Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study claims that, by the end of this century, some cities in the Persian Gulf will be uninhabitable by humans, thanks to extreme temperatures up to 170F (76c).
The abstract of the study;
Future temperature in southwest Asia projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability
A human body may be able to adapt to extremes of dry-bulb temperature (commonly referred to as simply temperature) through perspiration and associated evaporative cooling provided that the wet-bulb temperature (a combined measure of temperature and humidity or degree of ‘mugginess’) remains below a threshold of 35 °C. (ref. 1). This threshold defines a limit of survivability for a fit human under well-ventilated outdoor conditions and is lower for most people. We project using an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this critical threshold under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas concentrations. Our results expose a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.
Read more: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2833.html
Unfortunately the main study is paywalled, but according to the press release in Time Magazine;
Temperatures could reach 170ºF
A number of cities in the Persian Gulf region may be unlivable the end of the century due to global warming if humans do not curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research.
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, projects that by the end of the century heat waves in Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas could lead to temperatures at which humans physically cannot survive over a sustained period of time by around 2100. The threshold, estimated around 170ºF, takes into account heat and humidity that prevent humans from exercising natural functions that allow the body to cool.
“Such severe heat waves are expected to occur only once every decade or every few decades,” said study author Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But when they happen they will be quite lethal.”
http://time.com/4087092/climate-change-heat-wave/
According to Wikipedia, the hottest temperature ever recorded was 57c (134F) in Death Valley, in 1913. 76c (170F) might not seem like much of a leap from 57c, but the cities Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas are all coastal cities which experience substantial Summer rainfall.
Summer rainfall and storms are natural air conditioning. When temperatures soar, evaporation, convection and storm activity remove vast amounts of excess heat from the surface and transport the heat straight up to the edge of space. The heat laden water vapour keeps rising until it condenses – the vapour simply punches straight through the bulk of the world’s greenhouse blanket, soaring into the upper reaches of the troposphere, until it finds a height at which it can dump its vast store of heat.
Anyone who has spent time in the tropics, who has seen the towering thunderheads which form in Summer, has experienced this cooling phenomenon in action. The air is always very perceptibly cooler after a major thunderstorm.
Abhu Dhabi, Bandar Abbas and Doha aren’t going to run out of “coolant” – as coastal cities, any evaporation is immediately replaced from the inexhaustible waters of the world’s oceans.
If the world warms, what is surely more likely than implausibly high maximum heatwave temperatures, is that the temperature would stay about the same, but Summer rainfall would increase.
Paris?
Two points of interest
1/. Driving back from Chichen Itza thright the Quintana Roo I saw the external gauge on the hired car drop from 35C to 27C in less than three minutes as a massive thunderstorm dumped a load of cold water on the rainforest. 35C at Chichen Itza is a lot harder to handle than 50C in the Mojave desert because of humidity.
2/. There is a theory that the ‘Garden of Eden’ – the ‘cradle of civilisation – existed where the Persian gulf now is, as at that time (end of the ice age) sea levels were much much lower than they are and that was a very nice Mediterranean style climate. Rising temperatures, falling rain fall, and later rising sea levels drove the population to abandon hunter gathering and develop agriculture (“mankind’s greatest mistake”*). The myth of the expulsion from the garden of Eden is a story of that process.
I do not advocate the theory – merely mention that it exists.
Oddly unless people was driving 4x4s around that time, far greater climate change happened without human intervention.
*http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
If you think dying at 40 and running the risk of being killed by wild animals are starving every time the rain fails to fall is the life for you, go ahead. I for one am grateful that our ancestors sought better food supplies and as a result started on the road to civilization.
commieBob: I agree completely
Hey! Don’t shoot me: I am only the messenger.
I mention that such theories exist. Not that I espouse them.
BTW there is no reliable evidence as to what age hunter gatherers lived to, but there is plenty of evidence that grinding corn wore you out by 30.
The Kalahari bushmen are not especially short lived, nor are the Australi8an aborigines. Ex of alcoholism and civilisation of course
Leo
Point 1 is a nice example. In the semi-tropical southeastern US, a temperature drop of 10° C after a few minutes of rain from a thundershower is commonplace.
