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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to a new study, people don’t thrive in places where the average annual temperature is higher than 15C / 59F.
Unsuitable for ‘human life to flourish’: Up to 3B will live in extreme heat by 2070, study warns
Doyle Rice USA TODAY
May 4, 2020By 2070, up to 3 billion people are likely to live in climate conditions ‘deemed unsuitable for human life to flourish.’
…
If global warming continues unchecked, the heat that’s coming later this century in some parts of the world will bring “nearly unlivable” conditions for up to 3 billion people, a study released Monday said.
The authors predict that by 2070, much of the world’s population is likely to live in climate conditions that are “warmer than conditions deemed suitable for human life to flourish.”
…
That “niche” is equivalent to average yearly temperatures of roughly 52 to 59 Fahrenheit. The researchers found that people, despite all forms of innovations and migrations, have mostly lived in these climate conditions for several thousand years.
…
“Large areas of the planet would heat to barely survivable levels and they wouldn’t cool down again,” said study co-author Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “Not only would this have devastating direct effects, it leaves societies less able to cope with future crises like new pandemics. The only thing that can stop this happening is a rapid cut in carbon emissions.”
…
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/05/04/world-heat-conditions-unlivable-global-warming-unabated/3063849001/
The abstract of the study;
Future of the human climate niche
Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Marten Scheffer
PNAS first published May 4, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117Contributed by Marten Scheffer, October 27, 2019 (sent for review June 12, 2019; reviewed by Victor Galaz and Luke Kemp)
All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.
Read more: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117
The explanation the study authors give for why they don’t think humans thrive above 59F;
Why have humans remained concentrated so consistently in the same small part of the potential climate space? The full complex of mechanisms responsible for the patterns is obviously hard to unravel. The constancy of the core distribution of humans over millennia in the face of accumulating innovations is suggestive of a fundamental link to temperature. However, one could argue that the realized niche may merely reflect the ancient needs of agrarian production. Perhaps, people stayed and populations kept expanding in those places, even if the corresponding climate conditions had become irrelevant? Three lines of evidence suggest that this is unlikely, and that instead human thriving remains largely constrained to the observed realized temperature niche for causal reasons.
First, an estimated 50% of the global population depends on smallholder farming (19), and much of the energy input in such systems comes from physical work carried out by farmers, which can be strongly affected by extreme temperatures (20). Second, high temperatures have strong impacts (21⇓–23), affecting not only physical labor capacity but also mood, behavior, and mental health through heat exhaustion and effects on cognitive and psychological performance (20, 24, 25). The third, and perhaps most striking, indication for causality behind the temperature optimum we find is that it coincides with the optimum for economic productivity found in a study of climate-related dynamics in 166 countries (12). To eliminate confounding effects of historical, cultural, and political differences, that study focused on the relation within countries between year-to-year differences in economic productivity and temperature anomalies. The ∼13 °C optimum in MAT they find holds globally across agricultural and nonagricultural activity in rich and poor countries. Thus, based on an entirely different set of data, that economic study independently points to the same temperature optimum we infer.
Read more: Same link as above
My view, this kind of study is what happens when a bunch of scientists based in temperate climates didn’t enjoy their last Caribbean holiday.
There is substantial evidence the “optimum” described in the study is a historical accident. There are plenty of cultures like Thailand and India, which built large populous nations with big cities, even conquered empires, without the “benefits” of a temperate climate, not to mention wealthy modern day tropical nations like Singapore, Malaysia and increasingly Indonesia.
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Let these twits spend a summer in Maracaibo. Like the natives do, and have done for several hundred years. To misquote the beloved Cat Talk guys Tom and Ray Malliozzi “Doesn’t anyone screen these calls?”
Look: USA Today needs to sell papers to survive & this is how they go about it.
Think a “Climate is Fine” headline would do the trick?
I’m embarrassed that I took the time to comment on this drivel!!!
