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Global heating pushes tropical regions towards limits of human livability:
Humans’ ability to regulate their body heat is dependent upon the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air. We have a core body temperature that stays relatively stable at 37C (98.6F), while our skin is cooler to allow heat to flow away from the inner body. But should the wet-bulb temperature – a measure of air temperature and humidity – pass 35C, high skin temperature means the body is unable to cool itself, with potentially deadly consequences.
“If it is too humid our bodies can’t cool off by evaporating sweat – this is why humidity is important when we consider livability in a hot place,” said Yi Zhang, a Princeton University researcher who led the new study, published in Nature Geoscience. “High body core temperatures are dangerous or even lethal.”
The research team looked at various historical data and simulations to determine how wet-bulb temperature extremes will change as the planet continues to heat up, discovering that these extremes in the tropics increase at around the same rate as the tropical mean temperature.
[...] Dangerous conditions in the tropics will unfold even before the 1.5C threshold, however, with the paper warning that 1C of extreme wet-bulb temperature increase “could have adverse health impact equivalent to that of several degrees of temperature increase”. The world has already warmed by around 1.1C on average due to human activity and although governments vowed in the Paris climate agreement to hold temperatures to 1.5C, scientists have warned this limit could be breached within a decade.
This has potentially dire implications for a huge swathe of humanity. Around 40% of the world’s population currently lives in tropical countries, with this proportion set to expand to half of the global population by 2050 due to the large proportion of young people in region. The Princeton research was centered on latitudes found between 20 degrees north, a line that cuts through Mexico, Libya and India, to 20 degrees south, which goes through Brazil, Madagascar and the northern reaches of Australia.
Journal Reference:
Yi Zhang, Isaac Held, Stephan Fueglistaler. Projections of tropical heat stress constrained by atmospheric dynamics, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00695-3)
(Score: 2) by Thesis on Sunday March 14 2021, @11:11AM (20 children)
https://www.noaa.gov/news/us-had-its-coldest-february-in-more-than-30-years [noaa.gov]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Sunday March 14 2021, @12:27PM (13 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14 2021, @05:23PM (12 children)
Since UK, Europe, and Russia had its coldest February in decades too. Does your imaginary Earth have no North hemisphere, or what?
(Score: 4, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday March 14 2021, @11:54PM (10 children)
What does the weather last month have to do with the climate?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 15 2021, @01:21AM (9 children)
Nothing. Except when climate evangelists find out that we had a particularly hot summer. Then it's undeniable proof.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 15 2021, @01:44AM (8 children)
Even when they're right! [nasa.gov]
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 15 2021, @04:09AM (6 children)
If they're right about one summer proving something then the folks who say one winter proves something are right too. Either one season's weather matters or it doesn't; pick one, you don't get both.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 15 2021, @07:26AM (5 children)
Can't argue with a troll, wonder why anyone bothers with you anymore.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 15 2021, @01:42PM
Mostly? Because they keep losing the arguments.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 15 2021, @02:36PM (3 children)
TMB is right and obviously folks on both sides should not quote data from one month, one season or one year. A long term statistical trend for climate change has been established very clearly in the literature - why is it even a discussion?
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Monday March 15 2021, @03:55PM (2 children)
> why is it even a discussion?
I don't see a discussion. What discussion? Oh you mean TMB trolling to people about things they didn't say?
ps. We adults shouldn't interfere with bullies and Internet trolls bullying other kids until they hit each other in the eye or bite each other. Not call it discussions.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 15 2021, @04:20PM
Fair point.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:12PM
So PTZ wasn't doing so a few comments up and you don't see it all over the climate evangelist media every summer? Liar. Pointing out hypocrisy that you don't want to look at is not trolling.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 15 2021, @08:01PM
If you actually care, that study they are referencing does not say what you might think it says. One of the most important factors in climate models are obviously exactly how CO2 levels correlate to heat, and how CO2 levels change in response to human emissions. If you change these values you obviously get dramatically different outcomes in your model. That paper *did* change these scalars, and then claimed the papers were correct.
Here [www.ipcc.ch] is the IPCC climate assessment from 1990-1992. This [www.ipcc.ch] is their policymaker summary. Turn to page 69, to see some graphs. According to the IPCC in 1990, if we maintained 100% of 1990 CO2 emissions, we were set for about the levels of atmospheric CO2 we have today. The thing is though, we didn't stick with 100% of 1990 levels, instead we dramatically increased our outputs. And you'll find similar nonsense everywhere.
