Actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has long been a passionate advocate for alternative energy.

He’s in Paris as part of the UN Climate Change Conference, pairing up with his successor, Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown, to push for action on the issue, arguing that California’s thriving solar and wind-based power industries are proof those who argue action on climate change will cost jobs and the economy are wrong.

Overnight, The Terminator also took to Facebook with an epic smackdown of the naysayers titled "I don't give a f--- if we agree about climate change."

Schwarzenegger’s critical point about the need for change is best summed up in one killer line about the fossil fuels industry: “I don’t want to be the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged.”

He also has some critical points to make about pollution on a day when Beijing has declared a red alert in the Chinese capital because the air quality has the potential to kill people.

Here’s the text of Schwarzenegger’s head-on challenge to his doubters:

I see your questions.

Each and every time I post on my Facebook page or tweet about my crusade for a clean energy future, I see them.

There are always a few of you, asking why we should care about the temperature rising, or questioning the science of climate change.

I want you to know that I hear you. Even those of you who say renewable energy is a conspiracy. Even those who say climate change is a hoax. Even those of you who use four letter words.

I’ve heard all of your questions, and now I have three questions for you.

Let’s put climate change aside for a minute. In fact, let’s assume you’re right.

First – do you believe it is acceptable that 7 million people die every year from pollution? That’s more than murders, suicides, and car accidents – combined.

Every day, 19,000 people die from pollution from fossil fuels. Do you accept those deaths? Do you accept that children all over the world have to grow up breathing with inhalers?

Now, my second question: do you believe coal and oil will be the fuels of the future?

Besides the fact that fossil fuels destroy our lungs, everyone agrees that eventually they will run out. What’s your plan then?

I, personally, want a plan. I don’t want to be like the last horse and buggy salesman who was holding out as cars took over the roads. I don’t want to be the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged.

That’s exactly what is going to happen to fossil fuels.

A clean energy future is a wise investment, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either wrong, or lying. Either way, I wouldn’t take their investment advice.

Renewable energy is great for the economy, and you don’t have to take my word for it. California has some of the most revolutionary environmental laws in the United States, we get 40% of our power from renewables, and we are 40% more energy efficient than the rest of the country. We were an early-adopter of a clean energy future.

Our economy has not suffered. In fact, our economy in California is growing faster than the U.S. economy. We lead the nation in manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, entertainment, high tech, biotech, and, of course, green tech.

I have a final question, and it will take some imagination.

There are two doors. Behind Door Number One is a completely sealed room, with a regular, gasoline-fueled car. Behind Door Number Two is an identical, completely sealed room, with an electric car. Both engines are running full blast.

I want you to pick a door to open, and enter the room and shut the door behind you. You have to stay in the room you choose for one hour. You cannot turn off the engine. You do not get a gas mask.

I’m guessing you chose the Door Number Two, with the electric car, right? Door number one is a fatal choice – who would ever want to breathe those fumes?

This is the choice the world is making right now.

To use one of the four-letter words all of you commenters love, I don’t give a damn if you believe in climate change. I couldn’t care less if you’re concerned about temperatures rising or melting glaciers. It doesn’t matter to me which of us is right about the science.

I just hope that you’ll join me in opening Door Number Two, to a smarter, cleaner, healthier, more profitable energy future.

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Keurig Green Mountain, which makes the Keurig coffee brewers and single-brew K-cups, recently got acquired by JAB Group for $92 a share, a deal which values the company at $13.9 billion.

Shares of Keurig closed last week at $51.70 per share, making this acquisition price a 78% premium to the stock's most recent close.

Shares of Keurig were up as much as 75% in pre-market trade last week.

But the burgeoning coffee empire is still failing to address a much bigger problem: A warming planet that is slowly devastating coffee crops worldwide.

Global temperatures are forecast to rise by at least two degrees Celsius over the next few decades, and it's likely that many of the major havens for coffee production will suffer as a result. A recent report in the journal PLOS One predicts that pressure from climate change will drive down supplies, forcing coffee prices up.

Where our java comes from

Americans love coffee. But most of the java we drink comes from places around the globe where warming temperatures and altered weather patterns are decimating coffee crops. A combination of coffee rust, a fungal infection that attacks the leaves of the coffee plant, and invasive species like the coffee berry borer are slowly destroying coffee plantations across the globe.

The PLOS report found that the number of coffee-growing regions in Africa — where Goldilock's mix of just-right temperature, altitude, and soil moisture allow the plant to be grown in bulk — could be reduced by between 65% and 100% in the next seven decades.

On a recent visit to a coffee farm in Costa Rica, considered one of the havens for consistently smooth andfruity, complex coffee, I saw firsthand the problems that plague the current industry. At the frm we visited, the vast majority of coffee came from Coffea arabica plants, a species which accounts for roughly 75% of the world's coffee. Here's a shot of the many rows of coffee plants, which are interspersed with corn and other crops to help cycle nutrients through the soil:

It is thought that the first place where C. arabica plants were farmed was in the southwestern highland forests of Ethiopia. Today, coffee plants are rarely found in that region. Instead, the crop is grown all over the world, from Africa and South America to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. 

