Slashdot Mirror
A Third Of the Planet's Population Is Exposed To Deadly Heatwaves (motherjones.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly a third of the world's population is now exposed to climatic conditions that produce deadly heatwaves, as the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere makes it "almost inevitable" that vast areas of the planet will face rising fatalities from high temperatures, new research has found. Climate change has escalated the heatwave risk across the globe, the study states, with nearly half of the world's population set to suffer periods of deadly heat by the end of the century even if greenhouse gases are radically cut. "For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible," said Camilo Mora, an academic at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the study. High temperatures are currently baking large swaths of the south-western US, with the National Weather Service (NWS) issuing an excessive heat warning for Phoenix, Arizona, which is set to reach 119F (48.3C) on Monday. The heat warning extends across much of Arizona and up through the heart of California, with Palm Springs forecast a toasty 116F (46.6C) on Monday and Sacramento set to reach 107F (41.6C).
A hint: please don't use Mother Jones as a source for science information.
Heatwaves are a thing. They can be very dramatic.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/...
Considering most of the globe lives either the tropics or the subtropics, this is probably only going to get worse, especially as the temperate zones become more and more tropical.
Or as those of us in Arizona call it... Summer.
Surprise, the desert is hot and such high heat is deadly if exposed to it too long. Here is an idea, don't live in the desert.
Abstract of the original article: https://www.nature.com/nclimat...
Press release from Nature East Asia: http://www.natureasia.com/en/r...
Press release from U. Hawaii Manoa (the institution of the lead authors): http://www.hawaii.edu/news/201...
Article at phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-...
Article at Science Daily: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Interactive map of number of deadly heat days: https://maps.esri.com/globalri...
that means two thirds ARENT?
what the hell i thought the whole planet was the same temperature
...so I guess we're all dead then?
Oh wait, humans are the most adaptable creatures to have ever existed (as far as we know) on this planet.
Perhaps the snowflakes will melt.
-Styopa
Climate change has no effect on a year-to-year basis. If we're showing the weather to someone from Year 1900, then ok, but we aren't, so this is just dumb.
To be fair, although I think the Mother Jones article is alarmist, the actual work cited catalogued heat-related deaths documented "for 783 lethal heatwaves in 164 cities across 36 countries," referencing a search of publications dating back to 1980. This was not a one-year study.
This news has been out a while. Look at references #9 and #10 here.
Silicon Valley is the high 90's this week. Power went out yesterday for a few hours, making the afternoon heat unbearable without the fans. Still trying to figure out where to put another fan in the Cougar QBX Mini-ITX case, as the SSD and HDD run ten degrees higher than my fileserver with six HDDs and seven fans. This case is supposed to have enough room for a regular PSU, a dual-slot GPU and a water cooler radiator. I don't have either and there isn't enough room for my fat fingers.
https://twitter.com/cdreimer/status/874112440379744257/
I find it strange that some people call this alarmism when the truth is that extreme weather conditions were predicted to occur decades ago. It's been going on for a while and we're now getting a taste of its brutal heat. The point is that this brutality is going to spread to much of the planet. In the developed world we have electricity to help cool us and sufficient water to keep our crops alive. However, in the underdeveloped world people will try to survive just like they always have but it won't be enough. Either they will migrate to a cooler climate and/or they will die from the heat. If you don't want mass immigration to devastate your nation, you need to be working on a way to reverse the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Considering how lightly most countries are taking this threat, million of people are going to die and millions more will migrate and it will reshape our societies. You can call it alarmism but it's really happening and it's happening right now.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
IIRC, Phoenix offered tax incentives for Silicon Valley companies to relocate there in the 1990's. A lot of people from my church worked at Intel and relocated to Phoenix at that time. The biggest draw then was being able to buy an affordable house far, far away from Silicon Valley.
If a Republican dies of heat stroke, they may qualify for a Darwin Award.
