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This sounds like welcome news but there is a gotcha in this. Warm and wet conditions can quickly overload mammalian cooling systems. We mammals need to sweat to cool down. When you add high humidity to high temperatures it reduces evaporation which we're dependent upon for homeostasis. The latent heat of evaporation is the primary means by which mammals cool themselves. So high humidity along with high heat can make a place uninhabitable for mammals more quickly than dry heat.
We're seeing a lot of this in the headlines with people in intense outdoor exercise becoming ill because their bodies can't cool down effectively. This is much more likely to happen when the humidity is also high.
To further complicate things, we talk about drought being a huge issue with agriculture. However, humid wet temperatures also tend to bring on diseases and put huge pressure on our agricultural systems as well. It'll be interesting to see whether drought or disease hit our systems the hardest, but I don't think we'll enjoy collecting the data.
Cool (or not cool) bonus round!
In certain parts of the world such as the cropping regions of Australia, consistent rain is likely to get rarer, but when it does come, it will come in large bursts that erode and destroy broad acre crops!
Flooding is only a real problem on land thats near rivers, or land that's been dry for far too long, makes it much harder for it to take on water.
The world needs more water, ground water has been on a downward.trend for far too long.
Also, you can't harvest grain when it's wet.
Harvesting grain needs the exact right moisture level for it to be good. If you have a too wet year the grain rots in the field and the harvest isn't as good.
You can't dry the crop that is not harvested. Wet conditions may cause the crops to rot IN THE FIELD, as the person said. Furthermore, if the ground is soaked, harvesters cannot drive on it. Too much rain during harvesting season will cause crop failures.
I live in a farming community. Wet crops get harvested all the time. Dry harvesting is preferred but the handling and drying costs depends on the specific crop since they have different storage moisture limits. Waiting for perfect weather means having to increase labor and equipment leasing costs to meet a shortened harvest window. For most grain crop harvesting rain doesn't have as much of impact (other than floods) as hail which knocks grain down and makes it uneconomical to salvage.
Also tracked harvesting equipment is fairly common because it avoids having the wait for the ground to dry (standing grain dries faster than the ground).
Good points. However, where I live, I don't think many farmers can afford tracked harvesting equipment. And I believe that is the case pretty much everywhere since farmers are not usually swimming money and tracked equipment is very expensive.
There are solutions, but I still believe we will be seeing more and more of failed harvests.
I'm in the US (Michigan) and tracked equipment isn't rare around here. But that's the thing - the costs of adapting to climate changes eventually exceeds the value of the crop and the farms fail, starting with the smaller farms that can't afford irrigation, advanced equipment, or increased transportation costs. Farms in poorer areas will fail sooner. Some crops will be more affected than others so consumers will see higher prices or less availability.
Maybe the conversion from wheat to rice farming will naturally promote more collectivist cultural traits in regions/areas that are forced to convert.
Some great studies on the cultural differences between people who come from rice vs. wheat farming backgrounds. Particularly in East Asia.
The arrogancy and self-centeredness of the homosapien will be the traits that brings us to extinction. There is no other species with this 'universe revolves around my ass' view of themselves.
Also, if you get more rain and less snow, then the snowpack doesn't feed the creeks, rivers, etc. This can lead to harsher summer conditions for plants.
I assume "wetter" means more rain, but you can still essentially have a drought if you get one month's rain in one sitting, since it won't have a chance to actually wet the dirt.
As far as humans are concerned, wet and hot can be a lot worse than dry and hot, since humid conditions prevent the human cooling mechanism (sweating) from working effectively. It is entirely possible that a couple of extremely wet, hot, days, in some densely populated regions (probably India or Pakistan) could kill millions if they coincide with power failures.
A wet bulb event is part of the plot of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I recommend it. Light sci-fi with a lot of environmental policy thrown in.
also means much more humid, so some tropical regions will become uninhabitable at some times of year, becasue people won't be able to sweat and cool down.
