Climate-Exodus Expected In The Middle East And North Africa (phys.org) 240
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised. The goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, agreed at the recent UN climate summit in Paris, will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario. The result is deeply alarming: Even if Earth's temperature were to increase on average only by two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold. This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century. Such extremely hot days will occur five times more often than was the case at the turn of the millennium. In combination with increasing air pollution by windblown desert dust, the environmental conditions could become intolerable and may force people to migrate.
That's one way to convince the deniers (Score:5, Funny)
The Dems will see to that no matter what (Score:2)
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In the months leading up to every US election I always keep hearing about how so many Americans will want to move up to Canada if or when so-and-so becomes president, and then it never happens.... even when that person wins the election.
Honestly, it's getting old... how many times do you think you can cry 'wolf' and people will believe you?
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Your example is not really a counterpoint to the one I was making. In fact, most of the Americans who moved to Canada at the time you refer to did not ever "threaten" to do so... they simply did, without any announcement of their intention in advance (in fact, to have done so would have defeated the purpose because of the situation they were trying to get away from).
My point remains... historically, almost all Americans who announce that they will move to Canada based on the outcome of an election befor
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That wasn't because such and such got elected, it was to avoid the draft. Both Dems and Reps oversaw that conflict.
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It was a politically driven exodus. Just like now we had two bad political parties trading power, it isn't like either party then or now was responsive to the will of the people. You only have to look at the statistics on how the will of the people has no effect on passing laws when either party is in power, and the will of big business and political contributors comes out ahead of popular opinion in passing laws no matter which side is "in power".
So I guess your point is that the 60's and 70's exodus to C
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I said that when they *announce* that they are going to move to Canada because of something like an election, they never actually do
That is just making your claim more difficult to ascertain. For that, we need :
1. the number of people that claim to intend to leave in a certain situation; AND
2. the number of people that actually left in that situation; AND
3. the overlap between these people.
How do you intend to get these numbers? (1) and (2) are difficult as it is, (3) might be impossible for historical exoduses. Now, you can leave the burden of proof of *your* assertion to others, but that would be dishonest.
This also makes the claim
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Define "not insignificant".
http://www.tradingeconomics.co... [tradingeconomics.com]
Shows a fairly smooth and stable population for Canada, with no spikes in the 60's or 70's.
Could it be that your idea of "significant" is pretty insignificant?
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Re:They were the worthless ones (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to have a real issue with Carter... odd for the man who is probably the most productive ex-president in American history. The man only went and eradicated and entire disease from humanity since he left office, and he is a few months from eradicating a SECOND one.
But yeah... a president who actively avoided wars and were more focussed on saving lives than taking them and has the sense to employ highly skilled scientists to tell him how to solve problems rather than lobbyists (and continued to do so after leaving office - which is how he achieved the eradication of one disease and is on the verge of doing it again) ... can't have that !
Re:The Dems will see to that no matter what (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The Dems will see to that no matter what (Score:4, Informative)
Forgetting, of course, the amount of methane trapped in the permafrost in Siberia and Canada, which would greatly accelerate the warming, as methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
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And where are you going to get all that fresh water as supplies dry up?
The melting ice is pretty rich in fresh water
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Well the warming isn't going to change the length of the days, something that most agriculture crops have been bred for.
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The growing season gets much shorter
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That'll change once the glaciers have finished melting and the fires really start burning.
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Some Alaskans have a very different opinion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... [smithsonianmag.com]
Alaska and Northern Canada will be some of the very first places to see the more extreme effects of warming. In fact already the ice roads are less stable than they used to be, which will eventually have a huge impact on the ability to operate mines and other economic activities in the far North. To say nothing of the natives who are finding the drastic changes very damaging their their livelihood
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I don't think republicans or anybody else will really care. If there are 1 billion people who want to move into your country with a few hundred million people, you always will have to say "no", even if they all were evangelicals or had other kinds of religions the republicans *would* like. The sheer number of it will just drown this religion argument, or any other argument. It will just be about bikeshedding issues about how to keep them all out of the place. Like whether to put automatically shooting devic
Re:That's one way to convince the deniers (Score:5, Insightful)
The history of mass migrations suggest that even powerful states can be overwhelmed. Rome, Byzantium, Medieval Islamic civilization and China were all unable to prevent massive amounts of migrant peoples, and where the states weren't outright wiped out, they were heavily damaged.
