A Third Of the Planet's Population Is Exposed To Deadly Heatwaves (motherjones.com) 273
An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly a third of the world's population is now exposed to climatic conditions that produce deadly heatwaves, as the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere makes it "almost inevitable" that vast areas of the planet will face rising fatalities from high temperatures, new research has found. Climate change has escalated the heatwave risk across the globe, the study states, with nearly half of the world's population set to suffer periods of deadly heat by the end of the century even if greenhouse gases are radically cut. "For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible," said Camilo Mora, an academic at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the study. High temperatures are currently baking large swaths of the south-western US, with the National Weather Service (NWS) issuing an excessive heat warning for Phoenix, Arizona, which is set to reach 119F (48.3C) on Monday. The heat warning extends across much of Arizona and up through the heart of California, with Palm Springs forecast a toasty 116F (46.6C) on Monday and Sacramento set to reach 107F (41.6C).
Real, but (Score:5, Insightful)
A hint: please don't use Mother Jones as a source for science information.
Re:Real, but (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Real, but (Score:5, Interesting)
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I also live in Phoenix and you are confusing individually hot days with the total number of days over 120. Yes, I also remember in 2001 even that it was so hot they had to stop all flights in and out Skyharbor.
Also note [wunderground.com] that on this day in 1990 it was 111 degrees. We're warming that than today. Can you guess when the last record was set for this day? You guessed right, it was June 20th 2016 where it was 116. So while June of 1990 was famously hot, its not even as hot as a normal June for us right now.
Eve
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I'm not believing it until it's on Infowars and the fillings in my teeth.
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I'll only believe it when I hear it! On a different note, the CIA cafeteria lunch menu will be meatloaf on Tuesday.
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The true enemy of mankind [sciencedaily.com]
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When it's cold out, I can wear warmer clothes and it's fairly simple to heat my immediate environment by burning things. When it's hot out, there's a hard limit to the clothes I can remove, and air conditioning is complicated and not necessarily all that effective at high temperatures. Moreover, consider room temperature at 70F. The article is discussing temperatures in the neighborhood of 120F, which is 50F above room temperature. 50F below room temperature is 20F, which is very comfortable with prope
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Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Please mod parent up to 5 for "Funny". The Grauniad isn't credible about anything - but especially topics that involve numbers, logic, or science.
Re:Real, but (Score:5, Informative)
Even Mother Jones gets it right sometimes [motherjones.com].
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Human-induced climate change is real... but this article is alarmism.
Climate change is real, but how much of a role humans play in it is something we will not fully understand for a long time.
That said, this is definitely alarmism. There is a reason why even just a few hundred years ago, even a few decades ago, places like what are today Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, etc. had very few people living there: those places suck without modern air conditioning.
Sure there were wealthy people who wintered in Florida (Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were even next door neighbors during
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but how much of a role humans play in it is something we will not fully understand for a long time.
Any links for that?
I thought climate change was driven by the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (and by that increased water vapour and methan concentrations)
If you know non human reasons I guess many people would like to know about that!
Re: Real, but (Score:2)
I don't see why it couldn't. Stars are like factories that produce elements by smashing stuff together. There should be some C and O in there somewhere. If so, I'm not seeing any reason that stops them from bonding with one C and two O.
But, I'm pretty sure there would be no meaningful changes to our climate, based on anything made there. I also would begin to guess how much of that might be emitted. It is rather pointless for this discussion, I imagine.
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Stars with below 8–9 Solar masses never reach high enough core temperature to burn carbon, instead ending their lives as carbon-oxygen white dwarfs after shell helium flashes gently expel the outer envelope in a planetary nebula.[3][13]
In stars with masses between 8 and 11 solar masses, the carbon-oxygen core is under degenerate conditions and carbon ignition takes place in a carbon flash, that lasts just milliseconds and disrupts the stellar core.[14] In the late stages of this nuclear burning they d
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I suppose I should look up hour big Sol is. Google is so very far away.
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Sol is one solar mass.
Poe's law?
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Weed might be a factor.
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The carbon on Earth came from the star that was there before the sun.
Re: Real, but (Score:2)
It does emit heat, while co2 does not
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It does emit heat, while co2 does not
Since CO2 has an emissivity not equal to zero, it emits heat according to Stefan-Boltzmann's law, just like every other substance in the universe.