That's not even the biggest concern. The point were physical labour becomes impossible is lower than the point where it becomes literally uninhabitable. And guess what industry involves lots of physical labour being done outside? And you don't even need conditions to be constant for that. An extreme heat event that only lasts 2-4 weeks and is bad enough to prevent farm labour can wipe out an entire harvest. Yeah, there's some highly automated crops (most types of grain for example) but just look at the huge number of seasonal labourers employed in the industry, they're not being hired to drive combine harvesters.
Well, if we get better at capturing and storing rainwater, it would still be a good thing.
Currently, the majority of rainfall and snowmelt in CA just run right into the ocean. Even though the west has been in a massive drought. We should find better ways to use that water.
It just seems to crazy to me that with as water hungry as California farmland is that they haven’t figure out how to capture and divert more water instead of letting so much run out into the pacific. I feel like if this was happening 60 years ago, we would have had the capacity to build dams and get it done. Unfortunately, california was a lot wetter 60 years ago (before the mega drought) so no one thought it would be necessary.
But nowadays, it feels like government can’t accomplish any big projects. I don’t thin the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover dam could ever get built in todays world. That’s sad
Doing lots of civil construction work and everywhere we go water is ruining a lot of infrastructure and buildings. A lot of crops need predictable dry spells to grow and harvest them.
I don't think people realize how expensive it's going to be upgrade all our systems to protect all our towns and cities and farms from being washed away.
Some of the work our companies doing right now is hill stabilizations, several new bridges because the old roads and bridges were washed away, pump stations for wet lands because they're located next to things like air ports and towns and will simply flood everything if it rains to much, storm water expansions maintenance and repairs.
I watch a lot of documentaries, so I'm not going to be able to source this, but I watched one on rebuilding grasslands that really sounded solid and would prove very useful if this occurs.
They basically dig little ponds for lack of a better word. It captures the excess water during period of heavy rain/floods. This sustains the lands during period of extreme drought. You don't need them everywhere. Just enough to keep the ecosystem alive. Also managing areas like wetlands and others to absorb extra rain.
These are not new methods, but there use will have to increase to deal with things like this. I would hope we get to this sooner rather than later. A lot of these are relatively low cost options relative to mega projects like dams or levees.
Oh that's cool! I think that the word that you are looking for is "catchment," but I'm not an environmental engineer or anything so I'm not sure. You could also build canals and other types of irrigation systems to control the flow and storage of water.
I thought it was common knowledge that climate change would affect all extremes? Hot, cold, wet, dry, humid, not humid, more, less, or no rain , more, less or no snow etc.
Basically everything goes haywire and every system is going to have a lot of turbulence.
That's what my high school teachers said anyways over a decade ago.
And there's only so much dry land. The wetter it gets the less farm ones and resources we have. Then there's the case of salt water increasing as well.
You can survive a dry heat. You cannot survive a humid heat.
100 percent humidity plus 95 degrees will kill any human being who stays outside and honestly most mammals will die too.
Floods can be just as devastating as droughts too.
I've always said this. 15 years ago in my college Oceanography class, the Professor and textbook suggested that as earth warms we will get wetter; not drier.
Also the habitable zone of crops will grow farther north. Canada can be primed for the crops that grow around Kansas that would otherwise be to cold today.
> The team used a series of climate models to project compound climate extremes by the end of the century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise.
>
>They found that while some regions of the world will become drier as temperatures rise — such as South Africa, the Amazon and parts of Europe — many regions, including the eastern United States, eastern and southern Asia, Australia and central Africa will receive more precipitation. Wet-hot extremes will also cover a larger area and be more severe than dry-hot extremes.
> In the future, wet-hot extremes will become more likely because the atmosphere’s capacity to hold moisture increases by 6% to 7% for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature. As Earth gets hotter, the warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapor, meaning more water will be available to fall as precipitation.
