Despite Death Threats, Scientist Working On Wet-Bulb Temp Research Keeps Going - Atlantic

[hatrack]

Purdue University climatologist Matthew Huber gets plenty of death threats, but that hasn't stopped him from exploring the outer limits of just how much global warming human beings can tolerate. Whatever our recent Great American Heat Wave may or may not portend, most credible climate scientists agree that human-caused global warming is real -- oh yes they do! -- and most of the research out there, Huber says, predicts dire consequences for people (and other mammals) if average global temperatures rise by 6° Celsius or more.

That could well happen this century: By 2100, Huber points out, the mid-range estimates predict a rise of 3°C to 4°C in average global temperatures based on current economic activities, but those studies ignore accelerating factors like the release of vast quantities of methane -- a potent greenhouse gas -- now trapped beneath permafrost and sea ice that's becoming less and less permanent. Other models foresee rises in the 10°C range this century; at the outer fringe, predictions range as high as 20°C. Truth is, we simply don't know exactly when we'll reach these milestones or what they will cost us. And thanks to the uncertainty, it's been hard to get nations to agree on limits.

All of this got Huber and Steven Sherwood, his colleague at Australia's University of New South Wales, to thinking: Economic considerations aside, they asked, how much warming can we physiologically tolerate? At what point does it get so bad that our bodies can no longer keep cool, so bad that we can no longer work or play sports or even survive for long out of doors? Will we flee for colder climes? Live underground like hobbits, surviving on cold fungus? Okay, I'm projecting -- they didn't actually ponder that last bit that I'm aware of.

In any case, the pair crunched the numbers and published the results in a May 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a measurement called "wet-bulb temperature," which Huber explains below, they modeled what might happen in several warming scenarios. At the point where the average global temperature rise hits 10°C, "even Siberia reaches values exceeding anything in the present-day tropics" and many populated parts of the globe might become, if habitable at all, places where the relatively affluent would likely find themselves "imprisoned" in air-conditioned spaces and where "power failures would become life-threatening." Lacking access to AC, the world's poor would have little choice but to flee. Even "modest" global warming, Huber and Sherwood conclude, could "expose large fractions of the population to unprecedented heat stress."

EDIT

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/will-the-human-body-be-able-to-adapt-to-rising-temperatures/255223/

[Speck Tater]

1. If the person making the threats

really believed he was right about global warming he'd have nothing to fear from letting the scientists do their work.

This nut job, whoever he is, is making death threats because he's scared to death that he might be wrong. People react forcefully when their fake feeling of certainty is threatened.

[flamingdem]

2. The human race can look forward to

saluting their fungal overlords.

Life is imitating scary sci-fi

[ffr]

3. It depends on where you live, age and health.

People in Las Vegas or Phoenix can tolerate more heat than people in humid climates, such as the South. It's at the point that water stops evaporating from your skin and no longer cools the body that presents concern or web bulb temperature. To see who lives and who dies, just add a power outage to the other factors.