International warming will increase the utmost temperature of the tropical moist onion – watts with that?

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to a study, with every degree of warming, the maximum wet bulb temperature in the tropics also increases by one degree, so that even a small amount of warming poses a serious threat to human health. But there are these things called thunderstorms that create a non-linear limit on maximum temperatures.

Global warming is pushing tropical regions to the limit of human viability

Rising heat and humidity threaten to plunge a large part of the world’s population into potentially fatal conditions

Oliver Milman
@olliemilman
Tue 9 Mar 2021 03.00 AEDT

The climate crisis is pushing the tropical regions of the planet to the limits of human viability. Rising heat and humidity threaten to plunge much of the world’s population into potentially lethal conditions, new research has shown.

Unless governments limit global warming to 1.5 ° C above the pre-industrial era, there is a risk that areas in the tropical area, which stretches on either side of the equator, will be transformed into a new environment that is “borderline” human adaptation, ”warns the study.

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The research team examined various historical data and simulations to determine how the extreme temperatures of the wet spheres change as the planet continues to warm. It found that these extremes rise in the tropics at roughly the same rate as the average tropical temperature.

This means that global temperature rise must be limited to 1.5 ° C to avoid areas in the tropics risking wet bulb temperatures above 35 ° C. This is so called because it is measured with a thermometer whose light bulb is wrapped in a damp temperature fabric that mimics the ability of humans to cool their skin by evaporating sweat.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heating-tropical-regions-human-livability

The abstract of the study;

Projections of tropical heat stress from atmospheric dynamics

Yi Zhang, Isaac Held and Stephan Fueglistaler

Extreme heat among global warming is a problem for the growing tropical population. However, extreme temperature model projections, a widely used metric for extreme heat, are uncertain at the regional level. In addition, humidity must be taken into account in order to estimate the health effects of extreme heat. Here we show that an integrated temperature-humidity metric for the health effects of heat, namely the extreme wet-bulb temperature (TW), is controlled by the established atmospheric dynamics and can therefore be projected robustly on a regional level. For every tropical mean warming of 1 ° C, global climate models predict an extreme TW (the annual maximum of the daily mean or 3-hour values) to increase roughly evenly between 20 ° S and 20 ° N by around 1 ° C. This projection is in line with theoretical expectations based on the dynamics of the tropical atmosphere and observations over the past 40 years, which gives confidence to the model projection. For a warmer world at 1.5 ° C, a probable increase (66% confidence interval) in the regional extreme TW to 1.33–1.49 ° C is forecast, while the uncertainty of the projected extreme temperatures is 3.7 times as great . These results suggest that capping global warming to 1.5 ° C will prevent most of the tropics from reaching a TW of 35 ° C, the limit of human adaptation.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00695-3

The claim that the maximum wet bulb temperature increases linearly with global temperature is dubious in my opinion. Unfortunately, we can’t see their full study, but in the real world sea surface temperatures have a sharp limit. From Willis’ article “Argo and the Sea Temperature Maximum”.

Since the sea makes up 70% of the world’s surface, this strict limit value has a major impact on global temperatures.

Why is the sea surface temperature so limited? This is because thunderstorms form spontaneously and cool the surface when temperatures rise well above 30 ° C.

This is why the rainy season in the tropical belt is so wet – all of these storms are busy pumping excess heat from the surface, punching a hole in most of the greenhouse ceiling, and dissipating excess heat to the cold edge of space. Anyone who has seen a thunderstorm head soar into the sky has personally seen water vapor punch a hole in the bottom of the troposphere.

What if you live too far from the ocean or a large body of water to benefit from this ocean cooling effect? In this case, there will be no extreme humidity, so the wet-bulb temperature will remain at a survivable level. High humidity requires a source of water vapor.

But what if i’m wrong? Fortunately, here in Australia we have developed a novel solution to withstand extreme heat.

In the tropical far north of Australia, people install solar heating systems for their swimming pools in order not to heat the swimming pools but to operate them at night. These solar heaters act as radiators at night and divert excess pool water heat into the cooler night air. In this way, pleasantly cool swimming pools are available to us when the temperatures of the damp lightbulbs rise to uncomfortable heights in order to maintain a viable body temperature.

We have also found that drinking beer for medicinal purposes helps our bodies dissipate heat by expanding our superficial capillary blood vessels. To take full advantage of our cooler-cooled swimming pools, you must keep a six-pack of beer on ice in a floating cooler. and drink beer bottles on a regular basis.

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