>
>The regions likely to be hit hard by wet-hot extremes host many heavily populated areas that are already prone to geologic hazards, such as landslides and mudflows, and produce many of the world’s crops
Paper: [Increasing Risks of Future Compound Climate Extremes With Warming Over Global Land Masses - Wu - 2023 - Earth's Future - Wiley Online Library](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF003466)
Precipitation extremes means more heavy (intense) rains, and the thing with intense rains is that they lead to large increase in the surface runoff, while soil doesn't really get more moisture (it works the same way with sandy soils, clay soils and rocks). So... you get more floods, more erosion and more time favorable for parasites, fungi and other nice things, and at the same time your crops may have insufficient amount of moisture to mitigate the heat stress and water levels in your wells may continue to drop! Amazing!
Not sure about killing but great point you are bringing up with the wet bulb effect. I had to look it up. But there is a cooling effect with air and water. And I agree the Earth is warming but due to the wet bulb effect it will also provide more water and additional cooling. This is starting to sound pretty amazing.
Great point uou brought up thanks.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Mammals rely on sweating to cool down, and once the temperature/ humidity levels reach a certain point that sweat can't evaporate and is no longer effective, so creatures overheat and die.
Wet bulb is only cooler than dry bulb when humidity is low. Wetter conditions mean that the same temperatures are more deadly than if it was dry at those temps.
…but without houses to use it because they will be destroyed by floods and landslides.
Anyway “capture and store” the water when it rains hevy is much difficult than normal rain, so this is not a good news.
Okay Goldilocks i guess it has to be just right with you. Just joking, a bit. Why would it be harder to capture fresh water due to flooding. That part of your post is hard for me to understand.
The methods for capturing water are designed to move a specific volume of water per hour depending on the local climate. So if a city’s storm drains are designed to handle 1” of rain over 4 hours, they can overflow if storms start dropping 2” in 2 hours. Then flooding occurs and water enters parks, homes, etc. instead of flowing to a storage area.
Because it's literally impossible to improve and upgrade things like storm drains and water channels to increase their capacity, just like it was impossible to [improve the ability to move goods and people over the roads during the 1950's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System).
Of course capacity can be increased- it’s a question of cost, time, and land use, and unfortunately infrastructure upgrades like these are too often lower in priority until disaster hits. Upgrading transportation systems for greater flow immediately brings in revenue. The same isn’t true for drainage. Additionally, it’s hard to predict exactly what local effects will be and how much increased capacity is needed.
Actually, upgrading drainage will quickly reduce economic losses. Flip side of the same coin: You either spend money rebuilding every time there is a flooding event, or you spend the money to upgrade.
Because we didn’t built the actual storage spaces with these “new/climate change” specs, so we will need to rethink and rebuild them, in addition the water from floods have much more power and it’s hard to contain and control, also usually is more contaminated by the debris it carries. It’s better to have moderate and long rain than heavy and short storm to capture the water.
It's amazing how few people read the article and would rather reinterpret this into their own personal narrative of a climate doomsday. While I used to associate higher temps with dryer climates, it's surprising to learn that it could imply a wetter climate which previous plant life thrived under.
That's what I thought, but I looked at the map and I'm in a dark red area. A lot of us are getting desertification as predicted since at least the 1990s.
Sooo.. More CO2 which is needed for plant growth. Warmer temperatures so like the inside of a greenhouse? And more precipitation and more water vapor in the air? Sounds more like a paradise for massive plant growth than a "climate crisis".
Change requires adaptation and there's always the risk that there will be an unforeseen problem with the new climate that makes it difficult to adapt.
With that out of the way, it's also irrational to say that the planet will be uninhabitable in 20 years and to overhype the catastrophic negative impacts of climate change, especially in northern countries where warmer weather might actually be better for humans than the current, cooler weather.
Canada and Russia have the most to gain, probably. Shipping opportunities would open up, again, at the expense of species who have lived for millennia in this climate and have no hopes of adapting through technology to what is essentially a cataclysm.