Table-ized A.I.
in 1990 it was 122 deg F in Phoenix.
this is alarmist trash, study the history of heat waves and find out when the massive deaths were. Hint, not recently. 5,000 dead in the 1936 north american heat wave, for example
kids. imagining any and every bad thing that happens in their lifetime is the world's greatest tragedy. pffft, this is alarmist nonsense.
The highest temperature in Arizona's recorded history was 128 degrees, on June 29, 1994
seems like we are moving in the right direction then, good job humons
I've lived in Phoenix most of my life. My family has been in Arizona since the 1930's. It's the summer now, it's hot.
Late June has always been the hottest part of the year in the southern desert. The high today is well within the curve we expect this time of year. Insane hot? Yes. Atypical, no. Fun watching some unlucky Weather Channel reporter standing outside in the sun saying "Yep it's hot." We try not to do that ourselves.
However:
Yearly average temperatures are hotter than before. It's getting hot earlier in the year and staying hot until much later in the year. It's not attention-grabbing enough to say that it didn't drop below freezing for the past two years in Phoenix, but that is significant. It's just significant in a way that has more to do with microclimate, rather than macroclimate.
Over the years, Phoenix has grown. It's now the 5th largest city in the US. Phoenix also has many satellite cities. Some of them are major cities in their own right. For example, Mesa by it's self is slightly bigger than Atlanta GA. What that means is lots of concrete, paved roads, and air conditioning. All produce or retain heat. Phoenix has developed an urban "Heat Island," which repels rain storms and makes the city even hotter.
In other words, the Temperature in Phoenix today is NOT a valid indicator of global climate.
Now, let's go two hours North of Phoenix to Sedona and Flagstaff. Those smaller cities are in forested areas which are drier and slightly warmer than before. It's easy to see large swaths of dead trees in the forests caused by the stresses of longer-term changes in climate (and poor forest management.)
Now for the irony:
Most voters in Arizona take it in faith that what they are told by their political party is correct. Arizona is also strongly Republican. See where I'm heading? Strange if you think of it. Perhaps it's the heat?
-D
The Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief of the US of A says so! That's why his administration minions are cutitng funding for renewable energy and instead propping up the fossil fuel industries! Also your 'thermometer' is something created because of SCIENCE, and Jesus hates science, so of course it's lying to you!
..and now I sit back and bask in the glory of being modded down to negative one by all the rabid conservatives. Go ahead, use your points up on me! All you're doing is proving that you're mad.
* * * WORLD-DESTROYING FACEPALM OF DOOM * * *
Face it: We're fucked. The only reason I can stay relatively sane, is I know I'll be long dead by the time the formerly temperate zones of the Earth become nigh-unto uninhabitable. Tell your single-digit-aged childen to cross their fingers that the current climate theories are in fact wrong and that there's a mini ice age coming up.
Actually, ISIS, Al Quaida, the Russians and a bunch of people in the Middle East and North Africa are actively working on a solution as we sit here typing!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
How much of the world's population is exposed to deadly cold waves?
Below-freezing weather is pretty unsurvivable unless you have shelter and artificial heating. A lot of the world's population lives in areas that occasionally get below freezing.
It makes sense that as the planet warms, deadly cold waves will become less common - isn't it only fair to take this into account as well?
Other than a pandemic, the last one we had was a century ago, old age is expected to do the rest. Humanity doubled twice in the 20th century, but it won't even double once in the 21st century. Population should peak at 10B by 2050 and decline to 6B by 2100.
I could be wrong, but I think much of Arizona is not actually a dessert. I bet it wouldn't taste good, at all.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Example, California drought claimed by alarmists to represent the doom of AGW coming to Cali. But research is indicating that California has been far wetter over the last century than it is normally and that the current drought is actually par for the long-term normal.
California’s current drought is being billed as the driest period in the state’s recorded rainfall history. But scientists who study the West’s long-term climate patterns say the state has been parched for much longer stretches before that 163-year historical period began.
Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years — compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.
“We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years,” said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. “We’re living in a dream world.”
