We're making the planet too hot to hold us

[pscot]

this is a long article, but you owe it to yourself and your children to read it.

http://barringtonstewart.wordpress.com/thermogeddon-when-the-earth-gets-too-hot-for-humans/

According to a recent study, parts of the Earth could start to become uninhabitable within a century. Surely it cannot be true?

IT IS the late 23rd century. Houston, Tel Aviv, Shanghai and many other once-bustling cities are ghost towns. No one lives in Louisiana or Florida anymore, and vast swathes of Africa, China, Brazil, India and Australia are no-go zones, too. That’s because in all of these places it gets hot and humid enough to kill anyone who cannot find an air-conditioned shelter.

This is the nightmare scenario outlined in a study published earlier this year. If we carry on as we are, it claimed, in as little as a century a few small areas might start to get so hot in summer that no one could survive without air conditioning. Three centuries from now, up to half of the land where people live today would regularly exceed this limit.

“I knew just from basic physics that there would be a point at which heat and humidity would become intolerable, and it didn’t seem that anyone had looked at that from a climate change perspective,” says Steven Sherwood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “When you look at the data, it becomes pretty clear that it wouldn’t take as much climate change as people seem to think to hit this.”

This is an astounding claim. Scientists have long warned that climate change will have serious consequences: big sea-level rises, floods, droughts, more extreme weather, extinctions and so on. But if Sherwood and co-author Matthew Huber of Purdue University in Indiana are right, huge parts of the planet could effectively become uninhabitable.

[Faygo Kid]

1. It's happening faster than even I feared, and it's not just the heat

It's the extraordinary snows in the winter, the drought, the changing worldwide weather patterns, the melting - it's all of us. I can't imagine what it will be like in 50 years.

[RC]

2. But..., but..., but... It's Summer. It always get hot in Summer. Besides

way back in 1834 or whenever it got just as hot in Texas as in is now in Kansas. Thar proves Global Warming is false.
:sarcasm:(For the reality challenged and the lurkers)

[gristy]

3. more discussion here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1554251

[txlibdem]

4. K&R

[htuttle]

5. I had that very impression last week

It was starting to feel like I was on an alien planet -- one that I hadn't evolved to live on.

[NickB79]

6. It's all about the humidity levels

When you see dew points up in the 80's, your body can't effectively cool itself because the sweat on your skin can no longer evaporate. That's why humans have been able to thrive even in places like deserts that regularly see 120F; the humidity is low in these climates.

We saw heat indexes of 120F-134F(!!!) this past week here in Minnesota, of all places, and it was simply amazing. We are lucky enough to have a deep basement that we could cool off in in the event we lost power. Humid as all hell with all the groundwater and high water table, but still cooled to the low 70's by the earth below.

Hey, maybe that's it? We build our cities underground to escape the heat and become Morlocks!

[meow mix]

8. or the iconic "dome cities"

may as well take advantage of the sunlight (AFTER we destroy the planet of course)

[txlibdem]

9. Underground cities

Anywhere but the area near Yellowstone National Park.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera

[txlibdem]

7. It aint just the heat, it's the humidity

Treehugger outlined this danger in an article.

Half of Earth Will Be Uninhabitable by 2300, Study Says
by Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil on 05.12.10

According to The Telegraph, researchers from the Universities of New South Wales and Purdue based their study on a number of worst-case scenarios produced from climate models--and what they've concluded it quite troubling: If mankind fails to curb greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures could rise from 10 to 12 percent by the year 2300, making much of the world uninhabitable.

Many similar projections just estimate the state of the planet's climate by the end of this century, but to some scientists that's too short-sighted. Professor Tony McMichael of Australian National University tells The Telegraph:

Much of the climate change debate has been about whether the world will succeed in keeping global warming to the relatively safe level of only two degrees Celsius by 2100. But climate change will not stop in 2100, and under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more. If this happens, our current worries about sea level rise, occasional heat waves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties will pale into insignificance beside a major threat - as much as half the currently inhabited globe may simply become too hot for people to live there.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/half-the-earth-uninhabitable-in-2300-study-says.php

Here's one blogger's take:

Simmered to the Edge of the World

Posted on May 31, 2010 by AK

When denier ideologues make the transition to accepting the reality of anthropogenic global warming, one of the arguments they start to use tends to go something along the following lines: “Sure, the polar bears might get screwed over, but otherwise things will be just great. Crop yields will increase and northerners will get to have their own sun-drenched beaches”. You wish. New research* indicates that beyond temperature rises of 7C, ”zones of uninhabitability” will begin to overspread much of the world (“An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress” by Sherwood & Huber 2010). Not a Mediterranean world, more like Mad Max in Waterworld.

...

Let that sink in. Forget the rainforest collapses, the icecap disintegrations, the plummeting crop yields as the increased CO2 fertilization effect is cancelled out by heat stress… during the long summers, the bulk of continental interiors below the Arctic Circle will become PHYSICALLY UNINHABITABLE for humans. Cities from Atlanta to Madrid to New Delhi will become ghost towns in the desert, crumbling relics to the long-dead gods of the industrial age.

http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2010/05/31/simmered-to-the-edge-of-the-world/