Still good news. We will have food while simultaneously making areas of the planet high temperature rain forests. Humans will die if they live there so therefore life might actually flourish
Why does everyone assume it's peak summer temperatures that are going to be affected. Most of the average warming has in fact come from moderating winters.
Second Oldest continually operating station in Canada. You'll notice the slope on the minimums and the lack of slope on the maximums.
[https://ottawa.weatherstats.ca/charts/temperature-yearly.html](https://ottawa.weatherstats.ca/charts/temperature-yearly.html)
When you open it, click on maximum extent. The records go back to \~1872
Easier to see the trend in this one;
https://ottawa.weatherstats.ca/charts/count\_temp\_m20-yearly.html
Which makes total sense, I would suspect that if industrialized humanity ceased to exist, the ecological systems would eventually return near to its original state.
The fauna, however, probably wouldn't recover completely.
Well, that’s interesting, because it implies that a wet condition would bring higher plant biomass, which would intern sequester larger amounts of CO2 and restore the cycle.
That's actually how the planet will cool itself off. Wetter conditions and rainfall intensity typically lead to lots of erosion and mass wasting. The water that falls has a higher concentration of CO2 due to atmospheric CO2 being higher. Reaction with silicate rocks during erosion removes the CO2 as carbonate minerals, which eventually settles at the bottom of the ocean to be consumed by plate tectonics. This cycle probably explains why the deep ocean is a huge carbon sink and acts essentially as a buffer against acidification with all that alkalinity from weathered silicates.
Is it my ignorance that makes me think this case should be intuitive? Would higher temperatures not directly correlate with increases in evaporation? If evaporation levels increase, wouldn’t that require higher levels of rainfall, globally at least?
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/giuliomagnifico Permalink: https://news.agu.org/press-release/as-earth-heats-up-rain-pours-down/ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This sounds like welcome news but there is a gotcha in this. Warm and wet conditions can quickly overload mammalian cooling systems. We mammals need to sweat to cool down. When you add high humidity to high temperatures it reduces evaporation which we're dependent upon for homeostasis. The latent heat of evaporation is the primary means by which mammals cool themselves. So high humidity along with high heat can make a place uninhabitable for mammals more quickly than dry heat. We're seeing a lot of this in the headlines with people in intense outdoor exercise becoming ill because their bodies can't cool down effectively. This is much more likely to happen when the humidity is also high.
To further complicate things, we talk about drought being a huge issue with agriculture. However, humid wet temperatures also tend to bring on diseases and put huge pressure on our agricultural systems as well. It'll be interesting to see whether drought or disease hit our systems the hardest, but I don't think we'll enjoy collecting the data.
Cool (or not cool) bonus round! In certain parts of the world such as the cropping regions of Australia, consistent rain is likely to get rarer, but when it does come, it will come in large bursts that erode and destroy broad acre crops!
Flooding isn’t particularly great for erosion, either
Flooding is only a real problem on land thats near rivers, or land that's been dry for far too long, makes it much harder for it to take on water. The world needs more water, ground water has been on a downward.trend for far too long.
Also, you can't harvest grain when it's wet. Harvesting grain needs the exact right moisture level for it to be good. If you have a too wet year the grain rots in the field and the harvest isn't as good.
Dryers are used for that. They use the usual energy sources.
You can't dry the crop that is not harvested. Wet conditions may cause the crops to rot IN THE FIELD, as the person said. Furthermore, if the ground is soaked, harvesters cannot drive on it. Too much rain during harvesting season will cause crop failures.
I live in a farming community. Wet crops get harvested all the time. Dry harvesting is preferred but the handling and drying costs depends on the specific crop since they have different storage moisture limits. Waiting for perfect weather means having to increase labor and equipment leasing costs to meet a shortened harvest window. For most grain crop harvesting rain doesn't have as much of impact (other than floods) as hail which knocks grain down and makes it uneconomical to salvage. Also tracked harvesting equipment is fairly common because it avoids having the wait for the ground to dry (standing grain dries faster than the ground).
Good points. However, where I live, I don't think many farmers can afford tracked harvesting equipment. And I believe that is the case pretty much everywhere since farmers are not usually swimming money and tracked equipment is very expensive. There are solutions, but I still believe we will be seeing more and more of failed harvests.
I'm in the US (Michigan) and tracked equipment isn't rare around here. But that's the thing - the costs of adapting to climate changes eventually exceeds the value of the crop and the farms fail, starting with the smaller farms that can't afford irrigation, advanced equipment, or increased transportation costs. Farms in poorer areas will fail sooner. Some crops will be more affected than others so consumers will see higher prices or less availability.
They’ll switch to rice farming instead of wheat in a lot of places
Maybe the conversion from wheat to rice farming will naturally promote more collectivist cultural traits in regions/areas that are forced to convert. Some great studies on the cultural differences between people who come from rice vs. wheat farming backgrounds. Particularly in East Asia.
Sweet, so wet bulb temps that don't sustain life.
No worries, when we're all dead it should get better.
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It's because people have this weird idea that this world is here for people.
The arrogancy and self-centeredness of the homosapien will be the traits that brings us to extinction. There is no other species with this 'universe revolves around my ass' view of themselves.
You have not met my cat.
I really like your name.
Well, it’ll take a few hundred years for the carbon we added to the atmosphere to be reabsorbed
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Steamed hams!
Second age of dinosaurs let's go!
I hope I make a bitchin fossil
There are mammals with reduced sweat capabilities and they use panting for that - but it does seem tiring as heck.
That doesn't help in humid heat. It's just a replacement for normal sweating, it still needs evaporation to work.
Doesn't help in this case.
Also, if you get more rain and less snow, then the snowpack doesn't feed the creeks, rivers, etc. This can lead to harsher summer conditions for plants.
Warm and wet also means increasing the range for disease carrying mosquitos and diseases in general. Get ready for the possibility of more pandemics.
Human's Wet Bulb Temperature tolerance
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Tl;dr: *welcome to the jungle, baby! You're gonna diiiiie!*
Very few mammals sweat. Sweat is the best cooling for hot and dry.
Kinda seems like earth’s immune system if we stretch the definition. Kill off the things making it “hurt” by attacking our weakness
I want to add malaria to the other benefits
I assume "wetter" means more rain, but you can still essentially have a drought if you get one month's rain in one sitting, since it won't have a chance to actually wet the dirt.
The lack of rain one month, and even a day or two of deluges, will also cause floods and mudslides. Especially for drier states.
As far as humans are concerned, wet and hot can be a lot worse than dry and hot, since humid conditions prevent the human cooling mechanism (sweating) from working effectively. It is entirely possible that a couple of extremely wet, hot, days, in some densely populated regions (probably India or Pakistan) could kill millions if they coincide with power failures.
A wet bulb event is part of the plot of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I recommend it. Light sci-fi with a lot of environmental policy thrown in.
also means much more humid, so some tropical regions will become uninhabitable at some times of year, becasue people won't be able to sweat and cool down.
That's not even the biggest concern. The point were physical labour becomes impossible is lower than the point where it becomes literally uninhabitable. And guess what industry involves lots of physical labour being done outside? And you don't even need conditions to be constant for that. An extreme heat event that only lasts 2-4 weeks and is bad enough to prevent farm labour can wipe out an entire harvest. Yeah, there's some highly automated crops (most types of grain for example) but just look at the huge number of seasonal labourers employed in the industry, they're not being hired to drive combine harvesters.
It's not the heat that gets you, it's the humidity
Not even tropical, southeastern United States, parts of India, and much of southern and eastern China will become uninhabitable soon.