Europe can't even cope with migrants from Syria and North Africa as they are. Now imagine what it would take to prevent many times more than that trying to get into Europe. Could Turkey hold them back? If Turkey fails, could the Balkan states prevent millions of people? And what about the Mediterranean, will the British Royal Navy start laying mines and sinking any boat that tries to get across?
The ramifications of massive migrations out of the Middle East and North Africa for Europe are enormous, and judging by the reactions to current migrations, I think we can see how destabilising and dangerous they will be.
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Rome in particular is a questionable example of that logic.
First of all, was it even migration necessarily? Roman citizenship used to be limited to classes of people who actually came from the city itself. As time passed, the class of people who could be citizens and further regions of the empire were granted citizenship.
Many of the "migrants" who moved to Rome weren't migrants, but slaves brought to Rome after conquest of new territories. And I've also read a logic employed similarly to support contempo
Re:That's one way to convince the deniers (Score:5, Informative)
You're being selective. The plagues during the first half of the second millennium were estimated to have killed killed from 30% to 60% of the population of Europe+Asia. You're making it sound like it killed 90% - that was the death rate from people who caught it. The rest of the population either a. weren't exposed, or b. resistant.
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The black plague, in medieval europe, for example had about a 90% kill rate, comparable with what modern militaries would like to see in an engineered bio weapon.
For what it's worth, I typed this into Google: what percentage of the population did the black plague kill
And got this:
Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population. In total, the plague reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.
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And you are acting like an outright lie doesn't color the rest of the message entirely. Which it does.
Try not lying so blatantly the next time you are trying to scare people into conformance with your religion.
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And it could easily not be.
global warming still better then what NK can get t (Score:2)
global warming still better then what NK can get to any one for 100,000,000 C
Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at the seasonal variation [weather-and-climate.com] of temperatures in Bahgdad.
A shift of a few degrees C is nothing compared to normal seasonal variation, even adjusting the topmost temperatures doesn't mean that much difference in reality.
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114 is a cold day for a Tucson summer.
What are these climate-whiners on about this time?
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People in Tuscon are wealthy enough to own air conditioning.
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:5, Insightful)
The weather is nice where I am, so I don't think the problem is real
Then here's another third of the problem:
The weather is terrible where I am and it used to be fine
Followed by:
Oh, well, just because it's bad where you are doesn't mean global warming is real
Then the final third of the problem:
Oh hi we're climate scientists! Since you apparently aren't paying attention to what we're saying, we're going to say it louder and be more extreme to try to make you listen!
Followed closely by:
Oh, well, you're just being alarmists!
This is then exacerbated by extremists on both sides of the equation tossing around their conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, tree-hugging anti-human rhetoric, plain old-fashioned politicking, and the religious types who quietly tell you it's all part of "Gods plan", "the End Times are coming", and "soon there will be Heaven on Earth and none of this will matter anymore", or whatever other nonsense they spout. So nothing actually gets done to prove anything one way or another because everyone just keeps arguing. What will 'decide' if it's real or not will be if it either becomes Too Late To Do Anything About It (at which time everyone will continue to argue, this time about whose fault it is), or it just Goes Away On It's Own (in which case everyone will continue to argue, this time about who was wrong, who was right, and why).
You want the TL;DR version?
Doesn't matter, we're doomed one way or another, because humans are fucking stupid, especially in large groups
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There was a reason the Romans thought the Huns were representative of the End Times. A civilization can be challenged to its core without all of humanity being threatened. But so far as the Romans were concerned, the threat was existential.
Now imagine millions more people than now are trying to get into Europe using any means they can to get there. If Europe pushes back by closing the borders and using military force to keep the migrants at bay, at some point they're going to get organized, and you may find
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I've said for a long time that the greatest loss of life from climate change will be people killed by other people. Resource wars have a tendency to be exceptionally brutal, especially when the resources in question are essentials like food and water.