Re:Real, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Human-induced climate change is real... but this article is alarmism.
Climate change is real, but how much of a role humans play in it is something we will not fully understand for a long time.
Sorry, but no. Although there is a well-paid effort to make people believe otherwise, in fact, scientists are not actually stupid .
We've understood the basics of the greenhouse effect for over a century; we've had good measurements of infrared absorption spectra for sixty years; we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now; and we've been making detailed measurements of atmospheric profiles and the incident solar forcing factor for thirty years. The overall picture of how human-emitted greenhouse gasses play in climate is understood.
There is still a lot of science being done, but this is is filling in the fine details. The overall picture is not controversial (at least, not by scientists).
That said, this is definitely alarmism.
We agree, however, on that point.
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I personally like higher temperatures, bring me on some global warming, we are gonna need it for the next glacial phase of our current Ice Age.
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in fact, scientists are not actually stupid .
As a group, yes, generally. Individually? Well I'm a scientist and I'm still here, so...
Re: Real, but (Score:2)
Not true. I am a scientist, and I'm a blithering moron, sometimes. If you don't believe me, ask my girlfriend. She will tell you all about it.
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we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now;
This isn't really true, unless you mean very rough estimates. Consider that without an atmosphere, the earth would be a certain temperature (as the moon is now). We don't know what that temperature would be for Earth. We have a rough idea, within 10 degrees. Likewise, we don't know how much warming the present atmosphere is providing. We have good rough estimates, but again, within 10 degrees.
You will never read precise numbers for the warming given to us from our blanket that is the atmosphere, because t
Check the textbook [Re:Real, but] (Score:2)
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~bage... [colorado.edu]
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/radiation/
You will never read precise numbers for the warming given to us from our blanket that is the atmosphere,
...unless you check an astronomy text, which will go through the planetary equilibrium t
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Cooling wasn't real, but warming is [Re:Real, but] (Score:5, Informative)
You may "know" that there was a global cooling scare in the 70s, but in fact there wasn't, or at least, there wasn't any such a scare supported by or coming from the science community. The American Meteorological Society wrote an article debunking that myth: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... [ametsoc.org]
The myth of the "1970s global cooling scare" rests primarily on one high-profile 1975 Newsweek article, with a scary headline ("The Cooling World"). But the atmospheric science community never had any consensus that the world was heading for a cooling trend.
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No there wasn't an actual global cooling scare supported by the scientific community in the 70s however there were hand picked scientific articles that the media used to create one in the general public. Then later it was chlorofluorocarbons will destroy the ozone layer. In general the media over the years has snowed over the details they are reporting and gone for the worst case scenario to grab headlines even if it meant re-interpreting the results.
Since I will not be doing any research into the field mys
New normal sometimes is reversion to the mean (Score:5, Interesting)
Example, California drought claimed by alarmists to represent the doom of AGW coming to Cali. But research is indicating that California has been far wetter over the last century than it is normally and that the current drought is actually par for the long-term normal.
California’s current drought is being billed as the driest period in the state’s recorded rainfall history. But scientists who study the West’s long-term climate patterns say the state has been parched for much longer stretches before that 163-year historical period began.
Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years — compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.
“We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years,” said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. “We’re living in a dream world.”
California in 2013 received less rain than in any year since it became a state in 1850. And at least one Bay Area scientist says that based on tree ring data, the current rainfall season is on pace to be the driest since 1580 — more than 150 years before George Washington was born. The question is: How much longer will it last?
Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.
Looking back, the long-term record also shows some staggeringly wet periods. The decades between the two medieval megadroughts, for example, delivered years of above-normal rainfall — the kind that would cause devastating floods today.
The longest droughts of the 20th century, what Californians think of as severe, occurred from 1987 to 1992 and from 1928 to 1934. Both, Stine said, are minor compared to the ancient droughts of 850 to 1090 and 1140 to 1320.
Bill Patzert, a research scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, says that the West is in a 20-year drought that began in 2000. He cites the fact that a phenomenon known as a “negative Pacific decadal oscillation” is underway — and that historically has been linked to extreme high-pressure ridges that block storms.
