this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
304 points (95.5% liked)

World News

38719 readers
2411 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] eatthecake@lemmy.world 45 points 6 months ago (17 children)

Full article:

Humanity’s superpower is sweating—but rising heat could be our kryptonite, and an average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels could bring regular, fatal heat waves to large parts of the planet, says Tom Matthews, a senior lecturer in environmental geography at King’s College London.

“We have evolved to cope with the most extreme heat and humidity the planet can throw at us,” he explains. But when our core temperature gets to about 42 degrees Celsius (around 107.5 degrees Fahrenheit), people face heat stroke and probable death as the body strains to keep cool and the heart works harder, inducing heart attacks.

Matthews cites an example from his home country, the UK. In the summer of 2022, the UK broke its high temperature record, surpassing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists estimate there were roughly 3,500 heat-associated deaths that summer in the UK. Across Europe, they estimate high heat caused more than 60,000 deaths.

Featured Video

Meteorologist Debunks Weather Myths

“At 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the likes of Lagos, Karachi, [and] Shanghai start to experience heat waves exceeding our limit. At 2 degrees Celsius, the events increase at least 10 times more often, and if we get to 8 degrees Celsius, a large fraction of the Earth’s surface would be too hot for our physiology and would not be habitable,” he says.

Air conditioning and heat-escape rooms would help, but we might need to abandon intense outdoor work such as rice farming in hotter regions. And these solutions will need to be able to meet demand. “The infrastructure must be able to withstand the surges when everyone turns on the air conditioning, and must be able to withstand hurricanes or floods,” he says.

Our best hope in the face of inevitable rises in heat? Cooperation. “We’ve built forecasting systems that will warn us when disasters are incoming by working together at enormous scale. We must continue to do the same.”

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 52 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Our best hope in the face of inevitable rises in heat? Cooperation.

Yeah, we're fucked

[–] MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Not true. Once we start dying in very large numbers, there will be fewer non-cooperative people around to fuck things up.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In any post-apocalyptic world, it’s always the bullies who seem to win. You don’t need to be cooperative if you can just take it from those cooperative wimps

[–] MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Answered elsewhere, but my comment was gallows humor, and not a serious response.

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Do you expect the heat to impact non-cooperative people more?

[–] MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

It's gallows humor, not a pragmatic answer.

load more comments (15 replies)