Climate-Exodus Expected In The Middle East And North Africa (phys.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised. The goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, agreed at the recent UN climate summit in Paris, will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario. The result is deeply alarming: Even if Earth's temperature were to increase on average only by two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold. This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century. Such extremely hot days will occur five times more often than was the case at the turn of the millennium. In combination with increasing air pollution by windblown desert dust, the environmental conditions could become intolerable and may force people to migrate.

Comments

Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[SuperKendall]

Look at the seasonal variation of temperatures in Bahgdad.

A shift of a few degrees C is nothing compared to normal seasonal variation, even adjusting the topmost temperatures doesn't mean that much difference in reality.

Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[ShanghaiBill]

A shift of a few degrees C is nothing compared to normal seasonal variation

For people, that is true. People are not going to die of the heat. But their crops and pastures will dry out. So the people will either move or starve. The problem is that there is no where to move to. Even Syrians, who are more educated and secular that most other Middle Eastern people, are not wanted anywhere.

Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[angel'o'sphere]

A shift of a few degrees C is nothing
Says the guy who grasps nothing.

The link you gave is using Celsius as scale, not Fahrenheit.

This article is about: if global average increases by 2C then at "hot spots" that might mean 20C or more.

If at those hot spots such peak temperatures are reached, then the normal seasonal variation has doubled. And the peak is so high that you can't live outside anymore, that is much difference in reality.

Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[kheldan]

I don't know if you're kidding or not, but you represent a third of the problem:

The weather is nice where I am, so I don't think the problem is real

Then here's another third of the problem:

The weather is terrible where I am and it used to be fine
Followed by:
Oh, well, just because it's bad where you are doesn't mean global warming is real

Then the final third of the problem:

Oh hi we're climate scientists! Since you apparently aren't paying attention to what we're saying, we're going to say it louder and be more extreme to try to make you listen!
Followed closely by:
Oh, well, you're just being alarmists!

This is then exacerbated by extremists on both sides of the equation tossing around their conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, tree-hugging anti-human rhetoric, plain old-fashioned politicking, and the religious types who quietly tell you it's all part of "Gods plan", "the End Times are coming", and "soon there will be Heaven on Earth and none of this will matter anymore", or whatever other nonsense they spout. So nothing actually gets done to prove anything one way or another because everyone just keeps arguing. What will 'decide' if it's real or not will be if it either becomes Too Late To Do Anything About It (at which time everyone will continue to argue, this time about whose fault it is), or it just Goes Away On It's Own (in which case everyone will continue to argue, this time about who was wrong, who was right, and why).

You want the TL;DR version?

Doesn't matter, we're doomed one way or another, because humans are fucking stupid, especially in large groups

Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[hey!]

Except we're not talking about Baghdad getting uniformly 2C warmer, every day of the year. We're talking about 60 additional hot days in the summer with the rest of the year being roughly similar to today. Those sixty days would, almost own their own, raise the year-round average by more than 4C (not 2C). For that to happen the temperature increase on these days be closer to +20C, rather than +2C.

A lot of denialist reckoning does this kind of simplistic reckoning -- e.g., assuming 2C global warming means exactly 2C warmer, uniformly distributed in space and season across the globe. That of course would only amount to a trivial change. But what you're actually going to get is vast increases in extreme weather (hot AND cold) which averaged out across the globe.

Think of it this way: imagine we hold the global increase in temperature to 2C. The amount of additional kinetic energy per unit volume represented by that additional 2C, integrated over the immense volume of the atmosphere, works out to be a staggering amount of total energy, which will change the patterns of weather. Since that immense fluid is rotating, the additional energy cannot mix and diffuse out uniformly and neatly; instead it will drive massive eddies of hot and cold migrating out of their old geographic limits. You'll get all kinds of extreme weather both hot AND cold, it just all averages out to +2C temperature-wise.

To put that perspective, current estimates are that we're capturing an additional 8 x 10^21 joules of extra solar energy per year, every single year.

Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why you're talking about faking data. To me it looks like you don't understand the ramifications of statistical variation. A moving of the average leads to a much larger effect at the extremes, and especially when everything relation to temperature is exponential.

Besides, we're talking about people without air conditioners. Big difference.

Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists

[GameboyRMH]

Scott Adams makes two great mistakes in that blog post: The first is that he blames science instead of industry for industry-led pseudoscientific disinformation campaigns (diet and tobacco specifically, and presumably also climate). He lays it all at the feet of science for failing to overpower these efforts with hardly a finger shaken at industry. He is saying that science has a credibility problem because of industry's lies. That's bullshit.

The second is that he fails to see that the wrongness of science is relative. Apparently until some extremely stringent rightness threshold is passed, science's answers are uselessly wrong, and telling people to cut down on fatty foods to prevent obesity was as wrong as telling them that they're fat because they're full of demons. That's also bullshit.

Yay, more migration

[Anonymous Coward]

The syrian civil war was started because of a 5 year drought. We got 1 million new migrants in Europe. Unless we quit destroying the world climate we'll have 500 million migrants. Stop Using Oil Now! And retarded americans stop using gas guzzling cars.

Re:The Dems will see to that no matter what

[BarbaraHudson]

The frozen tundra, even if completely thawed out, isn't suitable for farming. You're going to have to stop breeding so much no matter how you slice it. 1 child per family will probably be the world-wide norm in the coming years.

Re:The Dems will see to that no matter what

[frovingslosh]

Child, are you too young to remember the Americans who moved to Canada due to the politics of the 60's and early 70's? I know people who went, and the numbers were not insignificant.

Re:Look on the bright side

[BarbaraHudson]

Tundra, even thawed out, doesn't have enough topsoil to make farming possible. So forget that idea. Russia is going to be nervous about Chinese climate refugees. Both have nukes, and both share a common border in certain areas.

Re:That's one way to convince the deniers

[MightyMartian]

The history of mass migrations suggest that even powerful states can be overwhelmed. Rome, Byzantium, Medieval Islamic civilization and China were all unable to prevent massive amounts of migrant peoples, and where the states weren't outright wiped out, they were heavily damaged.

Europe can't even cope with migrants from Syria and North Africa as they are. Now imagine what it would take to prevent many times more than that trying to get into Europe. Could Turkey hold them back? If Turkey fails, could the Balkan states prevent millions of people? And what about the Mediterranean, will the British Royal Navy start laying mines and sinking any boat that tries to get across?

The ramifications of massive migrations out of the Middle East and North Africa for Europe are enormous, and judging by the reactions to current migrations, I think we can see how destabilising and dangerous they will be.

Re:Welp, we're screwed.

[MightyMartian]

There are benefits, but the costs overwhelm the benefits.

A malfunctioning septic system may see your lawn grow greener, but that's usually followed by a sewage smell and a very large bill to fix the problem.

Re:They were the worthless ones

[silentcoder]

You seem to have a real issue with Carter... odd for the man who is probably the most productive ex-president in American history. The man only went and eradicated and entire disease from humanity since he left office, and he is a few months from eradicating a SECOND one.

But yeah... a president who actively avoided wars and were more focussed on saving lives than taking them and has the sense to employ highly skilled scientists to tell him how to solve problems rather than lobbyists (and continued to do so after leaving office - which is how he achieved the eradication of one disease and is on the verge of doing it again) ... can't have that !