This past spring I recall a sunny afternoon of 90°+ F punctuated by a thunderstorm, and within a few minutes it was 70° with thumb-sized clear ice chunks stacked on the lawn, 100% coverage. An hour later I was waiting at the bus stop wearing a light jacket and plenty of ice remained on the grass because of the cool temperatures and deep cloud coverage. I would guess most models consider this an “anomaly”. But in tropical and semi-tropical areas, these anomalies are very commonplace. Its just how the biosphere works.
57C = 330K, 76C=349K, using t^4 power law, that gives a 25% increase in outgoing energy. Where does that energy come from?
“Where does that energy come from?”
Has to be from man-made CO2, why even ask?
That law assumes that the insulation is constant.
I assume you mean insolation which is solar radiation that has been received, not the fiberglass kind.
“…not the fiberglass kind.”
The worst type of home insulation.
I meant insulation, as in the ability to inhibit heat transfer.
MarkW October 27, 2015 at 10:35 am
“I meant insulation, as in the ability to inhibit heat transfer.”
thank you.
Merely details.
Steve:
I have been talking about t^4 for years, but very few will engage the subject – even on skeptic sites.
I believe that t^4 is planet earth’s ultimate thermostat.
The Stefan Boltzmann law is where the zero feedback sensitivity comes from.
Outgoing radiation scales as εσT^4. In the long run this has to balance the incoming, non reflected solar radiation: (1-α)*S/4 (~240.5 W/m^2 at present) where S is the “solar constant” which averages about 1361-2 W/m^2. At the current average effective radiating temperature of the Earth’s surface, the line tangent to the curve of outgoing radiation (ie the derivative with respect to temperature) is about 0.3 K/W/m^2 so the forcing from a doubling of CO2 (roughly equivalent to decreasing ε by ~.01) increases the equilibrium effective radiative temperature of the surface by ~1.1 K assuming no dependence of ε or α on temperature.
The Stefan Boltzmann law is present in all climate models, the reason it does not stabilize their temperatures is that models have dependences of ε and α ie “feedback” which increase the size of the temperature change necessary to restore balance between incoming and outgoing radiation.
So yeah, it’s a natural balancing mechanism, which prevents the Earth’s temperature from running away to infinity. But it’s not sufficient by itself to determine the full climate response to increased CO2 and it doesn’t rule out, by itself, a large sensitivity.
I don’t know why you’d have any trouble finding people willing to explain or talk about it, though.
Sounds like good news to me. These people seem to be nothing but trouble these days.
They’d be even more trouble once they moved to your neighborhood.
Thank God for oceans! Europe should be quaking in their boots. Not only do they believe in all the AGW stuff but they are the place Mid Easterners go first.
Well of course. Payback’s a bitch. We plan on frying ISIS. They ought to feel right at home there. If only it were true.
The quality of the fear mongering is really going down, even as the volume of cliamte hype and fear goes up dramatically.
hunter writes:
“The quality of the fear mongering is really going down, […]”
The alarmists disappoint.
True which is why ,ironically, is it something that sceptics should encourage, the more alarmist , madder and shriller it gets the better . And the fun part is their simply to arrogant to notice that the reason that they are hoping in pain around is because they shot a whole in their own foot.
A few years ago I moved from Philadelphia to California and experienced 5.6 degrees of climate change as a result. This is about 3X the toxicity limit established in the literature. Fortunately, I’m symptom-free at the moment. But every day is a struggle here in California.
The problem is that the above paragraph is ridiculous. Humans would simply adapt to a slightly warmer climate. This stumped the alarmist for a time. They had no good counter argument. We should now expect to see numerous papers being funded whose aim will be to manufacture the headline “…exceed a threshold for human adaptability”.
Folks in the outback of Australia adapted to the high temperatures by building their houses underground. Ozzies in the outback aren’t thought of as the brightest lights in the sky, so it does seem strange that they could come up with a solution that somehow escaped all these brilliant scientists.
You mean like this recent drivel from Harvard:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/10/26/3714853/carbon-dioxide-impair-brain/
they actually inserted a version of the “Hockey Stick” in one of their graphs! Seems a bit behind the times.
Perhaps it is true and they were sucking up too much CO2 themselves during the analysis and write up.