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You forgot the anti-simulationists like me. I can write a computer simulation too, and if I do write one I can pretty much guarantee that *my* simulation will not include mass migrations based on a 2 degree rise in global temperature which certainly seems absurd or at least very counter-intuitive. Somehow the current temperature, the exact one we have now is the only one in which human beings can survive? I call bullshit on that. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Maybe my simulation will
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Tectonic drift was first proven on a computer simulation, we didn't have the technology to confirm it with first-hand observation until it had been consennsus for almost 3 decades.
That was done on an early predecessor of the PDP-10. The thing was archaic.
We have much better simulation systems now, much better hardware to run them on - and far better statistical analysis teams to set the parameters and figure out what the results mean.
I've never yet encountered and anti-simulationist who had a sane argument
People who say (Score:2)
'You're either part of the solution or part of the problem' are the problem.
I'm so glad that the El Nino is fading. The Warmistas certainly enjoyed the last year. Finally some warming to talk about. Statistically it's rather small and insignificant, and they had to cool the past again, but it's there. Now they have their fingers and toes crossed hoping that the slight rebound in Artic ice will take a nosedive. Where's the next major conference? Somewhere nice I'm guessing.
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That's not really true, lots of Canadian climate scientists lost their paychecks when they were told to stop talking and didn't.
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When was that?
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:5, Insightful)
Scott Adams makes two great mistakes in that blog post: The first is that he blames science instead of industry for industry-led pseudoscientific disinformation campaigns (diet and tobacco specifically, and presumably also climate). He lays it all at the feet of science for failing to overpower these efforts with hardly a finger shaken at industry. He is saying that science has a credibility problem because of industry's lies. That's bullshit.
The second is that he fails to see that the wrongness of science is relative. [tufts.edu] Apparently until some extremely stringent rightness threshold is passed, science's answers are uselessly wrong, and telling people to cut down on fatty foods to prevent obesity was as wrong as telling them that they're fat because they're full of demons. That's also bullshit.
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:4, Interesting)
How have the scientists lost all credibility? Their findings are fine - no one has managed to challenge them. The thing about science is it doesn't matter who pays for what - the findings must stand up to scientific rigour before they are accepted into the general body of knowledge.
It sounds like you don't understand the scientific method, and are looking for any excuse to stick your fingers in your ears. You are wasting your brain, but I think you know that, and simply don't care. What a wonderful example for future generations.
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I've been paying attention. I've seen a lot of people decide for stupid reasons that global warming can't be happening, and since climate scientists say that it is they need to come up with inane reasons why climate scientists don't have credibility. Maligning climate science and climate scientists is the hallmark of the denier. (Skeptics may be dubious of climate science, but won't make up ludicrous stories about a massive conspiracy or a whole field of scientists clinging to a false orthodoxy.)
Re: Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:5, Informative)
Average high temp [currentresults.com] for a Tucson summer is 99 degrees, so no, 114 is not a cold day. In fact, there's only 7 days on record [tucson.com] where it's ever reached that high.
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114 is a cold day for a Tucson summer.
What are these climate-whiners on about this time?
The problem isn't just the temperature, its the humidity. Past a certain humidity you don't lose body heat through sweating. Then you just cook from the excess heat your metabolism generates.
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The 'Feels like' Temperature is a recent addition to weather forecasts and is largely imaginary.
Are you saying that these ''Feels Like" numbers are what are being used to calculate the global temps?
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The 'Feels like' Temperature is a recent addition to weather forecasts and is largely imaginary.
Are you saying that these ''Feels Like" numbers are what are being used to calculate the global temps?
Not at all.
As human beings we lose heat by sweating. If the air around you is saturated with water vapor sweating does not work. If the air temperature is high enough you will not lose heat and you will die.
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OK, that's not what we were discussing. ;)
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Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:5, Insightful)
A shift of a few degrees C is nothing compared to normal seasonal variation
For people, that is true. People are not going to die of the heat. But their crops and pastures will dry out. So the people will either move or starve. The problem is that there is no where to move to. Even Syrians, who are more educated and secular that most other Middle Eastern people, are not wanted anywhere.
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Exactly. People who point out that Canada will become more arable (eventually) don't usually realize that Canada might not want a large influx of Americans, nor will America want a large influx of Mexicans who can no longer farm their lands. Even assuming the same total amount of land remains capable of producing food, the migrations necessary to get people near those lands will spark several wars and lots of pain and suffering.