A lot of the scientific and medical instrumentation designed and built in the Nederlands have poor heat tolerance. If the equipment is run above 68F for an extended period of time it will deteriorate. The power supplies and the power handling circuits will be the first to fail. Cooling fans have to be installed in vital sign monitors if they are run outside of an air conditioned building.
@otsar
“above 68F”?
I suspect 86F – right?
Marten from Holland has been eating to many bulbs recently. need we say any more?? regards, Trevor,from New Zealand.
The A/C in my bedroom is set to 77 degrees F at night (25C), it feels very cool to me. The outside temp is 30-35C (86-95 degrees F), we live just fine in these temperature just sweat a bit when working outside. According to Micheal Mann parts of Thailand are already not able to be inhabited by people due to global warming.
RCP 8.5, I presume?
So the early hominids and the Homo Sapiens that evolved from them in Africa lived and thrived there in temperatures that never averaged more than 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yeah, right.
So the early hominids and the Homo Sapiens that evolved from them in Africa never lived and thrived in temperatures that exceeded an average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yeah, right.
Look – be fair to the authors of this paper:
– The paper suggests that historically large numbers (not all) of people lived in the temperate climatic region. Its hard to argue with this – look at history from the roman time forward.
– They also suggest that hard manual agricultural labour is challenging when temperatures rise and that the productivity of such manual labour decreases when it gets hot. This is also difficult to dispute as 1 hour of digging in fence posts will prove.
it’s just unfortunate that they didn’t consider relatively recent trends of urbanisation and mechanisation. I mean, be fair the agricultural revolution has only been going 300 years and the industrial revolution around 180 years. Its takes a bit of time for academics to notice these things.
They could also suggest that manual labour is challenging when the ground is frozen.
Europe, In My Opinion, succeeded in spite of the temperature, not because of it.
Winter. Snow. Nothing grows. You successfully spend the non freezing months producing enough food and learning the skills to store it for several months or you starve and die.
People familiar with the area known as the Fertile Crescent? So called, apparently, because it was fertile. Also, and this is the important part in context of our story, it wasn’t in this 15C zone.
To call this paper junk science is an insult to junk, because at least junk can be recycled.
I have friends who hail from Portugal, where it is VERY hot in the summer. They said when they were young, they would get up before dawn and work the fields in the cool of the day. During the blistering heat, they would siesta.
Gee, I guess the peasant class isn’t so dumb after all.
John,
I think everyone *is* being fair to the authors.
1. Large numbers of historic peoples did not do agriculture. They lived as hunter/gartherers. So who cares if agriculture was hard when it was warm?
2. Manual agricultural labour is challenging under ANY temperature. Anyone who thinks temperature makes a big difference has never hoed a single row of corn in the summer when its warm! They have never used a scythe to harvest wheat in the spring when temperatues are moderate. The real challenge is to stay hydrated and is not surviving high temperatures.
BTW, I have dug holes for fence posts, in the spring, in the summer, and in the fall. It is physically demanding whatever the tempeature. Again, the most important thing is to stay hydrated when you are sweating.
It is comforting they set their Doomsday TEOTWAWKI fifty years hence… gives them just adequate time to complete their careers before they could be held accountable for their failed prediction.
Yes, it’s important to get the timescale of doom right. It needs to be short enough to be scary. But it also needs to be long enough so that, when the doom is due to arrive and everything is fine, everybody will have forgotten the prediction.
Personally, I would have reduced the timescale of doom to thirty years. But, then, I’m not a “scientist”.
Chris
About weather, but way off topic. Is it of any relevance to anything, that the upper stratosphere’s northern jet stream came to a halt a few days ago, and is now building up steam in the reverse direction? At 100 000′, for months, the far north, and the far south jets have been streaming west-east, with an equatorial jet streaming east-west. In the last week or so, the southern jet is x3 as wide, while the northern jet just ‘petered out’, and now is increasing it’s momentum east-west.
