Thread by @chriscmooney

1. Announcing the 4th installment of the @washingtonpost “2 degrees C: Beyond the Limit” series. This time, we visit the small but wealthy nation of Qatar in the Middle East, which is warming up rapidly. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…

2. The story is by @StevenMufson with striking photos by @salwangeorges. Data and graphics, as always, are from @JohnMuyskens, whose work with multiple massive global temperature datasets has been the lynchpin of the series.

3. I helped a bit with the science, which turns on why desert regions (including much of the Middle East) are warming faster than many other places, and how fast urbanization, combined with fast warming, can provide a kind of double-whammy in such places.

4. The story is unique in our series because it presents quite a different dynamic than you see in many stories about climate change.

5. It's not about rapid warming arriving, upending lives, and leaving people struggling to cope.

6. Rather it’s about a wealthy county facing down warming by using its resources, engineering, and innovation to come up with ever more impressive ways of cooling down indoor – and even outdoor – spaces.

7. But of course, there’s a downside. Air conditioning uses lots of energy and that energy is generated by the burning of fossil fuels and…well, you see the problem.

8. After traveling to Qatar during the heat of summer, @stevenmufson reports back from malls, markets, and future World Cup soccer stadiums, all of which are finding ways to air condition *the outdoors.*

9. As he puts it

10. It is because of this overall dynamic that the world is forecast to install loads more air conditioning in the future, with particular growth in the Middle East but also in India and other developing countries.

11. And that, in turn, will fuel more greenhouse gas emissions.

12. I want to talk a little bit about the warming of Qatar, which shows up as 2.1 C since preindustrial in the Berkeley Earth dataset. That's close to double the global average warming rate.

13. It’s a complex situation, though. What we have here is a combination of climate-driven warming and urban-driven warming in the rapidly growing city of Doha. At least 3 factors are involved:

14. *Amplified warming rates in the Middle East.* Much of this region shows up as 2C in our analyses. Experts tell us that it is because deserts, faced with warming temperatures, lack the capacity to expel heat through evaporation from soils.

15. At the same time, more heat means more evaporation of moisture from the shallow and already hot Persian Gulf, which means more water vapor, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere. Indeed, Qatar sits on a peninsula that juts out into the Gulf.

16. Which brings us to factor number two: *The Persian Gulf is warming much more rapidly than the global ocean,* with 1C of change just since the year 1982.

17. We know there are broad regional and global climatic factors involved because fast changes are happening across the Middle East and often appear in sync.

18. Multiple locations, including Doha, show a temperature spike from 1997-1999, a period centered on the major El Nino event of the late 1990s. And even temperature analyses that seek to control for urban factors in a variety of ways show immense warming in Doha and Qatar.

19. Some studies of the region’s warming, unpacking all of this in more detail, can be found here.
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

20. And yet there is a third factor. *Urban-driven warming is happening on top of this.*

21. It’s hard to deny a role for urbanization in the warming of Doha, where expansion and population growth have been rapid, and the effect of more cars and paved surfaces adds additional heating.

22. So it’s really a problem with compounding factors. And this is a situation that many major cities will face as the globe continues to warm even as people more and more flock to urban centers.

23. Any way you look at it though, there is major warming in a place that is already very hot to begin with.

24. And the real danger here is how this gets expressed in acute heat events. Most alarmingly, a measure called the heat wave index, which analyzes the worst heat wave of each year, increased by 1.57 C per decade from 1983 to 2012 in the area. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

25. There is concern that too much heat, combined with high humidity could make for deadly outdoor conditions in the Middle East.

26. This threshold was actually nearly reached in one extreme heat event in Iran in 2015. nature.com/articles/nclim…

27. But as our story explains, it's not that Qatar cannot cope. It can install lots of air conditioning. It can take cooling innovation to new heights.

28. But that is expensive and it comes with more emissions to boot -- and such solutions will not be available, or affordable, for everyone.

29. So, that is the problem with rapid warming in the globe's warmest places -- and I encourage you to read the full story for more. /end
washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…