Good News for Coach Potatoes of the Future!

A new report, “Risky Business,” suggests that by the end of the century, climate change will make it difficult to even be outside for parts of the    year – across the Southern states and even in places like NYC, Chicago and Seattle (Reuters). "As temperatures rise, toward the end of the century, less than an hour of activity outdoors in the shade could cause a moderately fit individual to suffer heat stroke," said climatologist Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, lead scientific author of the report. "That's something that doesn't exist anywhere in the world today." This is due predominantly to the rise in humidity that is expected to only worsen as time goes on: "If it's humid you can't sweat, and if you can't sweat you can't maintain core body temperature in the heat, and you die," said Dr Al Sommer, dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and author of a chapter on health effects in the new report.

And while the right continues to claim global warming is a giant hoax perpetuated to help … hmm … Nobel Prize winning scientists I guess, we have just passed through the hottest May on record (according to NOAA). According to a report commissioned by Coca Cola, General Mills, other Fortune 500 companies and wealthy individuals like Michael Bloomberg, the economic damage coming our way is astronomical (the Economist). For example, if the sea level continues to rise, $66 to $105 billion worth of coastline property could be submerged as soon as 2050! A second area of serious concern is with crops and farming, as for example in North Dakota in 2006, when 10 percent of the state’s wheat crop was wiped out by a drought. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in fact, now argues that losses to cereals and other crops more sensitive to heat could wipe out the benefits of more arable land in the future. Finally, is a decline in productivity for workers outside – with farming, construction and other outside jobs seeing a drop of an hour a day per worker when the temperature rises above 37.8 celsius.

While these reports continue to proliferate, along with the evidence that global warming is a fact, and caused by human activity, the Supreme Court was quibbling with a part of Obama’s executive order forcing manufacturers to cut carbon emissions (while not affecting the overall program, it seems like a silly time to continue with these constant battles). Of course, this is good news for couch potatoes, who now have an excuse to stay in, even in the beach-calling summer months. And conservatives have little to worry about, as there is no such thing as global warming. Actually, maybe the country will finally shift leftward toward the end of the century, as skeptical conservatives drop dread across the U.S., unwilling to heed climatologists’ warnings.