I’m glad the science is so settled.
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=29;126;1&l=wind-10hpa
From the above article: “According to a new study, people don’t thrive in places where the average annual temperature is higher than 15C / 59F.”
That’s a patently absurd statement. The “new study” authors obviously never considered what is actually happening on Earth.
Beyond the pictorial examples of the coastal cities of Singapore and Jakarta provided by WUWT author Mr. Worrall in his rebuttal of that claim, I’ll just point out an example of a city that is located far inland from any body of water:
The country of Ecuador is bisected (in the north) by the Earth’s equator and its capital Quito is just 26 km south of the equator. The average temperature of Ecuador ranges from 26 °C (79 °F) in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer (December-January) to 23 °C (73 °F) in winter. Relative humidity is constantly high and makes the heat sweltering.
The current population of Quito is 1.8 million people.
. . . Quito’s population in 2015 was about 1.7 million people, and it has been sustaining a yearly population GROWTH rate since then of between 1.4 and 1.8%.
Where do those clowns go during their holidays ?
The right place for such a sharticle is babylonbee and still, perhaps too dumb, even for them.
The Babylon Bee is exquisite satire… among the very best of its kind… nearly indistinguishable from reality, as often is for the best satire.
With this Pandemic lockdown, most cities in the world have come to a standstill with skies empty of airlines.
Under such circumstances, would there be a drastic drop in CO2 emission since world transportation industry (car and airplanes
are said to be the great emitters) has come to a standstill, you would expect that NOAA would report a drop in CO2. No! NOAA
reported for May. 3, 2020 418.12 ppm from May. 3, 2019
414.81 ppm . Look it up here: https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
Ah yes, but the CO2 we produce is not only sentient, it is also capable of breeding and that’s why levels continue to rise despite the drop in our emissions.
Okay, it’s crap, but it’s more plausible than the explanation that will be published any day now..
Most of the warming, as others have noted is warmer temps at night and warmer temps in winter, with this little tiny bit of warming we have had the last 150 years being especially true for the northern hemisphere. So far this all has been about .8 C warmer than 1880, which was already fairly cooler at the end of the Little Ice Age. And this is according to the global warming experts that write the IPCC reports. They might make claims about what temps will be in 2070 or the end of this century, but at best, all that is a WAG and not worthy of real science. What is the right temperature supposed to be?
Anyway, the tropics can’t get much hotter than it already is, which in places has always been real hot. And humid. And if it tries to get hotter, the thunderstorm will just form 15-20 minutes earlier than it would have, and re-balance with cooler air coming down from higher up in the atmosphere with the cooler rain, while the rising heat/cloud heat already escaped to space. I don’t think there is anything to worry about, other than having A/C if you live where it is hot. Or at least a good fan and a wet towel. When I am in the tropics where it is real hot with neither, I wrap a wet towel around my head and even my upper torso, and can manage to stay fairly comfortable. Or a dip in the ocean or pool, and my nightmares about -40 with a wind slowly fade at night. That is my real fear.
< The only thing that can stop this happening is a rapid cut in carbon emissions.”
Always that "carbon" emission, instead of CO2.
More junk science, every year these goons produce more junk telling us we are going to die decades in advance,
In the 80s it was 2010,( even sooner if you followed the high priest of climate doom al gore) in the 90s it was 2020 and so on and so on, we must give them a B for consistency though , every doom and gloom junk paper has been consistently wrong.
So that’s why we migrated from Ethiopia all those years ago – it was too warm
I really don’t understand why the type of people who carry out these studies are allowed to leave primary school.
Janice…..How can you imply that these souls of virtue are driven by FUNDING?