California in 2013 received less rain than in any year since it became a state in 1850. And at least one Bay Area scientist says that based on tree ring data, the current rainfall season is on pace to be the driest since 1580 — more than 150 years before George Washington was born. The question is: How much longer will it last?
Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.
Looking back, the long-term record also shows some staggeringly wet periods. The decades between the two medieval megadroughts, for example, delivered years of above-normal rainfall — the kind that would cause devastating floods today.
The longest droughts of the 20th century, what Californians think of as severe, occurred from 1987 to 1992 and from 1928 to 1934. Both, Stine said, are minor compared to the ancient droughts of 850 to 1090 and 1140 to 1320.
Bill Patzert, a research scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, says that the West is in a 20-year drought that began in 2000. He cites the fact that a phenomenon known as a “negative Pacific decadal oscillation” is underway — and that historically has been linked to extreme high-pressure ridges that block storms.
Such events, which cause pools of warm water in the North Pacific Ocean and cool water along the California coast, are not the result of global warming, Patzert said. But climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has been linked to longer heat waves. That wild card wasn’t around years ago.
“Long before the Industrial Revolution, we were vulnerable to long extended periods of drought. And now we have another experiment with all this CO2 in the atmosphere where there are potentially even more wild swings in there,” said Graham Kent, a University of Nevada geophysicist who has studied submerged ancient trees in Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe.
http://www.mercurynews.com/201...
Although many Californians think that population growth is the main driver of water demand statewide, it actually is agriculture. In an average year, farmers use 80 percent of the water consumed by people and businesses — 34 million of 43 million acre-feet diverted from rivers, lakes and groundwater, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
“Cities would be inconvenienced greatly and suffer some. Smaller cities would get it worse, but farmers would take the biggest hit,” said Maurice Roos, the department’s chief hydrologist. “Cities can always afford to spend a lot of money to buy what water is left.”
Roos, who has worked at the department since 1957, said the prospect of megadroughts is another reason to build more storage — both underground and in reservoirs — to catch rain in wet years.
In a megadrought, there would be much less water in the Delta to pump. Farmers’ allotments would shrink to nothing. Large reservoirs like Shasta, Oroville and San Luis would eventually go dry after five or more years of little or no rain.
Farmers would fallow millions of acres, letting row crops die first. They’d pump massive amounts of groundwater to keep orchards alive, but eventually those wells would go dry. And although deeper wells could be dug, the costs could exceed the value of their crops. Banks would refuse to loan the farmers money.
The federal government would almost certainly provide billions of dollars in emergency aid to farm communities.
“Some small towns in the Central Valley would really suffer. They would basically go away,” said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.
“But agriculture is only 3 percent of California’s economy today,” Lund said. “In the main urban economy, most people would learn to live with less water. It would be expensive and inconvenient, but we’d do it.”
Farmers with senior water rights would make a huge profit, he noted, selling water at sky-high prices to cities. Food costs would rise, but there wouldn’t be shortages, Lund said, because Californians already buy lots of food from other states and countries and would buy even more from them.
In urban areas, most cities would eventually see water rationing at 50 percent of current levels. Golf courses would shut down. Cities would pass laws banning watering or installing lawns, which use half of most homes’ water. Across the state, rivers and streams would dry up, wiping out salmon runs. Cities would race to build new water supply projects, similar to the $50 million wastewater recycling plant that the Santa Clara Valley Water District is now constructing in Alviso.
Many of them never came to pass. That perhaps the most generic "there will be extreme weather events" is one of the few that appears to have had merit is telling in itself. Even Miss Cleo could be right once in awhile "There will be a death in your family in the next few years..."
One of the things that fuels "deniers" is the failure of the climate models to make specific, verifiable predictions that actually occur when predicted. E.g. http://thefederalist.com/2014/...
I don't think it is plausiible that the planets population is declpining by 4B people over the course of 50 years.
It is more likely it will stabilize around those 10B give or take 1B.
