Climate, Heat, And You

Michael Mosley’s recent passing from what has tentatively been attributed to heat stress highlights something that will become a deadly factor in daily life and is already tipping into being very concerning to our lives.

The thing with heat stress is that it’s insidious. It sneaks up on you. You’re on a walk that starts in the morning and it’s warm – but you feel okay and you go on your usual weekend walk, about ten to twenty kilometres because you get to see how your nature space changes with the seasons and there’s a family of magpies along the way that you enjoy watching grow up.

The second sign that things aren’t business as usual is that the young magpie you nicknamed Charlie is dead and the parents are sitting in a small tree overlooking him dejectedly. The first sign was when you had to forego a quick splash of water on your face because you’ve somehow drunk it all.

You still have about seven klicks to go before you reach the edge of town and by the time you get halfway there you’re feeling decidedly woozy and far more tired than you usually do. By the time you get home you feel so hot that you decide to take a cold shower, you step in and wake up on the floor shivering.

You can’t muster up the strength to stand up but you can get to your knees, turn off the water, and after a few minutes you manage to stagger to bed under the ceiling fan, and by ten more minutes you feel most of the way back to able to cope. But your legs are still weak and wobbly for hours, and still not back to normal for most of the next day.

This actually happened to me, albeit under different circumstances, in the 1970s. Luckily I’d grown up in a region where 35C summer temperatures were considered normal to warm, so I was acclimated to it. But I still lost the use of my legs for several hours and felt terrible the next day.

Had that taken place in a setting with higher humidity, I wouldn’t have been able to use sweat evaporation to remain cool, and the effects would have been worse. Not all that much higher temperatures and humidities would have seen me in danger of A) not being able to cool down and B) since my internal body temperature would have been cooler than the surroundings, of that humidity condensing inside my lungs and effectively drowning me.

That last is a relatively rare occurrence but it has happened, people who explore caves where the temperatures are extremely high have to wear personal cooling suits or this evaporative drowning is guaranteed to kill them within minutes. As it is, even with the suits, their time is strictly limited on each entry.

— Naica Crystal Caves

Why This Will Affect You

The world’s climate is warming. You can’t argue with records that show the steady rise. You can decide for yourself if this is natural or manmade, but either way there are consequences of this. In Saudi Arabia temperatures that once averaged 35C are now heading to much higher averages and more days where the thermometers indicate 50C or more. Rich Saudis head towards the poles during this hot season but indentured workers have to stay and work.

There are no official figures (and why would they be reported if they only serve to show that wealthy Saudis treat their workers like slaves?) but I bet they’d be eye-opening. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/18/kuwait-city-hottest-place-earth-climate-change-gulf-oil-temperatures

Range Creep

Traditional rice growing land is now too hot to grow rice. Places where it once grew are now spectacularly underproductive, encouraging cooler region farmers to switch to rice to meet the demand. That in turn reduces the quantities of the former vegetable crops that once grew on them.

Animal feed that grew closer to the equator is starting to creep away from the middle and towards the poles. If it’s a fast-growing and adaptable crop, it’ll sustain food animals but their range too will creep to the poles. If it’s a plant in a delicate balance with the local ecosystem, the feed crop will die out and those animals will starve.

(Whole ecosystems will be destroyed because not all the living things in that ecosystem will move at the same rate. Grasses and annual plants may be able to spread quickly to a cooler climate region, but trees, perennials, the microbiome, and many slow-reproducing plants can’t. Any animals and plants that depend on those will be negatively affected.

If you live in a temperate zone, it’ll become a little warmer on average, and a bit warmer again next year. The conglomerate of farms that currently supply your supermarkets will falter and fail, food prices go up, those farms will creep to the cooler regions.

That walk that I referred to and that you could have done in a singlet and shorts ten years ago will now become harder and may even prove harmful. Not just because you’ve aged ten years but also because it now IS harder.

You’ll have many more refugees, driven out of their homes by war over fertile land, and by the lack of food from their formerly fertile but now infertile land. These will compete with you and yours for the slowly-shrinking food supply in your region. If it persists (and all indications are that it will not only persist but also get worse) then you yourself may very well become a climate refugee in turn.

