On the day before the Bill on Climate and Energy comes to the Senate floor USA Today reports on a National Academy of Sciences study that describes potentially extremely dire consequences resulting from man made climate change.
Report: Climate change could render much of world uninhabitable
A worst-case scenario of global warming, in which temperatures would soar some 21 degrees, is that much of the world may simply become too hot for humans to live in, according to new research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We found that ... a 21-degree warming would put half of the world's population in an uninhabitable environment,"says study co-author Matthew Huber of Purdue University.
This worst case scenario should be a deafening wake up call to even the most recalcitrant members of the Senate and all Americans who believe in modern science.
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the result of business-as-usual warming would be 7 degrees by 2100, eventual warming over several centuries of 25 degrees is feasible, says Huber.
This worst case scenario would render our planet a much more hostile habitat for human beings, unrecognizable to the people today who are exacerbating the problem.
The middle range scenario entails very serious repercussions for human civilization as well.
"We show that even modest global warming could therefore expose large fractions of the population to unprecedented heat stress, and that with severe warming this would become intolerable," the authors write.
"If warmings of 10 degrees C (18 degrees F) were really to occur in next three centuries, the area of land likely rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level. Heat stress thus deserves more attention as a climate-change impact."
This is a warning we would be prudent to heed.
This has to raise the stakes of tomorrow's Senate vote on the Climate and Energy Bill.
Sorry for the quickie diary but I felt this needs to be published immediately.
Call your Senators NOW, your grandchildren will thank you.