Such events, which cause pools of warm water in the North Pacific Ocean and cool water along the California coast, are not the result of global warming, Patzert said. But climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has been linked to longer heat waves. That wild card wasn’t around years ago.
“Long before the Industrial Revolution, we were vulnerable to long extended periods of drought. And now we have another experiment with all this CO2 in the atmosphere where there are potentially even more wild swings in there,” said Graham Kent, a University of Nevada geophysicist who has studied submerged ancient trees in Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe.
Re:Real, but (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a pro tip: look up the result in other sources using google [google.com], find a more useful source [nationalgeographic.com] that tells you things like the name of the journal [nature.com] the research was published in.
In this case it was Nature Climate Change, a relatively new offshoot of the prestigious journal Nature. Nature Climate Change was established in 2011, but by last year ut gad achieved an impact factor of over 19, making it the most cited journal in its field. This doesn't mean it's infallible, but it means it doesn't have to scrape the bottom of the research barrel to fill its pages. This paper may be right or it may be wrong, but it's pretty much guaranteed not to be garbage.
Knowing the journal name makes it trivial to find the original paper [nature.com], or at least the abstract.
Still it is never possible to know the significance of a paper or a study in the short term. You have to wait until it is cited in a review paper [wikipedia.org], which will summarize all the supporting and conflicting results that followed any particular piece of research. You should never make a life decision (change what you eat) or policy decision based on any single paper until it has been cited and characterized as sound in a review paper published in a high impact factor journal.
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You misspelled 'evangelical conservative climate change denier.'
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Even if warming is part of a natural cycle, it does seem quite likely that man is exacerbating the situation. If nothing else, if we could run our societies without belching pollution into the atmosphere, it'd be the better alternative. I look forward to clean fusion plants (now supposedly only 20 years in the future!).
So please don't call me a "denier". My issue is that few of the proposed "solutions" seem to be based on science. I see the occasional discussion of carbon sequestration and that sort of thin
So long Icehouse Earth. (Score:2)
The question that we should be asking: is the transition point to Greenhouse Earth under 700ppm of CO2? If so, there is likely no stopping it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth [wikipedia.org]
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I for one am glad it is. We need to reduce consumption and materialism first and foremost. This is quite often driven by 'for profit' capitalism, so its no surprise that the road eventually leads to a redistribution of wealth. This is not a bad thing. There is no reason with all the abundance in the world, that some people should be "richer" than others
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It's not about climate change or environmentalism, it really hasn't been for a long time...it's about socialist economic policy--redistribution of wealth. The leaders of the movement readily admit as much.
I really think you are missing a point on this. Let's start basic, winter wheat here in the US. You can apply this to coffee or chocolate, but why not something that most likely directly affects the US? Now over the last few decades the US yield of winter wheat has declined. It isn't that we aren't growing enough, it is that it's overall quality has decreased. Without getting too detailed, wheat grown needs a pretty stable environment especially early on. If that's not the case the amount of starch in
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As opposed to the chicken littles on the far left claiming humans are causing climate change? Both positions are equally as wrong about climate change. Some evangelical conservatives actually agree that humans are quite responsible for making it worse. However, they also acknowledge the natural portion of climate change as the Earth's climate, much like Earth's geological geological system, is in a constant state of flux. Nut jobs exist in all parts of the political spectrum, not just the ones you disa
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Even if climate change weren't happening, those kind of conservatives would always find some reason to yell at the rest of us. They like telling people what to do. Environmentalists just want to live and let live, they would rather not be telling people what to do. But people keep dumping their pollution in the shared environment we all have to live in. It's like you let your dog shit on my lawn and then you call me names when I tell you to pick it up.
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Breaking news (Score:2)
Heatwaves are a thing. They can be very dramatic.
Baseline figure for this prediction (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Baseline figure for this prediction (Score:5, Informative)
That said, here's a link to the original paper in Nature [nature.com] rather than some spin piece in Mother Jones. The 2100 prediction is outright extrapolation, and there's not quite enough history for me to feel confident about the trendline. But there is enough of a historical trend not to dismiss this as mere alarmism as some have posted.
We live in the tropics or subtropics (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering most of the globe lives either the tropics or the subtropics, this is probably only going to get worse, especially as the temperate zones become more and more tropical.