OR..perhaps they were confused and were using CO instead!
what happens when New Yorker’s used to drink big Slurpees of Pepsi and Coke, did any of that CO2 get ingested into the body?
Your comment reminds me of a line from a GWPF paper criticizing UN predictions of calamity.
Something along the lines of, “what these predictions fail to take into consideration – is that people are not potted plants”.
Anyway – it made me laugh!!
Let me get this straight, the world itself is only going to warm 2 to 5C, but the Arab peninsula is going to warm about 20C? According to the “models”?
These guys are getting more desperate by the minute.
“The annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8–5.4 °F (1.0–3.0 °C) warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as high as 22 °F ”
birds , bees , flowers and trees are already surviving in these hotter temps in the city that are hotter than the expected 2 degree rise by the end of the century.
Maybe maybe not, Perhaps they are factoring in all the “Nukes” that will be acquired and used by then.
michael 🙂
So if that part of the world warms by 20C, other places have to cool to keep the “average global temperature” in line with only 2C-5C warming.
Eric, I wonder if the study uses the MIROC simulations of global surface temperatures.
KNMI has recently deleted them from their Climate Explorer because:
“24-sep-2015 Deleted the MIRO-ESM and MIROC-ESM-CHEM Txx as it reached 80 °C in the deserts.”
See:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/news.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&all=all
Cheers.
Very possibly, though I would be surprised if it was just MIRO-ESM and MIROC-ESM-CHEM. The climate has been very stable over billions of years, yet everyone since James Hansen has been predicting runaway instability…
Ugh, you can’t fix stupid, not even with duct tape.
But crazy glue on thier lips and fingers would make them much less unpleasant to be around.
I’m quite partial to hot models but this is ridiculous.
by 2100 by which time by ‘lucky chance ‘ none of those that made this claim will be around to be reminded of this BS and ask how they got it so wrong , now who says climate ‘scientists’ never learn anything .
“A number of cities in the Persian Gulf region may be unlivable ”
so probably won’t happen.
A lot of Persian Gulf region cities are already barely habitable.
Before air conditioning, there were virtually no cities in any of the desert regions there! These all sprang up in recent times. Back in the pre-air conditioner era, most children died before age 18 and many women died in childbirth, life was very tough back then.
Today, huge cities rise where it is very hard to maintain a city without modern energy systems. Ditto for US desert cities.
My grandfather came to Tucson way back when it was a territory. No one wanted to be posted there in the calvary due to the hot desert climate. My grandfather told us stories how he and his friends used various schemes to stay cool in summer, that is, dig a pit and cover it with brush and then a canvas.
“Heat waves will make Persian Gulf Uninhabitable by 2100”
Finally some good news out of the alarmists!
You mean finally peace in Middle East? No, not plausible…
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m relieved at this climate modelled projection news… I fully expected Eltahir to portend a temperature rise to 96°C rather than just 76°C. The ME dodged a bullet. MIT must be so proud.
Time is running out to get in your scare headline before the Paris climate fest. Late entries and moderate, sane sounding “studies” will not be accepted.
“using an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations”
I’m glad to see the alarmists haven’t lost their sense of humor. Basing a study on climate models is a pretty good joke.
It seems that the majority of climate studies start with “if” and proceed from there. To a layman that does not make sense. If “if” isn’t working out can we get a refund on public monies spent. Probably not as the research itself is a backdoor funding mechanism for local economies, universities complexes, and high power computing.
In the USA we have seen a persistent loss middle class jobs in the private sector. Unable to generate such jobs through the market politicians have increasingly turned to public (often borrowed) funding of public positions in that pay range. Funding junk science meets that goal. Bigger computers, more buildings, and more people to staff it all. The bureaucratic state is like an Egyptian temple complex or European cathedral in that sense. The economics are divorced and sometimes at odds with the religious underpinnings.
Same as it ever was right. I submit that this is why we need a concerted campaign to tackle the Augean stables of climate science funding. It is inconceivable that Dr. Shukla’s gold is a one off. People understand greed and it’s many manifestations all to well. Lets turn over the tables of these modern money changers.
Troe October 27, 2015 at 7:17 am
“It seems that the majority of climate studies start with “if” and proceed from there….”
I think you should make it “if, according to climate models,” .
