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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.