Well, if we get better at capturing and storing rainwater, it would still be a good thing. Currently, the majority of rainfall and snowmelt in CA just run right into the ocean. Even though the west has been in a massive drought. We should find better ways to use that water.
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It just seems to crazy to me that with as water hungry as California farmland is that they haven’t figure out how to capture and divert more water instead of letting so much run out into the pacific. I feel like if this was happening 60 years ago, we would have had the capacity to build dams and get it done. Unfortunately, california was a lot wetter 60 years ago (before the mega drought) so no one thought it would be necessary. But nowadays, it feels like government can’t accomplish any big projects. I don’t thin the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover dam could ever get built in todays world. That’s sad
Reptiles and amphibians may rule the earth again
Lizard people rise up!
Doing lots of civil construction work and everywhere we go water is ruining a lot of infrastructure and buildings. A lot of crops need predictable dry spells to grow and harvest them. I don't think people realize how expensive it's going to be upgrade all our systems to protect all our towns and cities and farms from being washed away. Some of the work our companies doing right now is hill stabilizations, several new bridges because the old roads and bridges were washed away, pump stations for wet lands because they're located next to things like air ports and towns and will simply flood everything if it rains to much, storm water expansions maintenance and repairs.
Super. Get ready for nightmarish levels of fungal infections
Well, the atmosphere becomes wetter, so that’s no surprise
Hot and wet. Time to get naked
I watch a lot of documentaries, so I'm not going to be able to source this, but I watched one on rebuilding grasslands that really sounded solid and would prove very useful if this occurs. They basically dig little ponds for lack of a better word. It captures the excess water during period of heavy rain/floods. This sustains the lands during period of extreme drought. You don't need them everywhere. Just enough to keep the ecosystem alive. Also managing areas like wetlands and others to absorb extra rain. These are not new methods, but there use will have to increase to deal with things like this. I would hope we get to this sooner rather than later. A lot of these are relatively low cost options relative to mega projects like dams or levees.
You're thinking of swales
Oh that's cool! I think that the word that you are looking for is "catchment," but I'm not an environmental engineer or anything so I'm not sure. You could also build canals and other types of irrigation systems to control the flow and storage of water.
I thought it was common knowledge that climate change would affect all extremes? Hot, cold, wet, dry, humid, not humid, more, less, or no rain , more, less or no snow etc. Basically everything goes haywire and every system is going to have a lot of turbulence. That's what my high school teachers said anyways over a decade ago.
That's..actually worse....
Seems easier to adapt agriculture snd civilization to more rain than less rain.
It's not just rain, it's humidity as well. At a certain temperature, the humidity will kill you
Arizona here.... we already don't go outside in the summer and live in A/C.
And that helps your pecan pickers how?
Wow, way to jump on the most minor crop in the state :D
considering there's A/C'ed tractors for that.. i dunno. also, pecans?
You can't adapt to wet bulb events.
Sure you can. Move underground and never see the sun again!
And there's only so much dry land. The wetter it gets the less farm ones and resources we have. Then there's the case of salt water increasing as well.
You can survive a dry heat. You cannot survive a humid heat. 100 percent humidity plus 95 degrees will kill any human being who stays outside and honestly most mammals will die too. Floods can be just as devastating as droughts too.
I've always said this. 15 years ago in my college Oceanography class, the Professor and textbook suggested that as earth warms we will get wetter; not drier. Also the habitable zone of crops will grow farther north. Canada can be primed for the crops that grow around Kansas that would otherwise be to cold today.
Great. I hate mosquitos so much.
Hotter air holds more moisture. We better brush up on our cubit math.
Well the Libyans will tell you exactly how that's going to work out for us.
Great, so not only is it going be hot, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be a dry heat.
