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

That's one way to convince the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell them that if we don't take action soon, more Muslims will move to their neighborhood.

More Great Editing

[chipschap]

This is in the summary:

"the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold"

This literally means that if the temp averaged 90F it will then average 180F. That's a lot of climate change.

Could we, you know, maybe have something that makes sense? Like "the temperature in summer in these regions will increase twice as much as previously expected"?

Slashdot may have new owners but the editing hasn't quite gotten there yet.

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.