ever treated agreed upon knowledge as fact (even if it isn't 100% proven) when building upon that research. Engineers would never have the time to apply scientific knowledge if they never trusted the consensus of scientists who made the breakthroughs.
Most knowledge is still gained by trusting authority, even by scientists. Trusting authority is not the same thing as never questioning authority.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Whom do you mean by "we", are you a climatologist? Scientists continue "the debate" (wrong word, btw) all the time, but if around 95% of experts in the field (=working climatologists, and no one else) agree that global warming is to a large extent man-made, as a recent large meta study showed, and many people (experts, politicians, and "Joe the Plumber") agree that the effects of this warming will likely be disastrous, it's just plain stupid not to act on the basis of the experts' knowledge. That doesn't mean that the experts cannot be wrong, but their assessments are the best information we currently have.
It is crazy, and perhaps a sign of how modern media have declined, that some groups seem to have managed to "ideologize" this issue, as if ongoing research in an area had anything to do with ideology, let alone cliches like "left" and "right". It's like saying "Yeah, 95% of all medical doctors agree, on the basis of their research, that substance X causes cancer, but we will not act upon this information, because it doesn't fit our world view". What kind of world view would that be? I can only attribute this stupidity to the modern TV culture which has apparently created the impression that it is enough to put one "expert" in front of a camera in order to cast doubt on theories on which thousands of real experts have previously converged.
We have exactly one planet to test things on.
Models are our best bet for predicting what is going to happen; evidence will only appear when it's too late to do something else.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
All of science is a model. Every single thing in science is a model.
Atomic theory? That's a model. Ecosystem balance? Models. Why is the sky blue? We have a model for that. How do eyes and brains turn light into vision? We have an answer, and the answer is a model. How do the planets move? That's a model.
Models are the way we know about the world. We put in the evidence, and out come predictions. We judge the model by the accuracy of the predictions.
As of this writing, only 6 of 210 postings were at level 5 which just goes to show how pointlessly contentious this topic is. Maybe the Slashdot editors should think about a moratorium on climate topics for a while.
It's only really a contentious topic amongst extreme right wingers in the US, who are of course well represented on slashdot. In most of the rest of the civilised world, even conservatives generally accept that climate change is a reality.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it