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the seasonal variation [weather-and-climate.com] of temperatures in Bahgdad.
A shift of a few degrees C is nothing compared to normal seasonal variation, even adjusting the topmost temperatures doesn't mean that much difference in reality.
Of course that's only kinda relevant if the temperature increases uniformly which it doesn't [phys.org]
In the Middle East and North Africa, the average temperature in winter will rise by around 2.5 degrees Celsius (left) by the middle of the century, and in summer by around five degrees Celsius (right) if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase according to the business-as-usual scenario (RCP8,5).
That's ~9F, would you consider that change in your summertime average to be inconsequential? The average high in Baghdad in July is 44C, if the projection is right it will become 49C, I suspect there's a few places you start to consider uninhabitable at that point.
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I lived in Phoenix wen it got up to 50C one day and was/is regularly above 45C. And no AC either other than at work.
And what if it was regularly 50C, and once hit 55C? You really think it's inconsequential?
(oh, and I don't know how the shift in means affects the max with climate, but people dying in heat waves is definitely an issue in parts of the world)
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How about if you don't have air conditioning? A lot of people in the ME can't afford it and the power is often intermittent at best in many places. Also, clean water can be a luxury in many places in the ME.
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:4, Interesting)
That isn't how bell curves work (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:5, Insightful)
A shift of a few degrees C is nothing
Says the guy who grasps nothing.
The link you gave is using Celsius as scale, not Fahrenheit.
This article is about: if global average increases by 2C then at "hot spots" that might mean 20C or more.
If at those hot spots such peak temperatures are reached, then the normal seasonal variation has doubled. And the peak is so high that you can't live outside anymore, that is much difference in reality.
Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists (Score:5, Insightful)
Except we're not talking about Baghdad getting uniformly 2C warmer, every day of the year. We're talking about 60 additional hot days in the summer with the rest of the year being roughly similar to today. Those sixty days would, almost own their own, raise the year-round average by more than 4C (not 2C). For that to happen the temperature increase on these days be closer to +20C, rather than +2C.
A lot of denialist reckoning does this kind of simplistic reckoning -- e.g., assuming 2C global warming means exactly 2C warmer, uniformly distributed in space and season across the globe. That of course would only amount to a trivial change. But what you're actually going to get is vast increases in extreme weather (hot AND cold) which averaged out across the globe.
Think of it this way: imagine we hold the global increase in temperature to 2C. The amount of additional kinetic energy per unit volume represented by that additional 2C, integrated over the immense volume of the atmosphere, works out to be a staggering amount of total energy, which will change the patterns of weather. Since that immense fluid is rotating, the additional energy cannot mix and diffuse out uniformly and neatly; instead it will drive massive eddies of hot and cold migrating out of their old geographic limits. You'll get all kinds of extreme weather both hot AND cold, it just all averages out to +2C temperature-wise.
To put that perspective, current estimates are that we're capturing an additional 8 x 10^21 joules of extra solar energy per year, every single year.
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In other words you really have no idea what you're talking about. No data has been faked. It's not "statistically less likely to happen than getting hit by a meteor". It's not ONLY the summer, as has been explained to you time and time again. So yes, it is "straight-up" the realm of idiots and fools, as you made it up.
You are the only one here lying, and it's your religion which is becoming toast. Hint: If you find yourself calling the scientific method bogus, you might just be an idiot.
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But... Could! Might! Maybe!
We must act now before it's too late!
Because models!
More Great Editing (Score:5, Informative)
This is in the summary:
"the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold"
This literally means that if the temp averaged 90F it will then average 180F. That's a lot of climate change.
Could we, you know, maybe have something that makes sense? Like "the temperature in summer in these regions will increase twice as much as previously expected"?
Slashdot may have new owners but the editing hasn't quite gotten there yet.
Re:More Great Editing (Score:5, Informative)
"the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold"
This literally means that if the temp averaged 90F it will then average 180F. That's a lot of climate change.
It's worse than that, because 0F is just an arbitrary point on the temperature scale. The only sensible way to interpret a doubling of temperature is relative to absolute zero, so this means that if the temperate averaged 90F (305 Kelvin) it will then average 638F (610 Kelvin).
