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Will it soon be too hot for Texas football?


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A survey of football coaches and athletic officials in Texas indicates an opportunity for them to better protect athlete health during high heat, humidity, and climate change.

Climate scientist Sylvia Dee led the survey of Texas coaches, trainers, and athletic directors showing that while many are aware of the risks of outdoor workouts during the height of summer, not all are on board with adjusting for hotter weather.

Dee says that’s concerning in light of recent warnings that climate change is already making Texas’ summers hotter. For example, a 2021 report from the Texas State Climatologist’s office said Texans should expect the number of 100-degree days each summer to nearly double by 2036 compared to the average numbers from 2001-2020.

“It’s one thing to send out a survey, but we need to think ahead and have the tough conversations about what to do if it’s too hot to play football in the summer in the near future (or even now),” says Dee, an assistant professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Rice University. “I want to hope that just receiving this survey got these athletic staff thinking about the problem.”

The survey of hundreds of coaches and athletic directors at Texas high schools, colleges, and universities found that most are aware of the dangers of intensive workouts and strenuous events when temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit can put athletes at risk of heat-related illnesses.

They indicated they’re keeping a close eye on damaging heat, humidity, and wet bulb temperatures and will adjust schedules as necessary. But surprisingly, some indicated they don’t acknowledge climate change or its implications for the health of athletes and their programs.

The results appear in the journal GeoHealth.

read more:  https://www.futurity.org/heat-texas-football-coaches-2777592-2/

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24 minutes ago, meaniegreenie said:

Over FORTY years ago (in 1980), we were just about to start two-a-days here in TX.

Good thing it wasn't hot back then.

Was born in 83 and never quite got the whole comparisons to that year's summer. We've had a few since that are definitely worse and I'm not even arguing climate change, just simply hotter summers like 2011. 

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6 hours ago, Coach Andy Mac said:

For example, a 2021 report from the Texas State Climatologist’s office said Texans should expect the number of 100-degree days each summer to nearly double by 2036 compared to the average numbers from 2001-2020.

How do they know that?

 

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

DENTON LOVE!! 👇🏼

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Note: The prediction of famine in South America is partly true, but only in Venezuela and only because of socialism, not for environmental reasons. 

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say,`I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” 

Note: Global oil production last year at about 95M barrels per day (bpd) was double the global oil output of 48M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. 

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-were-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/

In case we need some newer predictions:

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/

 

 

Edited by TheColonyEagle
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50 minutes ago, TheColonyEagle said:

How do they know that?

 

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

DENTON LOVE!! 👇🏼

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Note: The prediction of famine in South America is partly true, but only in Venezuela and only because of socialism, not for environmental reasons. 

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say,`I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” 

Note: Global oil production last year at about 95M barrels per day (bpd) was double the global oil output of 48M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. 

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-were-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/

In case we need some newer predictions:

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/

 

 

standing ovation clap GIF

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/fort-worth/article263576058.html

I remember the summer of 1980.  I was 14 years old and played baseball all summer long.  I also remember all the predictions of the fall of man due to changes in the weather yet here we are 42 years later.  These "climate scientist" are still spouting the same old rhetoric and something tells me they will still be doing it 42 years from now.  Of course, by then, we will be playing sports in underground bunkers to avoid heat, humidity, dry heat, the sun, the wind and the damages of acid rain.

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16 minutes ago, 97and03 said:

You guys should leave your hometown at some point in your lives. When you see places where people start shooting over access to water, you gain different perspectives. 

Hasn't that been going on forever as well?

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Just now, UNTLifer said:

Hasn't that been going on forever as well?

True. Access to water has always been a thing. But only recently was it driven by concerns there won’t be enough. In Central Asia, most water is coming from snow and glacier melt. Less snow means shrinking glaciers equals less water. And the situation is worsening. Modernizing outdated irrigation systems will help stave off the worst effects in the short term but won’t solve the longer term issues of there just being less water to use. Also affects power production which is hydro powered. Dropping water levels have led to electricity shortages, rolling blackouts, etc. Widespread and extended droughts have affected food production worldwide. 
We are working on ways to mitigate these effects but none of them solve the overarching problem. 

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26 minutes ago, 97and03 said:

You guys should leave your hometown at some point in your lives. When you see places where people start shooting over access to water, you gain different perspectives. 

My dude they downvoted me to hell for merely calling Denton a suburb, they aren't ready for these kinds of truths. 

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23 minutes ago, TheColonyEagle said:

So all of these predictions have come true?

I mean that's some classic gish galloping for one, but like half the ones speaking about pollution were entirely accurate and were only prevented because action was taken. Mass extinctions, the rainforest disappearing...these are all happening in real time as I type this, that's not some dire prediction. If you want to go back to the days of leaded gasoline & DDT then be my guest though. 

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5 minutes ago, Coffee and TV said:

I mean that's some classic gish galloping for one, but like half the ones speaking about pollution were entirely accurate and were only prevented because action was taken. Mass extinctions, the rainforest disappearing...these are all happening in real time as I type this, that's not some dire prediction. If you want to go back to the days of leaded gasoline & DDT then be my guest though. 

No bamboozling on my part...I was just wondering if we should believe the Texas State Climatologist’s office or not. 

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