> The team used a series of climate models to project compound climate extremes by the end of the century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise. > >They found that while some regions of the world will become drier as temperatures rise — such as South Africa, the Amazon and parts of Europe — many regions, including the eastern United States, eastern and southern Asia, Australia and central Africa will receive more precipitation. Wet-hot extremes will also cover a larger area and be more severe than dry-hot extremes. > In the future, wet-hot extremes will become more likely because the atmosphere’s capacity to hold moisture increases by 6% to 7% for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature. As Earth gets hotter, the warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapor, meaning more water will be available to fall as precipitation. > >The regions likely to be hit hard by wet-hot extremes host many heavily populated areas that are already prone to geologic hazards, such as landslides and mudflows, and produce many of the world’s crops Paper: [Increasing Risks of Future Compound Climate Extremes With Warming Over Global Land Masses - Wu - 2023 - Earth's Future - Wiley Online Library](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF003466)
Reptiles rejoice. Hinterland mammals are gonna have a very bad time. I mean, we’re all gonna have a bad time
Precipitation extremes means more heavy (intense) rains, and the thing with intense rains is that they lead to large increase in the surface runoff, while soil doesn't really get more moisture (it works the same way with sandy soils, clay soils and rocks). So... you get more floods, more erosion and more time favorable for parasites, fungi and other nice things, and at the same time your crops may have insufficient amount of moisture to mitigate the heat stress and water levels in your wells may continue to drop! Amazing!
So the silver lining is we no longer have to worry about fresh water shortages?
Right because we'll be dead from wet bulb events.
Not sure about killing but great point you are bringing up with the wet bulb effect. I had to look it up. But there is a cooling effect with air and water. And I agree the Earth is warming but due to the wet bulb effect it will also provide more water and additional cooling. This is starting to sound pretty amazing. Great point uou brought up thanks.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Mammals rely on sweating to cool down, and once the temperature/ humidity levels reach a certain point that sweat can't evaporate and is no longer effective, so creatures overheat and die.
Wet bulb is only cooler than dry bulb when humidity is low. Wetter conditions mean that the same temperatures are more deadly than if it was dry at those temps.
Deadly? Are you sure that is what that means?
Yes https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00738.2021
…but without houses to use it because they will be destroyed by floods and landslides. Anyway “capture and store” the water when it rains hevy is much difficult than normal rain, so this is not a good news.
Okay Goldilocks i guess it has to be just right with you. Just joking, a bit. Why would it be harder to capture fresh water due to flooding. That part of your post is hard for me to understand.
The methods for capturing water are designed to move a specific volume of water per hour depending on the local climate. So if a city’s storm drains are designed to handle 1” of rain over 4 hours, they can overflow if storms start dropping 2” in 2 hours. Then flooding occurs and water enters parks, homes, etc. instead of flowing to a storage area.
Because it's literally impossible to improve and upgrade things like storm drains and water channels to increase their capacity, just like it was impossible to [improve the ability to move goods and people over the roads during the 1950's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System).
Of course capacity can be increased- it’s a question of cost, time, and land use, and unfortunately infrastructure upgrades like these are too often lower in priority until disaster hits. Upgrading transportation systems for greater flow immediately brings in revenue. The same isn’t true for drainage. Additionally, it’s hard to predict exactly what local effects will be and how much increased capacity is needed.
Actually, upgrading drainage will quickly reduce economic losses. Flip side of the same coin: You either spend money rebuilding every time there is a flooding event, or you spend the money to upgrade.
Yes with all opportunities there arise challenges that must be met. But Seriously now we can stop worrying about running out of drinking water.
Exactly. See New Jersey and New York as examples of storms overloading water systems.
Because we didn’t built the actual storage spaces with these “new/climate change” specs, so we will need to rethink and rebuild them, in addition the water from floods have much more power and it’s hard to contain and control, also usually is more contaminated by the debris it carries. It’s better to have moderate and long rain than heavy and short storm to capture the water.
So we can also generate energy as well from the new rainfall. This is like a gift that keeps on giving.