Previous climate predictions have in general just been very wrong. Papers like this that completely change these variables, and which the media then runs along with 'we predicted everything just perfectly', are part of the reason I've become much more disinterested in climate stuff in general. There is clearly a major agenda in play, which may be something as innocuous as publish or perish driving poor quality clickbait style "science", as in other fields. But it's enough to make me go from a rather vocal advocate for climate awareness to somebody who is rather on the other side of the field now a days.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday March 15 2021, @08:00AM
Another year of no longjohns for me (been 5 on the trot now). This year was especially warm though, as I didn't wear my goose-down over-the-head puffer once, and my zip-up puffer I only wore once on the coldest day, and it was way too warm, I unzipped it within minutes of leaving the house.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14 2021, @05:56PM (5 children)
Wild temperature fluctuations are a sign of climate change https://earther.gizmodo.com/unseasonable-european-warmth-smashes-all-time-february-1846357348 [gizmodo.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14 2021, @06:23PM (3 children)
Can you reference some papers written let's say a decade or so ago referencing the expectation for record cold temps?
The reason I specify older temps is because global warming is based 100% entirely on models. And these models generally suck - the studies suggesting the contrary tend to juke a scalar value within the models (atmospheric CO2 : heating ratio change in particular) to fit what's observed, and then claim the models were right all along which makes no sense. I can tell you exactly what the stock market will be on any given day, down to the fraction of a penny, so long as you let me have a scalar I can retroactively change.
But beyond the models sucking there's an even more insidious problem. When observations falsify the models, the data instead just dumped into the model, and we then claim the new models "predicted" it - it's, again, completely nonsensical. Of course these increasingly frequent chills weren't happen a decade ago, so the models would not have yet been retrofitted to "predict" them. So back to the original question, can you reference any "reputable" climate papers from a decade+ back that predicted these substantial chills throughout the world?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14 2021, @06:29PM
And the above, assuming these record chills were not predicted by climate change - you should consider something. Climate change has long since become non-falsifiable. There is a seemingly never-ending pattern of:
1) The world will end within 10 years because of [reason].
2) 10 years passes. Hyperbolic predictions do not come even remotely true.
3) Okay, the world didn't - but it's (e.g.) slightly warmer than it was then! That's proof the world will end in 10 years because of [reason].
4) Goto 2.
This has been happening for at least 40 years now. How can you ever falsify the hyperbolic predictions if their consisted and repeated failure does not falsify them?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday March 14 2021, @11:59PM (1 child)
The models are pretty good. [sciencemag.org]
You could read through this, which will explain some of for you. [skepticalscience.com]
But you won't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 15 2021, @07:44PM
In other words, when we take into account actual sinking of greenhouse gases (what they term "pollution levels changed in ways Hansen didn’t predict"), the models are relatively accurate. So when are these model-makers going to put in accurate "pollution levels" into their models? Keep in mind these models made claims that a given level of emissions would result in a given level of warming. Now, they're walking back those claims by redoing the calculation with existing CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) concentrations rather than existing CO2 emissions.
This game gets played over and over again with claimed warming overshooting actual warming consistently. The physics is solid, but there's a lot of inputs (like pollution levels) that can be and are gamed.
Why this matters is that substantial greenhouse gas sinks mean substantial negative feedbacks are likely being ignored in climate models and that results in excessively high climate sensitivity estimates.
Moving on, let's consider the second link you posted:
Notice the bolded sentence. There is plenty of reason to think a model that gets the past perfectly right can spectacularly self-destruct on the future because it's not hard to make such things happen (classic example is approximating near constant data say like a short span of human population with a polynomial - it'll fail once you get outside the range of approximation). Extrapolation is notoriously hard. This glib dismissal of that difficulty should raise red flags. Second, notice that they talk about the past 30 years and the future 30 years. That's barely the scale of climate which is typically defined on time scales of 30 years.
The elephant in this room is the amazing disconnect [soylentnews.org] between human emissions of CO2 which have gone up substantially versus the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. TL;DR: the apologists are glossing over greenhouse gases sinks. It doesn't matter how shiny and solid your radiative models are, when the problem is that you're greatly overestimating greenhouse gases concentrations.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 15 2021, @03:24AM
Really??
https://montanakids.com/facts_and_figures/climate/Temperature_Extremes.htm [montanakids.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.