The coming heat age

[unhappycamper]

http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2981589

Greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to reach a record high of 36 billion tons this year.

The coming heat age
Dec 06,2013

BEIJING - In the last 100,000 years or so, our planet has endured an Ice Age and a few mini ice ages. But now, with the earth on track to be four degrees Celsius (39.2 Fahrenheit) warmer by 2100, a “Heat Age” is looming over us all.

This is not fear-mongering. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2100 we can expect a mean increase in surface temperature of 3.7 degrees Celsius, with a likely range of 2.6 to 4.8 degrees. A warmer world will lead to mass migration from stricken areas and exacerbate existing wealth gaps between countries. In the words of David Victor, of the University of California, San Diego, the coming Heat Age will be “nasty, brutish and hot.”

Greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to reach a record high of 36 billion tons this year. That figure is expected to grow dramatically, as the great emerging-market boom of recent decades, which has lifted billions out of poverty and raised living standards around the world, puts increasing strain on the world’s environment and resources. Indeed, by 2030, 3 billion new middle-class consumers - most of them in Asia - will add to the ever-growing burden of emissions.

We can already get a sense of the far-reaching consequences of climate change. In 2010, a major drought in eastern China damaged the wheat crop, forcing the country to rely on imports. This, combined with major wildfires in Russia’s wheat-producing areas, helped to double average food prices in global markets.

[FreakinDJ]

1. You mean like this pollution

[unhappycamper]

2. Yup. n/t

[Jim Lane]

3. A minor correction to the numbers

You write, "with the earth on track to be four degrees Celsius (39.2 Fahrenheit) warmer by 2100...."

The formula for converting a temperature from Celsius is F = 9/5 C + 32. If the outdoor temperature is four degrees Celsius, then it is indeed 39.2 Fahrenheit.

But you add the +32 only because the scales have different zero points. If you're talking about a temperature change, that doesn't apply. (Another way to look at it is that you'd add the 32 to the Fahrenheit temperature both before and after the change, so it nets out.) If the Earth warms by four degrees Celsius, it will have warmed by "only" 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit.