Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Worried about wet bulb temps

I'm still grieving that we're over 400 ppm CO2. It happened a few weeks ago but it is still sinking in, at least with me. The rest of the country doesn't seem to mind, except for the brave few environmental bloggers. Alert, alert! Yawn. So now I'm reading some depressing societal collapse stuff and I looked up wet bulb temprature, which I heard Jim Hansen talking about not long ago. So here are a few excerpts from a blog: "To function normally, we have to maintain a core body temperature of around 37 °C. If it rises above about 42 °C, we die...for every 1 °C that the global average temperature rises, maximum wet-bulb temperatures will rise by about 0.75 °C (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 9552)." When will this happen? It depends on climate sensitivity to CO2. It could be within the century. "Most of the discussion has been about the 21st century, but warming isn’t going to stop in 2100 unless our emissions have fallen almost to zero by then, and that would require heroic efforts,” says Sherwood. “If you consider that carbon releases might be a little higher than the most likely value and that the climate might be quite sensitive to inputs of energy, it’s not too hard to get up to 10, 12 or even 15 °C by the 23rd century.” This, along with the paleontologist research into the PETM, the previous thermal maximum that occurred millions of years ago, should be enough to finally shut James Inhofe up, and let Congress start debating solutions to this catastrophic climate trajectory. That is, assuming that facts are meaningful, which is a questionable assumption.