End of the Line?

 

The habitable Earth is becoming increasingly smaller.

In some places it's too dry. The phenomenon of decadal drought from mellennia past has returned.  The pattern of reliably predictable and gentle rains that marked the Holocene and, along with technology and abundant, cheap fossil fuels spurred a growth in human numbers from one to eight billion in just two centuries, is over. This is the Anthropocene. It is what humankind has wrought. It is nature's refutation of our avarice.

In some places it has become too wet, bringing the shock of massively devastating floods to British Columbia, the US Eastern seaboard, the UK and Europe and elsewhere.

Then there is the Ground Zero of our worsening climate catastrophe.

Scientists have found that Mexico and Central America, the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia are all careening toward "wet bulb 35."

The wet-bulb temperature that marks the upper limit of what the human body can handle is 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius). But any temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) can be dangerous and deadly. Horton and other scientists noted in a 2020 paper that these temperatures are occurring with increasing frequency in parts of the world. To put things in perspective, the highest wet-bulb temperature ever recorded in the Washington region, known for its muggy, unbearable summers, was 87.2 degrees (30.7 Celsius).

Baking from the inside out.

Even below these thresholds, cooling down is hard work on the body. The efforts to fight the effects of heat puts pressure on your heart and kidneys. With extreme heat, people’s organs can start to fail. If you have preexisting conditions, it’s even more likely.

...“The poorest people are the most vulnerable, and they are already suffering,” Cavazos said, noting that Sonora [Mexico] depends on farming, meaning a lot of people have to engage in physical labor in the dangerous heat.

In regions like the Persian Gulf, extreme heat is the new normal: Qatar has adapted so extensively to the blistering climate that it air-conditions the outdoors. But not everyone has access to outdoor air conditioning, including those building the facilities that have them. When the wealthy country began construction on venues to host the 2022 World Cup, it faced an uproar over its treatment of workers building the stadiums.

In 2019, the United Nations warned that during the four hottest months of the year, outdoor laborers in Qatar were working under “significant occupational heat stress conditions.”

More on this from NASA.

Air conditioning the outdoors. That sounds like a nutty idea. Yes, powerful, energy-intensive compressors can deliver cool air but the heat energy they extract doesn't magically disappear. It's that business about "conservation of energy." It's akin to moving food around on your plate.

Maybe they can harvest that scavenged heat to boil water to create steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. No, I guess not.

Look at the areas that will be hit first - southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, Mexico and Central America. These are heavily populated, in some cases quite overpopulated regions. They're also heavily agrarian. What happens when they become seasonally uninhabitable during the planting, growing and harvesting season?

How will the United States cope with "life or death" migration out of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean?  What about us? How dependent are we on their agricultural production? The questions seem endless even as solutions elude us.