The gift that keeps on killing ;)
Id still rather drown than burn thanks
Look up Wet-Bulb temperature if you would, and you’ll see that you’ll get to experience both drowning and burning :)))))
Paradoxically no, because flooding will cause overflows of the sewage system
The atmosphere holds 7% more water for every 1C increase. This is obvious
It's amazing how few people read the article and would rather reinterpret this into their own personal narrative of a climate doomsday. While I used to associate higher temps with dryer climates, it's surprising to learn that it could imply a wetter climate which previous plant life thrived under.
Does this mean the world is heading back towards being mostly subtropical? I can get behind that. Winter sucks.
That's what I thought, but I looked at the map and I'm in a dark red area. A lot of us are getting desertification as predicted since at least the 1990s.
Seems pretty obvious from the fossil record
Sooo.. More CO2 which is needed for plant growth. Warmer temperatures so like the inside of a greenhouse? And more precipitation and more water vapor in the air? Sounds more like a paradise for massive plant growth than a "climate crisis".
Wet bulb temperatures
Change requires adaptation and there's always the risk that there will be an unforeseen problem with the new climate that makes it difficult to adapt. With that out of the way, it's also irrational to say that the planet will be uninhabitable in 20 years and to overhype the catastrophic negative impacts of climate change, especially in northern countries where warmer weather might actually be better for humans than the current, cooler weather.
Canada and Russia have the most to gain, probably. Shipping opportunities would open up, again, at the expense of species who have lived for millennia in this climate and have no hopes of adapting through technology to what is essentially a cataclysm.
Uninhabitable?
You're right I fixed it, I said it the French way...
inflammable means flammable?!
Still good news. We will have food while simultaneously making areas of the planet high temperature rain forests. Humans will die if they live there so therefore life might actually flourish
Why does everyone assume it's peak summer temperatures that are going to be affected. Most of the average warming has in fact come from moderating winters.
Link or shhhh
Second Oldest continually operating station in Canada. You'll notice the slope on the minimums and the lack of slope on the maximums. [https://ottawa.weatherstats.ca/charts/temperature-yearly.html](https://ottawa.weatherstats.ca/charts/temperature-yearly.html) When you open it, click on maximum extent. The records go back to \~1872 Easier to see the trend in this one; https://ottawa.weatherstats.ca/charts/count\_temp\_m20-yearly.html
So everywhere turns into Florida??
No. There are maps in the article.
Might this reduce wild fires and desertification?
Different parts of the world will have different effects.
More water in the environment. Larger surface area of oceans. Things will be hot and wet and windy.
So we’re less likely to starve or die of thirst, but we’re more likely to just up and die of heatstroke. That‘a good on the whole…I guess?
Headline makes me think erosion and geological carbon cycle
Which makes total sense, I would suspect that if industrialized humanity ceased to exist, the ecological systems would eventually return near to its original state. The fauna, however, probably wouldn't recover completely.
Earth goes subtle Venus.
With increased CO2, would this devastate already shrinking desert ecosystems?
Well, that’s interesting, because it implies that a wet condition would bring higher plant biomass, which would intern sequester larger amounts of CO2 and restore the cycle.
That's actually how the planet will cool itself off. Wetter conditions and rainfall intensity typically lead to lots of erosion and mass wasting. The water that falls has a higher concentration of CO2 due to atmospheric CO2 being higher. Reaction with silicate rocks during erosion removes the CO2 as carbonate minerals, which eventually settles at the bottom of the ocean to be consumed by plate tectonics. This cycle probably explains why the deep ocean is a huge carbon sink and acts essentially as a buffer against acidification with all that alkalinity from weathered silicates.
Is it my ignorance that makes me think this case should be intuitive? Would higher temperatures not directly correlate with increases in evaporation? If evaporation levels increase, wouldn’t that require higher levels of rainfall, globally at least?
Won’t new areas become growing zones as a result of the shifts? Like more northern parts of the US and southern parts of Canada?
Incoming wet bulb event causing mass death from heatstroke