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This!!! Absolutely this! Given that 1/6th of the world's population is in India - a completely tropical country, and big numbers in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, that makes up those numbers easily. Add up the populations of these countries, tossing in Pakistan & Bangladesh, and one gets 31% of the world's population right there. After that, toss in the population of the countries in the equatorial areas of Africa, such as Congo, and the number easily exceeds it.
Looks to me more like a
AZ Experiences Global Warming Every Year! (Score:2)
Or as those of us in Arizona call it... Summer.
Re: it is a DRY HEAT - and it is not that hot! (Score:3)
I could be wrong, but I think much of Arizona is not actually a dessert. I bet it wouldn't taste good, at all.
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I am baked in Maine. Close enough?
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when it gets above 110, it doesn't really matter -- it's unbearably hot, irrespective of humidity.
definitely agree with you though, Phoenix should not exist as a metropolitan area with 4+ million people. That water comes from somewhere (colorado river). What's even worse is that there are cotton fields.. one of the most water intensive crops on earth, being grown with stolen water, in a fucking desert. Something is seriously out of whack in regards to how water is priced in that part of the country.
(But
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People say dry heat like it ain't no big deal. It's true that in the shade, dry heat isn't that much of a problem. AFAIK, one definition of heat index uses the wet bulb temperature, measuring the temperature of a wet bulb in the shade. But the thing about the desert is that there is no shade. There is no cloud cover, pretty much every day, and there are no trees to hide under. You have some short bushes and occasional cacti, but you won't have meaningful shade unless it's man-made. The air temperature isn't
the desert is hot (Score:2, Insightful)
Surprise, the desert is hot and such high heat is deadly if exposed to it too long. Here is an idea, don't live in the desert.
The sky has fallen (Score:2)
...so I guess we're all dead then?
Oh wait, humans are the most adaptable creatures to have ever existed (as far as we know) on this planet.
Perhaps the snowflakes will melt.
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Aren't some of those pretty much quoting the same things Paul Ehrlich said 50 years ago?
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I think that maybe some people feel that it's too crowded and want a lot of people to die.
Tell me about it... (Score:2)
Silicon Valley is the high 90's this week. Power went out yesterday for a few hours, making the afternoon heat unbearable without the fans. Still trying to figure out where to put another fan in the Cougar QBX Mini-ITX case [amzn.to], as the SSD and HDD run ten degrees higher than my fileserver with six HDDs and seven fans. This case is supposed to have enough room for a regular PSU, a dual-slot GPU and a water cooler radiator. I don't have either and there isn't enough room for my fat fingers.
https://twitter.com/cd [twitter.com]
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But I wonder, why are you trying to cram so much into a such a small space?
The ECS KAM1-I AM1 mini-ITX motherboard has two serial ports and headers for two more serial ports, which made it perfect as a Red Hat Linux terminal server for my Cisco certification rack. I got the motherboard and AMD AM1 processor for $25 each last year. The mATX case that I had was overkill and I wanted something smaller. The Cougar case for $50 was perfect. I'll probably replace the PSU with a picoPSU [mini-box.com] to free up space inside.
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OK but why cram it in such a small space?
I build my systems small. For years it was mATX motherboards. I'm now switching to mini-ITX for future systems.
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I bet the temperature would drop five degrees if everyone would switch to lower TDP hardware and away from HDDs to SDDs.
Not necessarily. The case for my file server can hold 14 HDDs. If 1TB SSDs were available for $50 each, I could put 28 into my case with dual SSD adapters.
Millions will perish. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it strange that some people call this alarmism when the truth is that extreme weather conditions were predicted to occur decades ago. It's been going on for a while and we're now getting a taste of its brutal heat. The point is that this brutality is going to spread to much of the planet. In the developed world we have electricity to help cool us and sufficient water to keep our crops alive. However, in the underdeveloped world people will try to survive just like they always have but it won't be enough. Either they will migrate to a cooler climate and/or they will die from the heat. If you don't want mass immigration to devastate your nation, you need to be working on a way to reverse the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Considering how lightly most countries are taking this threat, million of people are going to die and millions more will migrate and it will reshape our societies. You can call it alarmism but it's really happening and it's happening right now.
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Millions will perish? Really? I have an even worse prediction for you. More than 10 billion people are going to die in the next 100 years.