Western countries, mainly Europe have a decline of about 0.5% - 1% of population per year. I see no reason why that should be different world wide when health care, birth control, and social security is established and working everywhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Anywhere in south Georgia and South Carolina pretty much in its entirety runs 90 degrees and 90% humidity right on through summer.
Have reached lows. Have a look at the map at
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
Just 5 percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions, the lowest level of drought here since government scientific agencies began updating the U.S. Drought Monitor on a weekly basis in 2000.
Why so violent?
You may "know" that there was a global cooling scare in the 70s, but in fact there wasn't, or at least, there wasn't any such a scare supported by or coming from the science community. The American Meteorological Society wrote an article debunking that myth: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...
The myth of the "1970s global cooling scare" rests primarily on one high-profile 1975 Newsweek article, with a scary headline ("The Cooling World"). But the atmospheric science community never had any consensus that the world was heading for a cooling trend.
Pre air conditioning. The question isn't has it always been this way but rather what are we doing to make it better?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
when it gets above 110, it doesn't really matter -- it's unbearably hot, irrespective of humidity.
definitely agree with you though, Phoenix should not exist as a metropolitan area with 4+ million people. That water comes from somewhere (colorado river). What's even worse is that there are cotton fields.. one of the most water intensive crops on earth, being grown with stolen water, in a fucking desert. Something is seriously out of whack in regards to how water is priced in that part of the country.
(But Arizona is god damn hot, year round. The extreme northern area around Flagstaff is cooler, but that's only due to elevation. The rest of the state is a desert, and it is hot)
The question that we should be asking: is the transition point to Greenhouse Earth under 700ppm of CO2? If so, there is likely no stopping it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth
If you think that's bad, you should try some Baked Alaska. With AGW will have even more of it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
People say dry heat like it ain't no big deal. It's true that in the shade, dry heat isn't that much of a problem. AFAIK, one definition of heat index uses the wet bulb temperature, measuring the temperature of a wet bulb in the shade. But the thing about the desert is that there is no shade. There is no cloud cover, pretty much every day, and there are no trees to hide under. You have some short bushes and occasional cacti, but you won't have meaningful shade unless it's man-made. The air temperature isn't that bad, but the temperature of any surface exposed to the sun skyrockets. I've lived in Phoenix and in Austin. Yeah, it's more humid in Austin, but there's shade everywhere. There are trees.
No there wasn't an actual global cooling scare supported by the scientific community in the 70s however there were hand picked scientific articles that the media used to create one in the general public. Then later it was chlorofluorocarbons will destroy the ozone layer. In general the media over the years has snowed over the details they are reporting and gone for the worst case scenario to grab headlines even if it meant re-interpreting the results.
Since I will not be doing any research into the field myself I have to take what the media says with a grain of salt.
And don't forget Kim Jong Un, that champion advocate of combating human-caused global warming by eliminating humans!
Maybe the DNC could hire Kim as a climate change consultant. He'd fit right in with the #huntrepublicans crowd at the DNC!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I've seen water condense on the outside of windshields where the AC was blowing. Fuck Florida.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Someone at some point decided "Yeah, let's stop here. This crappy desert with no water and no place to grow crops is a lovely place to live. I'm sure it won't get any better if we keep walking," and then set up cities in places like the middle east and north Africa. They're really the ones to blame, not climate change. Those places were hot even before CO2 went nuts.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~bage...
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/radiation/
You will never read precise numbers for the warming given to us from our blanket that is the atmosphere,
...unless you check an astronomy text, which will go through the planetary equilibrium temperature and the greenhouse effect.
The average surface temperature of the Earth, including atmosphere, is 288K (15C). Subtract out the radiative equilibrium temperture of -17C and you get the average planetary greenhouse effect warming, which turns out to be 32 to 33C.
because those numbers don't exist.
Sure they do. This is not news; it's been known for ages. It will be in any astronomy textbook. Or even, for that matter, Wikipedia.
I am baked in Maine. Close enough?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Starting from a peak population of 10B in 2020, a decline of about 1% of population per year means losing almost exactly 4B people over the course of 50 years.