Steps

Keep in mind when you exercise that just a degree or two of overall temperature in your area comes with increased variability. The average will only ramp up slowly, but for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, the range of conditions will extend. Winter will have more days that reach lower than the historical lows, summers will have several days that exceed the regions’s average maximums.

Range Sweep

A degree of warming in the oceans seems insignificant, but it most certainly is not. 71% of the Earth’s surface is water, 68.4% being oceans and 2.2% being rivers and lakes. Only 29% is land. The ocean temperatures produce almost all weather.

Rising water evaporation takes that extra energy up into the air, and the extra energy causes the water to rise faster and higher, which stirs the air up more. That means the “waves” that it causes in the layer of atmosphere moves higher than normal and has to fall further as it cools.

That means that the moisture carried in the air loses more heat on the way down, it’s moving faster, and to us that means more drenching rains and more wind carrying those rains which also means stormier weather. In warmer areas, there thus has to be more air displaced upwards by the falling air that will collide with falling air and cause more frequent and more intense storms, typhoons, cyclones, and hurricanes.

As we’re also seeing, that much air movement also takes warmer air and moisture to the poles, melting the ice caps to lower the temperature of the oceans again. You can see that the entire environment is a machine that tries to regulate itself to an average, but that the immense amounts of energy aren’t just going to go away, they have to run their course.

That’s basically a very simplified explanation of why, if we stopped ALL pollution and temperature-raising activities right now, it’ll take a long time for the oscillations to die down and climate change reversal is thus a slow process. And the more energy we allow to accumulate now, will means A) more extreme weather conditions next year and every year thereafter that we don’t manage to bring it down, but also B) a much longer oscillation period before the state of the climate settles again.

Steppes

Which brings me to an even bigger climate change threat – environment creep. The deserts will spread away from the equator and render once-fertile land into desert, the other climate bands will similarly creep away from the equator towards the poles, and the polar ice sheets will themselves recede towards the poles. The ice sheets will move towards the poles as the edges melt. They will uncover land that’s lain under ice and permafrost for millennia.

… They’ll … uncover … ancient … land … !!!

Currently in the North there’s Russia, Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. In the South there’s Antarctica. Antarctica is HUGE. And every county worth their salt has staked claims on parts of it. Parts that will soon start thawing… Russia is the only other single geopolitical entity with so large an area, but part of it is already occupied and a large portion is currently inhospitable to human life. Until it thaws.

Russia: Approximately 17.1 million square kilometres (6.6 million square miles).
Antarctica: Approximately 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles).

But once those areas start opening up, there’ll be some new considerations to account for. As we’ve already seen with anthrax that arose a few years back in melting permafrost and which killed two thousand reindeer, there are a few diseases under that ice that we’re not prepared for. I can’t tell you which ones because no-one really knows. Yet…

But this change in habitable land-masses will change the entire geopolitical situation around the planet, and it’s happening fast. You and I will see that newly-thawed land opened up, with mining for minerals and oil (some of the largest untapped resources on the planet) we’ll see a rush to populate the regions, to take advantage of new arable land to grow food, and so forth. Anyone moving there will technically be a climate refugee.

Fallout

Russia will become more populated and rich. There may be a push to get involved and save Ukraine, in the process whipping Putin’s ass and dragging Russia out of its chequered but never mild and peaceful history into the 21st century. Because people are gonna want to move to where it isn’t dangerously hot, y’all.

Americans will move north to Alaska where a new land rush will happen, every country in Europe are going to want Russia but without the USSR overtones, and other Earth itself may even experience a change of rotation (ever so slight, but get prepared for strange days and seasons) from the mass of humanity and other animal and plant life moving away from the equator.

These are things that, once I’ve pointed them out, seem obvious, right? And I’m definitely not the sharpest tool in the political sphere, I can tell you that for nothing. So – what’s the bet that all these scenarios have been wargamed to death in government military and secret service offices all around the world?

Just a thought…

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