The Uninhabitable Earth - When Will the Earth be Too Hot For Humans?

[Calculating]

Last edited Mon Jul 10, 2017, 03:48 PM - Edit history (1)

Well, it sure seems like we're screwed.




Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.


*This article appears in the July 10, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

*This article has been updated to clarify a reference to Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

[snooper2]

1. I thought this was going to have a chart or something

[Loki Liesmith]

2. Not for a billion years

If you mean the whole Earth. If you mean portions of the Earth, the answer is "since always." If you mean *more* portions of the earth, the answer is "in your lifetime".

[brush]

3. As it gets hotter and hotter the more AC will be used, thus contributing...

to the warming and the "the frog in the boiling pot" dystopia we are creating.

The warming may in itself not be the end, but the masses fighting against those withholding AC for themselves might be.

[MineralMan]

4. Democratic Underground has a four paragraph limit

for excerpts from copyright protected material. You might want to shorten your post to match that requirement.

[NRaleighLiberal]

5. So what was the conclusion - when (rough date?) will it become too hot?

[Calculating]

6. I don't think there is one

As it all depends on where our emissions go from here. Assuming no significant cuts in emissions I could see the really dire stuff starting to happen within 50+ years.

[NRaleighLiberal]

7. that's my thought - we are already seeing some dire situations, our children will see more -

but their children will see the really extreme impacts.

[panader0]

8. Here in SE Arizona the month of June was the hottest in 130 years.

I assume that's when they started making records.

[canetoad]

9. Warmest and driest June on record here

And we're in the middle of winter!

[earthshine]

10. Climate change will destroy most of the food and water supply.

That's when it'll be too hot.