No, we really need you to be baked in Alaska with a Baked Alaska. Are you even trying?
Not very hard, no. Sometimes the missus says I'm trying her patience, but I consider that a point of pride.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And what portion lived in places like that in the past? Similarly high no doubt since it is the hotter zones that humans came from and followed as much as possible.
It was easy to debunk because the scare was actually in the 50s and 60s. In the media it peaked in the 70s, but not in the scientific community.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
CFCs do destroy the ozone. Their elevated release due to manufacture and use in consumer products was responsible for the predicable chemistry destroying ozone (O3, particularly in the stratosphere). Since 1987 CFC reduction has been responsible for the predictable chemistry that resulted in the reduction of the very same ozone hole. Understandably this is history for you, but not for those who lived through it and have worked in related industries.
Oh, I did not do the math.
Probably you are right, interesting math again.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Actually no one debunked it... Global Cooling sure but that's not the point, the scare created by the media was very real.
I do find it funny that I can say the media propagated an unsupported global cooling scare and it's interpreted as global cool is real instead of the media failed to report accurately.
We've understood the basics of the greenhouse effect for over a century; we've had good measurements of infrared absorption spectra for sixty years; we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now; and we've been making detailed measurements of atmospheric profiles and the incident solar forcing factor for thirty years. The overall picture of how human-emitted greenhouse gasses play in climate is understood. There is still a lot of science being done, but this is is filling in the fine details. The overall picture is not controversial (at least, not by scientists).
We also thought that we knew that the appendix was a useless organ, only now we are beginning to understand that it is in fact useful. For centuries we thought that "humors" were the key to understanding the body and that bleeding was a good treatment for many ailments. After we have improved the science we look back and realize how little we really understood. If you think that in a couple of centuries humanity will not look back at this period and time and say something like "wow, we really didn't understand the true effect of humanity on the global environment," then you haven't been paying attention to how science has advanced in the last century.
To the contrary, I know the history of science pretty well (comes with being an astronomy professor, you have to teach some amount of history of science to the undergrads.). What the history of science shows, over and over, is that science proceeds by making successively better improvements to our understanding. Kepler's laws of planetary motion didn't invalidate Copernicus' heliocentric solar system, it expanded and filled in details. Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't invalidate Kepler, nor Galileo and Newton's laws of motion, it extends on and improves them. The way science works is by starting with understanding the big picture, and then getting better and better understanding of the details.
As a take-away line: "Just because we don't know everything does not mean that we don't know anything."
That's OK, though. I am accustomed to being berated for not kowtowing to the accepted orthodox politically correct view of things. It comes with the territory.
But that's the problem. There is no "orthodox politically correct" science. The science is what it is regardless of your political views.
There is scientific evidence of AGW. We know the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere affects the climate, and we have measured the rise of CO2 from about 280ppm to about 400ppm. We know what's driving global warming for the most part.
We also know about our fossil fuel use, and how much CO2 that produces. We also measure the isotopic concentration of carbon atoms in the air, and they're short on C-14 (which is going to screw up carbon dating for future archaeologists). The increase in CO2 is due to our burning of fossil fuels, and that causes the warming.
BTW, I don't know of any grant money going to AGW. There's grant money going to climate science, which is a good idea. If a climate scientist can provide a model showing that AGW isn't happening which matches the evidence currently available, that scientist is going to be famous. I really don't expect it to happen.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The headline is from Around 30% of the world’s population is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year, which in turn is from the abstract of the paper.
So you can't get a much better source of scientific information than Nature Publishing Group.
What part of the article do you think is unscientific?
In an era when nearly every print media organisation have replaced their science staff with generic reporters, the Guardian still maintains a science team, and produce a science podcast.
Are you sure the differences in their logic and yours are due to faults on their part?
Funny looking cycle.
Aren't cycles supposed to follow a repeating pattern, rather than starting in a repeating pattern then suddenly take off?