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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: 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.