Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Of course that's only kinda relevant if the temperature increases uniformly which it doesn't
In the Middle East and North Africa, the average temperature in winter will rise by around 2.5 degrees Celsius (left) by the middle of the century, and in summer by around five degrees Celsius (right) if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase according to the business-as-usual scenario (RCP8,5).
That's ~9F, would you consider that change in your summertime average to be inconsequential? The average high in Baghdad in July is 44C, if the projection is right it will become 49C, I suspect there's a few places you start to consider uninhabitable at that point.
I stole this Sig
That isn't how a bell curve works. If you move a bell curve slightly to the left, the big change isn't in the average, but is in how much you have where you end up sampling from the extremes of the distribution. This is why for example, China doesn't have nearly as many top-tier soccer players as some much smaller countries, or how the best runners are almost all Kenyan even though the Kenyan isn't much faster than the average in most other populations. One very controversial example of this is how some populations (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews) have many more Fields Medal and Nobel Prize winners than one would expect naively, but if you move the average intelligence up just a tiny bit, you get a massive change in how many really brilliant people you have.
Humanity has come reasonably close to a local extinction event a couple times in the last couple millennia. The black plague, in medieval europe, for example had about a 90% kill rate, comparable with what modern militaries would like to see in an engineered bio weapon.
What is new in the last century is that humanity is now capable of initiating its very own mass, global extinction event. Global warming could easily be comparable in scope, scale, and damage to a nuclear holocaust and the death toll due to global warming in the next one hundred years -is- going to be measured in percentages of total human population on planet earth. That is, in part, what this article is talking about. People are going to migrate or else they are going to die, and some of them will die.
Is this starting to sound like something you might be interested in? Homo sapiens, as a species, may in the near future cease to exist. I'd like our species epitaph NOT to read "Died from their own greed and nearsightedness." That is -your- greed and nearsightedness, in case you were wondering.
Also Cold kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries.
Expiration. The one-percenters realized a few decades ago that with fewer and fewer menial jobs remaining, there would be waaaay too many of the underclass that could ultimately threaten their lifestyles and very lives. Thus military, environmental, and especially economic policies have been implemented to 'thin the herd'. Explains quite a bit, actually.
How have the scientists lost all credibility? Their findings are fine - no one has managed to challenge them. The thing about science is it doesn't matter who pays for what - the findings must stand up to scientific rigour before they are accepted into the general body of knowledge.
It sounds like you don't understand the scientific method, and are looking for any excuse to stick your fingers in your ears. You are wasting your brain, but I think you know that, and simply don't care. What a wonderful example for future generations.