For as long as the schmuck on the street “thinks” that a temperature of 100 F is twice as hot as 50 F, these charlatans with their models will continue to find support.
I grew up in the deserts of Arizona and Death Valley.
50 degrees was FREEZING COLD. When you acclimate to heat, it hurts when it is cool. My hands would literally tingle with cold and be quite painful.
When I moved to upstate NY where it goes below zero, I got acclimated to that and now, if it is below 40 I work with no gloves because it is ‘warm’ and below zero is ‘cold’ but not freezing. It amused my dad to have me say, ‘It is a warm day today’ in winter when it was above 10 degrees.
My first winter in Iowa, I was amazed at how the locals would start wearing shorts and tee-shirts when the temperature got up to freezing.
This is proof beyond a doubt that having a PhD is correlated with being a moron.
The grant money keeps flowing in, they continue to enjoy events like the Paris gig at someone else’s expense and they don’t actually have to do any hard work, now whose the moron?
They have converted a disability into a profitable career. Nothing dumb about that.
That’s actually a good (or unfortunate) point. How did mankind reach modern time before the invention of the doctoral degree? I will say that in my observation of “professionals” is there is a narrowing of the mind. It happens because the university system of hiring is a measure of “doctored professors”, who of course must have a uniqueness that fits the process. The outcome is observed from the outside that they are morons that live in a tiny tube of knowledge; trapped in their own creation…even though many of the “doctored” are quite brilliant, so are many others who have avoided the “established” higher education realm. Examples abound. Cheers! Scotch for everyone…
Yet another “If the broken climate models that have never predicted anything right before, suddenly started to work” article. Idle speculation.
Absolutely no chance of this happening, the claim is just so ridiculous it’s not even funny anymore. The propaganda is strong when so much rubbish is accepted for the cause in climate non-science.
There is a big question mark over even if the current world record will be broken by 2100. Although they made a good job of removing previous records higher than this one. Maximum temperatures are hardly rising at all and in some areas not even rising especially from 60N to 60S.
Maximum temperature records occasionally occurring in local regions have only slightly beaten previous records, but only within around the global warming temperature rise since the 19th century. For this ridiculous record temperature claim to be even possible, global records based on this will have to rise about 20 c. Global temperatures have never been 35 c during the last billion years. Even the ridiculously wrong climate models only predicted global temperatures at worse in the past about 7 c warmer. (now more like 2 c)
The Persian Gulf is already uninhabitable.
1) War
2) Pirates
3) Sand…(no water)
4) no beer
But most importantly, no bacon.
And some extremely frustrated men who impose ridiculous rules on women.
More insecure than frustrated.
Secure people don’t need to control those around them.
Paul Westhaver
October 27, 2015 at 7:42 am
Only parts of the Persian Gulf are an issue and quite inhabitable. Depends on what you are used to – Bedouin, Sheikh or tourist; and what part of the Gulf you are in. I made several business trips to Iran. No issues even in the southern desert. Biggest risk then (and probably still is) was earthquakes.
War is north of the Gulf at the moment. (Although I do wonder how far south Russia intends to go.)
Pirates near some of the Gulf states are rare as the UAE doesn’t necessarily try to arrest them like the American and Canadian sailors in the area – bullets are quicker. (Well, their special forces arrested this bunch: http://gulfnews.com/opinion/editorials/armed-action-will-keep-high-seas-safe-1.787068 )
For the rich, the UAE is a very nice place. I had the opportunity to be invited over to compete at the World Championship Endurance Ride (horses) in the UAE in 1999 … and I used to fly through Dubai regularly traveling between Africa and S.E. Asia on business. It’s a rather nice place and driving in the sand can be quite the sport. They do have beer and any other drinks you care for. They know their oil is running out and are transforming to a financial centre although it is creating large debt. It is a pretty amazing place, not that I could afford it on my own, but still a great business stop over. Not sure what will happen when the oil and gas reserves dry up although oil and gas are down to 25% of their GDP.
Nice snorkeling and surfing, friendly people. Quite modern compared to countries further north. And I bet they don’t give a darn about CAGW. A degree added on to 45C is hardly noticeable.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ae.html
Is this going to be a problem? By then they will all be living in Europe anyway.
author Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…
well, thank God for tenure Elfatih