That is, indeed, well outside the range of human habitability.
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First, convert to Kelvin. 90F = 305kelvins. Then you can double it. 610kelvins. Now convert back to Fahrenheit. 610kelvins=638F.
That's a lot of climate change.
It's far worse than you thought. 638F. That's hot enough to melt Lead an is 200degrees above the temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts.
Yay, more migration (Score:2, Insightful)
The syrian civil war was started because of a 5 year drought. We got 1 million new migrants in Europe. Unless we quit destroying the world climate we'll have 500 million migrants. Stop Using Oil Now! And retarded americans stop using gas guzzling cars.
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The syrian civil war was started because of a 5 year drought. We got 1 million new migrants in Europe. Unless we quit destroying the world climate we'll have 500 million migrants. Stop Using Oil Now! And retarded americans stop using gas guzzling cars.
The drought was just the Last straw that broke the camels back. The tensions between the Assad family Regime and the oppressed Sunni majority have been simmering since Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970
heat wave (Score:2)
or the general economy will improve so much that they'll just buy air conditioning (like people in death valley).
more power generation (Score:3)
Twofold? (Score:2)
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In places like Dubai, regular summer temperatures could be around 117 degrees in the summer. In places like Kuwait City they could be as high as 140 degrees. That's by 2070.
http://www.theguardian.com/env... [theguardian.com]
I'd say even 117 is pretty fucking hot, and 140 is beyond even the maximums recorded at Death Valley.
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Adelaide, South Australia (Score:2)
> This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century.
We already get temperatures hotter than that (47 C) in Adelaide, South Australia.
It's why I left.
Fuck that place and fuck that heat.
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Boris Johnson's Brexit plan involves a 4 country free migration zone with our 2 countries, NZ and the UK.
So there'd be no reason you can't buy a second house in South Australia. Travelling between them might accelerate global warming though.
the opposite may well happen (Score:2)
There is a good chance that climate change will, in fact, bring more precipitation to Northern Africa:
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I used to trust the National Geographic, but since most of it was sold to R. Murdoch, I take anything from NG with a big grain of salt. Hang on, no - I just believe the opposite.
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I'd guess at minimum, plant respiration would be hindered due to higher rates of evaporation.
Plants lose moisture through leaf pores. The pores are open to absorb CO2. As CO2 levels go up, they can absorb enough CO2 through fewer and smaller pores, so they lose less water. So higher temps will be bad for plants, but the higher CO2 levels will help mitigate the problem somewhat.
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And how does the plant know it should grow smaller pores?
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Re:Welp, we're screwed. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are benefits, but the costs overwhelm the benefits.
A malfunctioning septic system may see your lawn grow greener, but that's usually followed by a sewage smell and a very large bill to fix the problem.
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The cleverer plants are tasty. Animals will ingest their seed and thus the plants' children will migrate to wherever the animals go.
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Climate fluctuates naturally. :D
Does it?
Then name as many natural causes or named fluctuations from your mind as you can. Feel free to stop early if you think it is to much for us
One shot, one kill (Score:2)
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Global warming is stupid hype because we cannot look at the whole of human impact, which is regulated by population and not product choices by people in the 5% of the population that comprises the West. Climate fluctuates naturally. What does not is human use of land, which at this point is nearing epidemic proportions and will result in many extinct species. But you don't hear about that on the news.
Humanity has come reasonably close to a local extinction event a couple times in the last couple millennia. The black plague, in medieval europe, for example had about a 90% kill rate, comparable with what modern militaries would like to see in an engineered bio weapon.
What is new in the last century is that humanity is now capable of initiating its very own mass, global extinction event. Global warming could easily be comparable in scope, scale, and damage to a nuclear holocaust and the death toll due t
The civilization disease (Score:2)
Then find a better method of leadership :)
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The black plague, in medieval europe, for example had about a 90% kill rate, comparable with what modern militaries would like to see in an engineered bio weapon.
Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population. In total, the plague reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.
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You distinguish by looking at trend lines. That means you can't definitely say any particular extreme temperature event is caused by climate change, but you can look at the overall frequency and temperatures of such events and correlate them to other data points, and can say, overall, AGW is going to be responsible for many, if not most of them.
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:4, Insightful)