(You see what I did there?)
Now that isn't to say that we should do nothing about climate change, but if, and it's a big if, the price of climate changes is a few (or even scores of) millions of lives, we need to balance this with the billions whose lives are better off as a result of increase access to energy (including to CO2 producing energy).
We already have people livi
Decades ago they made lots of predictions (Score:2)
Many of them never came to pass. That perhaps the most generic "there will be extreme weather events" is one of the few that appears to have had merit is telling in itself. Even Miss Cleo could be right once in awhile "There will be a death in your family in the next few years..."
One of the things that fuels "deniers" is the failure of the climate models to make specific, verifiable predictions that actually occur when predicted. E.g. http://thefederalist.com/2014/... [thefederalist.com]
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One of the things that fuels "deniers" is the failure of the climate models to make specific, verifiable predictions that actually occur when predicted.
"The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be higher than this year year," is a prediction that has been going strong. ;)
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million of people are going to die and millions more will migrate and it will reshape our societies
You mean that the same process that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years is going to continue? That's not exactly a bold prediction.
? Heating for thousands of years.. No
It has been going on for 200 years, and is on an exponential curve, making it sucker punch now that it is kicking in.
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Temperature over the ages:
here. [biocab.org]
It has mostly been much warmer from mid-Carboniferous to now.
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a third has ALWAYS been exposed to deadly heat (Score:3, Insightful)
in 1990 it was 122 deg F in Phoenix.
this is alarmist trash, study the history of heat waves and find out when the massive deaths were. Hint, not recently. 5,000 dead in the 1936 north american heat wave, for example
kids. imagining any and every bad thing that happens in their lifetime is the world's greatest tragedy. pffft, this is alarmist nonsense.
Re:a third has ALWAYS been exposed to deadly heat (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year was already the warmest year on record, 0.94 C above mid-20th century mean, and we've been having very warm years for the last 2 decades [noaa.gov]. If your point was that temperatures aren't rising, then I'm going to want to see some data to back up your claims. Even if it's just where you live, can you show temperatures have been flat or falling in the past 4 decades? Or do you just have worse and worse memory and can't remember how cold it was back then?
You'd expect more to die (Score:2)
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in 1990 it was 122 deg F in Phoenix.
Which is pretty much a confirmation of the article.
Interesting (Score:2)
The highest temperature in Arizona's recorded history was 128 degrees, on June 29, 1994
seems like we are moving in the right direction then, good job humons
Today It's just weather.. and a bit of Irony. (Score:5, Informative)
Late June has always been the hottest part of the year in the southern desert. The high today is well within the curve we expect this time of year. Insane hot? Yes. Atypical, no. Fun watching some unlucky Weather Channel reporter standing outside in the sun saying "Yep it's hot." We try not to do that ourselves.
However:
Yearly average temperatures are hotter than before. It's getting hot earlier in the year and staying hot until much later in the year. It's not attention-grabbing enough to say that it didn't drop below freezing for the past two years in Phoenix, but that is significant. It's just significant in a way that has more to do with microclimate, rather than macroclimate.
Over the years, Phoenix has grown. It's now the 5th largest city in the US. Phoenix also has many satellite cities. Some of them are major cities in their own right. For example, Mesa by it's self is slightly bigger than Atlanta GA. What that means is lots of concrete, paved roads, and air conditioning. All produce or retain heat. Phoenix has developed an urban "Heat Island," which repels rain storms and makes the city even hotter.
In other words, the Temperature in Phoenix today is NOT a valid indicator of global climate.
Now, let's go two hours North of Phoenix to Sedona and Flagstaff. Those smaller cities are in forested areas which are drier and slightly warmer than before. It's easy to see large swaths of dead trees in the forests caused by the stresses of longer-term changes in climate (and poor forest management.)
Now for the irony:
Most voters in Arizona take it in faith that what they are told by their political party is correct. Arizona is also strongly Republican. See where I'm heading? Strange if you think of it. Perhaps it's the heat?
-D
Cold waves? (Score:2)
How much of the world's population is exposed to deadly cold waves?
Below-freezing weather is pretty unsurvivable unless you have shelter and artificial heating. A lot of the world's population lives in areas that occasionally get below freezing.
