Mark Zuckerberg looking at melting glaciers
When Will The Planet Be Too Hot For Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.
From an Article by David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 9, 2017
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think
This is an article in the New York Magazine that caused “one of the most extraordinary” responses of any article it has ever published. The reason for the article is that most written on global warming talk about the minimum effect of global warming, as determined by scientists, as though wishing the least would happen would make it so.
That’s not the way to handle predictions that have a range of possibilities! The other extreme is not any more probable than the minimum, what will happen is likely to fall between. But it is useful to know what the higher extreme is, knowing the result will be somewhere between. What is certain if billions of people don’t change the way they are living, large parts of the Earth will become almost unlivable and other large parts inhospitable to the extreme.
Doomsday Most models show far greater temperatures than 2degrees Centigrade. Here after all temperatures will be in Centigrade, unless so stated. (One degree Centigrade equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) The average runs about 3.5o for the models, if nothing is done, by 2100, and continues upward beyond in the 22th century. 2100 is precisely as far away as the length of my life now, so baring serious misfortune, younger people alive today will see that time.
This winter a series of days 60 to 70 degrees warmer than normal occurred at the North Pole. It melted some of the permafrost on land. Permafrost is believed to contain i.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice what is in the atmosphere, and when it melts the carbon escapes into the atmosphere, furthering global warming, a positive feedback!
As ice on the Polar ocean melts, less sunlight is reflected back into space, and the light goes into the ocean, which is warmed, causing more melting. Forests dying all over the earth, or being burned by wildfires also are a positive feedback, hastening the high temperatures everywhere.
How fast will the change occur? No one knows. But it is know that at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum it changed 5o in 13 years! And four of the five global extinctions have been caused by climate change caused by greenhouse gas. The exception was the most recent, when the dinosaurs disappeared. It was caused by an asteroid, which cooled the earth for about 6 years with dust, then recovered and warmed above previous temperatures because of extra CO2. The present extinction, the sixth, is well underway. We humans are presently adding CO2 to the atmosphere ten times faster than the worst extinction, 252 million years ago, which was caused by gases from a series of volcanoes that are in what is presently Russia. Presumably we won’t be able to keep that up long. However, no program of reducing emissions alone can prevent climate disaster.
Heat Death We humans are heat engines. Use of energy from our food causes heat, and consequently we must loose heat, more if we exert ourselves, less if we are at rest. The limiting temperature for this is not much above body temperature, 37o. Sweat helps us keep cool, but humidity reduces the ability to loose heat by evaporation of sweat. Some places in the world people are already at that limit. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador one fifth of the population have kidney disease. This seems to be a result of working in the cane fields, a task that was mechanized only two decades ago.
In places where humidity is high, say 90 percent, just moving around above 40o C would be lethal to some. In effect, the human body would cook itself. At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. Even Europe has already, in 2003, had heat waves that killed 2000 a day. A few decades from now the Hajj which takes 2 million to Mecca each year, will not be possible.
Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.
The end of food Where cereal crops are grown at optimum temperature, each degree of warming causes a 10% decline in yield. That means if it is 5 Co warmer by 2100, when we will have 50% more people (the present projection), there is a serious shortage of the basic material for food.
The tropics are already too warm for cereals, and the areas where they are grown because they are at optimum temperature, are further North than most of us realize. What about moving the production area still further North? Those soils in remote Russia and Canada are not suitable for crop production, because it takes centuries for soil to develop the necessary structure and organic matter to be productive and they were recently glaciated.
As much as one third the Earth’s currently inhabited and arable land faces desertification in this century. Decline in precipitation, accumulation of salt from irrigation water or from below, and the decline of great aquifers, such as the Ogallala are responsible. The American dust bowl will return, southern Europe, the Middle East and the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa and the breadbasket of China will be affected, too. Some of these areas are already being hit.
Climate plagues Diseases are locked in Arctic ice that have not circulated for centuries. Anthrax in the body of a long frozen body of a reindeer infected 2000 reindeer, 20 people and killed one boy in Russia. Tropical diseases such as malaria will move north. The distant travel of today’s population and the mixing of natives of many areas facilitate rapid transmission of disease.
Another certainty is the release of tropical diseases not previously not seen in humans as temperatures rise. Higher temperatures facilitate transmission from animals, as does further cutting of the tropical forest. Zika is a familiar example of this.
See Part 2 tomorrow …..
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