You might be wondering about how much external heat a person can tolerate. Live Science writes that most humans can endure about 10 minutes in 140–degree heat before suffering from hyperthermia, a lethal form of which is the aforementioned heat stroke. We are getting CLOSE to that.
The Hottest reliably measured temperature in world recorded history in August. Death Valley, California, hit an astonishing 129.9 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4°C) at 3:41 p.m. PDT, August 16, 2020, at the Furnace Creek Visitor’s Center. Round it to 130 degrees.
At that temperature, you can drink water continuously and still not be able to keep from collapsing. The graph above shows that Earth’s current temperatures are rising in that direction, fueled by the increase in carbon from our fossil fuel emissions. Humans have broken a “cooling and heating” cycle that stayed within a constant range for over 800,000 years. We broke that cycle. 2020 was the hottest year on record, one of a series since 2000.
From now on, the planet will only get hotter unless we make a change, caused by our runaway greenhouse gas emissions. That is what killed our sister planet Venus which is an inhabitable hell of 800 degrees, far above the tolerance of humans or life as we know it.
Scientists were able to make that chart of temperatures by drilling ice cores that record this history of our past long before man arrived. At the very end of this chart represents the last 200 years of industrialization — you can see that the temperature jumps far above the hottest temperatures of the past 800,000 years. And it’s moving up. It won’t be coming down again unless we make some changes to our continued emissions from the billions of global factories, houses, and vehicles emitting carbon every day. That’s why cutting carbon is vital to our children’s survival.
Ten thousand years ago only a few humans existed with a few campfires, so there was little impact on the planet. Nature could take its course. But now with 8 billion of us on the planet cooking, heating, driving, cutting forests, releasing methane from oil wells, emitting coal dust from power plants, we are overpowering mother nature in a death grip of carbon and methane releases heating the atmosphere. That is causing us to lose our ice sheets, earth’s freon. When the ice is gone so is our planet’s cooling system. We then become hothouse, Venus.
Do you remember the story of the frogs in the gradually warming pot, who allow themselves to be cooked to death? But if the water had been hot when the frog first went in, he would have jumped out. We are those frogs in a gradual death grip, heating the only blue planet in our part of the universe. Moving to dry airless Mars is not an answer. Fixing ours is.
The good news is that you can do something about carbon by cutting your own emissions and that there is a product everyone needs that would do just that. Armor Glass® Security Films armor the weakest link of every building – its glass – from breach by humans with bricks, burglars, and hurricane-force winds hurling debris. It is used to stop shooters, while it also cuts solar heat coming inside your building up to 79% and 99% of harmful UV. Cutting solar heat means your energy bill drops, saving you money. That’s a win-win-win.
Armor Glass® Film is one of those rare, Carbon NEGATIVE products, meaning that the films save more energy than it takes to make it, transport it and install it. It is but one of many solutions we need to pursue to a net-zero carbon world.
Doing nothing is not an option, because that equals planetary suicide. A planet too hot for life will spare no one of any nation or religion or form of government, liberal or conservative. The problem is global and so is the solution.
There is no Planet B to move to once this one at 130 degrees starts hitting 140 degrees, too hot to grow crops or venture out without immediate heat exhaustion. The time to act is running out.
If not for you, cut your carbon emissions for your kids who will pay the price of our inaction. We are doing our part at Armor Glass to make their future a better, cooler and safer one.
Michael Fjetland, JD/BBA