It makes sense that as the planet warms, deadly cold waves will become less common - isn't it only fair to take this into account as well?
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Below-freezing weather is pretty unsurvivable unless you have shelter and artificial heating.
An Iglu does not need artificial heating to be warm. The body heat of the people inside is enough.
It makes sense that as the planet warms, deadly cold waves will become less common
In the far north, far south and everywhere with appropriated hight: it will always be cold in 'winter'.
The problem (Score:2)
Meanwhile, drought levels across the country (Score:2)
Have reached lows. Have a look at the map at
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ [unl.edu]
Just 5 percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions, the lowest level of drought here since government scientific agencies began updating the U.S. Drought Monitor on a weekly basis in 2000.
stupid ancestors are to blame (Score:2)
Some alternate sources (Score:5, Informative)
Abstract of the original article: https://www.nature.com/nclimat... [nature.com]
Press release from Nature East Asia: http://www.natureasia.com/en/r... [natureasia.com]
Press release from U. Hawaii Manoa (the institution of the lead authors): http://www.hawaii.edu/news/201... [hawaii.edu]
Article at phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-... [phys.org]
Article at Science Daily: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
Interactive map of number of deadly heat days: https://maps.esri.com/globalri... [esri.com]
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Not just one year [Re:That's nice] (Score:5, Informative)
Climate change has no effect on a year-to-year basis. If we're showing the weather to someone from Year 1900, then ok, but we aren't, so this is just dumb.
To be fair, although I think the Mother Jones article is alarmist, the actual work cited catalogued heat-related deaths documented "for 783 lethal heatwaves in 164 cities across 36 countries [phys.org]," referencing a search of publications dating back to 1980. This was not a one-year study.
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because there were no massive heat waves with even more deaths before that? Like say the 1936 North American heat wave?
we have better new coverage nowadays, that's all. This is all alarmist trash for young people with no knowledge of recent past let alone history
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Cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather, and it's not the extreme low or high temperatures that cause the most deaths, according to a study published Wednesday.
The study found the majority of deaths occurred on moderately hot and moderately cold days instead of during extreme temperatures.
"Although the risk of mortality due to extremely cold or hot days is actually higher, they are less frequent," said lead author Antonio Gasparrini of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
The study
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Why so violent?
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California drought solution: stop farming (Score:2)
http://www.mercurynews.com/201... [mercurynews.com]
Although many Californians think that population growth is the main driver of water demand statewide, it actually is agriculture. In an average year, farmers use 80 percent of the water consumed by people and businesses — 34 million of 43 million acre-feet diverted from rivers, lakes and groundwater, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
“Cities would be inconvenienced greatly and suffer some. Smaller cities would get it worse, but farmers would ta
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Actually, ISIS, Al Quaida, the Russians and a bunch of people in the Middle East and North Africa are actively working on a solution as we sit here typing!
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And don't forget Kim Jong Un, that champion advocate of combating human-caused global warming by eliminating humans!
Maybe the DNC could hire Kim as a climate change consultant. He'd fit right in with the #huntrepublicans crowd at the DNC!
Strat
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I don't think it is plausiible that the planets population is declpining by 4B people over the course of 50 years.
It is more likely it will stabilize around those 10B give or take 1B.
Western countries, mainly Europe have a decline of about 0.5% - 1% of population per year. I see no reason why that should be different world wide when health care, birth control, and social security is established and working everywhere.
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that means two thirds ARENT?
Actually, TFS says that 1/3 of the people on Earth are "hot."
It these heatwaves really are lethal, that number will be reduced down to 1/4 really soon. The problem will be self-correcting until nobody lives in a heatwave any more.
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Anywhere in south Georgia and South Carolina pretty much in its entirety runs 90 degrees and 90% humidity right on through summer.
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I've seen water condense on the outside of windshields where the AC was blowing. Fuck Florida.
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O I C, I'm the moron, huh? Not you, who apparently doesn't grok sarcasm? Should I really need to put a </sarcasm> tag at the end, for the two-digit IQ people like you?
Yes, please.
Sarcasm becomes invisible when posted on /. (or pretty much anywhere else on the 'net) because it's indistinguishable from the apparently sincere posts of trolls and clueless idiots.
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