In 2009 Marten Scheffer was one of three winners of the Dutch Spinoza Prize and received a 2.5 million euro grant.[…..As there was no fourth Spinoza Prize awarded in 2009, Scheffer and his co-winners Albert van den Berg and Michel Ferrari asked the NWO to reward them the remaining prize money, which they would spend on a collaborative research effort.[3] Their efforts culminated in a research paper on migraine published in PLOS ONE in 2013.[4][5][6] The paper claimed that a critical tipping point of neurons started a migraine attack…Ferrari is a Neurologist and Migraine expert…The other 2 are not
Sainthood is not enough!
Heh.
2070!!??
What happened to 2050? I thought that was the ‘drop dead’ date
2070!!??
What happened to 2050? I thought that was the ‘drop dead’ date?
No, according to AOC (native American) the ‘drop dead’ year is 2030.
According to GT (Swedish high society dropout) you should already panic.
How did that pass peer review?
”It is assumed that moderate climates with ambient temperatures of around 21°C need minimal human energy investment in comparison to heat and cold exposure.” I remember that at Uni even a slightly higher physiological ambient temperature optimum was mentioned.
(Human whole body cold adaptation byHein A.M. Daanen and Wouter D. Van Marken Lichtenbelt)
The human body is quite adaptable to external temperatures, at least over a certain range.
Consider that it seeks to maintain an average internal temperature of about 37 C (the famous 98.6 F oral thermometer temperature in the US). Many people start to feel cold (and thus add insulating clothing) when ambient temperatures fall below about 16 C (61 F), especially in dry climates that enhance the body’s natural evaporative cooling capability. In the other direction, many people start to feel excessively hot (and thus shed normal clothing, start perspiring excessively, and/or seek out shade or air conditioning) when ambient temperatures rise above about 32 C (90 F), especially in humid climates that decrease the body’s natural evaporative cooling capability. So, the human body is naturally “comfortable” with a body-to-ambient differential temperature in the range of about +5 to +21 C (+9 to +38 F) . . . such temperature differentials being necessary to shed the heat generated by metabolic activity, including muscle use.
The average of the 16 C and 32 C “limits” mentioned above is 24 C . . . not too different than the 21 C mentioned in the quoted statement.
Of course, the human body can survive much wider differential temperatures while being “uncomfortable”.
Paul Ehrlich, is that you?
At least you seem to have learned since you wrote “The Population Bomb”. Back then your doomsday predictions were only 10 years away. Must have been embarrassing when it turned out completely opposite. At least with the predicted doomsday 50 years out you’ll be long dead when it doesn’t happen.
Urban heat island is preferred if You see where most people live.
3-10 degrees hotter than rural area.
UHI is a real thing and happens where population densities are the highest. So a lot of people will actually feel hotter in these high density population areas. Reducing CO2 and emissions back to preindustrial levels would not change UHI since that is solar retention of heat in thermal masses and just humans causing heating from all activity. Other measures should be considered for UHI relief such as more urban forest and reducing albedo of the city. Might help a bit.
But it doesn’t have anything much to do with overall global warming throughout the entire planet. This is a major distinction that should be explained in the very first paragraph of the study. This is the root of the matter, but somehow some people will try and say the entire planet will be roasting. The entire global warming part scare tactic is disingenuous to this fact.
The BEST study has discounted the UHI in affacting global climate.
“We observe the opposite of an urban heating ffect over the
period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 ± 0.24°C/100yr (2σ error) in
the Berkeley Earth global land temperature average. The confidence
interval is consistent with a zero urban heating effect, and at most
a small urban heating effect (less than 0.14°C/100yr, with 95%
confidence) on the scale of the observed warming (1.9 ± 0.1°C/100 yr
since 1950 in the land average from Figure 5A). ”
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/papers/UHI-GIGS-1-104.pdf
Yes, you’re right. It might affect the local weather a little and perhaps add humidity to the concentrated population areas from all the concentration of the people so densely packed together, but of course it won’t add much to the overall global temperature. And of course all these people will feel the local effect of the UHI effect as temperature rise and increase in humidity, so the study might be partially correct, but for the wrong reasons.