An guest opinion article in The Los Angeles Times (LA Times), written by researcher Daniel Vecellio titled: “Opinion: Here are the places that could become too hot for humans due to climate change,” claims that heat and humidity will combine to make some areas of Earth “uninhabitable.” While it is true that high levels of combined heat and humidity create heat stress in humans, there’s no evidence that climate change will cause some areas to be uninhabitable.
Climate Realism has already debunked this topic in our recent guest post by Andy May, Media Takes the Bait on a Study Claiming Climate Change Will Make ‘Parts of the Earth Too Hot for Humans’ and, it seems that the LA Times also fell for this bait without realizing the problems with it. The flawed study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) claimed wet bulb temperatures (essentially the heat index, from combined temperature and humidity effects) will become too hot for human habitation in parts of the world. The only problem is that the LA Times, like other media, didn’t catch the errors in the paper.
Here is what Andy May wrote about the conclusions of the PNAS paper:
The first problem we notice is that the authors conflate local warming, mainly in the tropics, with the consensus goal to limit global warming to 1.5-2°C. Tropical temperatures don’t change much even over very long geological periods of time, because they are limited by deep convection to less than 30°C, except for short periods and over land where humidity is generally lower.
This is explained well by Sud, et al. (Sud, Walker, & Lau, 1999), Newell and Dopplick (Newell & Dopplick, 1979), Willis Eschenbach (Eschenbach, 2021), and Rick Willoughby (Willoughby, 2021). As Sud, et al. explain, a sea surface temperature of about 28°C is sufficient to drive the surface air to cloud level. This process also occurs over land, but generally requires high relative humidity and higher temperatures. It is well known that average tropical sea surface temperatures over large areas are capped at 30°C (86°F) and that essentially all global warming happens in the higher latitudes, thus the idea in the paper that global warming somehow will push tropical temperatures to dangerous levels is unfounded and physically impossible as long as our oceans and lakes exist.
But there’s also the human history element to consider:
Our distant ancestors, the first primates, evolved about 56 million years ago during one of the warmest times in the Cenozoic Era. This was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when the global average temperature may have been ten degrees warmer than today. Primates not only evolved then, but they also thrived. They spread rapidly around the world according to the fossil record, that we exist today is a testament to their success.
The bottom line is this, humans can, did, and do survive just fine at much warmer temperatures and humidity. The PNAS paper makes assumptions and creates future model projections of temperature and humidity that are not realistic by not taking into account how the tropical sections of Earth actually work to self-regulate temperature.
This is just another article in a long line of climate scare stories pushed by the media that have no basis in reality.
Absurd claim that places will become inhabitable! The first law of thermodynamics that energy can be neither created or destroyed and that hot goes to cold the old refrigerator open door can’t cool a room! Temperatures are always self regulating and the fact that 70% of the earth is water also makes unsustainable heating impossible! When will these fear mongers ever get their stories straight! Thermodynamics and entropic physics will always behave the same!