A global threat to coffee

Unfortunately, since nearly all the coffee we drink started with just a few wild Ethiopian plants, the current coffee crop is far from genetically diverse. In fact, experts estimate that all the coffee currently farmed has less than 1% of the diversity of wild Ethiopian plants.

This is a big problem: It means coffee plants — wherevere they are grown — are highly susceptible to changes in the climate.

One example of these changes is the emergence of the coffee berry borer, a small species of beetle native to Africa. It is thought to rank among the most harmful pests to coffee crops worldwide and is considered the single most economically important coffee pest in the world. Together with a pesky fungus known as coffee rust, the borer is devastating coffee crops. Higher temperatures have expanded the range where the pest can survive, thrive, and reproduce.

Here's a photo of an adult coffee borer beetle (Hypothenemus hampei) on a damaged coffee bean:

All of these threats to coffee will put many pressures on the industry, and it's left to see how the growing industry will cope.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger — who is making the rounds at the COP21 talks in Paris — wrote an epic Facebook post on December 7 about the threat of climate change and doesn't "give a damn" whether you agree with him or not.

"To use one of the four-letter words all of you commenters love, I don't give a damn if you believe in climate change," the international superstar wrote.

He added, "I couldn't care less if you're concerned about temperatures rising or melting glaciers. It doesn't matter to me which of us is right about the science."

To date, the post has been "Liked" by nearly 82,000 Facebook users (including a thumbs-up from none other than Facebook head and fellow renewable energy advocate Mark Zuckerberg) and shared nearly 50,000 times on the social networking platform.

In his essay, the former Republican California governor makes it clear on why he wants to see an end to fossil fuels:

First — do you believe it is acceptable that 7 million people die every year from pollution? That's more than murders, suicides, and car accidents — combined.

Every day, 19,000 people die from pollution from fossil fuels. Do you accept those deaths? Do you accept that children all over the world have to grow up breathing with inhalers?

Now, my second question: do you believe coal and oil will be the fuels of the future?

Besides the fact that fossil fuels destroy our lungs, everyone agrees that eventually they will run out. What's your plan then?

Schwarzenegger also urged for a clean energy future, comparing the fossil fuel industry to a dying business.

"I don't want to be like the last horse and buggy salesman who was holding out as cars took over the roads," he wrote. "I don't want to be the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged. That's exactly what is going to happen to fossil fuels."

You can read the entire post on Facebook.

The Terminator actor has long used his muscle to take action on the climate front. While he was in office, Schwarzenegger signed the nation's first cap on greenhouse gas emissions in 2006, saying the effort kicks off "a bold new era of environmental protection."

His work has helped put the state on track to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a goal set under Schwarzenegger. The former "Governator" also continues to use his clout to speak out on California's devastating drought.

Schwarzenegger is currently in Paris with his successor, Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown. In the video below, the two sit with The Los Angeles Times and said those who think climate change efforts are bad for the economy should look to the efforts made by the Golden State.

Also at the climate conference, Schwarzenegger told The Guardian he wants an immediate solution to the emerging crisis of a warming planet.

"It drives me crazy when people talk about 30 years from now, rising sea levels and so on," he said. "What about right now? Thousands of people are dying from pollution. People are living with cancer [because of air pollution]."

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The former Republican governor of California (and four-time Terminator) is doing the rounds at the climate talks in Paris with his successor, Governor Jerry Brown.

Schwarzenegger recently posted a note to his personal Facebook account where he compared using fossil fuels to making a recent investment in the ill-fated movie rental company Blockbuster (emphasis ours):

I, personally, want a plan. I don’t want to be like the last horse and buggy salesman who was holding out as cars took over the roads. I don’t want to be the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged.

That's exactly what is going to happen to fossil fuels.

He also pushed California's track record in creating jobs in the renewable energy sector — as a backlash to those in his own party who argue that acting on climate change will cost the economy dearly:

Renewable energy is great for the economy, and you don't have to take my word for it. California has some of the most revolutionary environmental laws in the United States, we get 40% of our power from renewables, and we are 40% more energy efficient than the rest of the country. We were an early-adopter of a clean energy future.

Our economy has not suffered. In fact, our economy in California is growing faster than the U.S. economy. We lead the nation in manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, entertainment, high tech, biotech, and, of course, green tech.

As always, Schwarzenegger has no time for the haters:

And he vows to fight climate change like a Terminator:

You can read the rest of his note here.

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California mudslides! Florida tornadoes! Killer New England ice storms!

Is that the kind of weather we're in for this year?

No, all that happened back in the winter of 1997-98 — courtesy of one ornery El Niño.

While the once-every-several years weather pattern has already caused 100-year flooding on India's eastern coast, it probably won't do much harm in the U.S.

Yet, some forecasts for this season sound ominously similar to 1997, drawing catastrophizing prognostications from some quarters—as well as hopes for a California-drought-ending deluge in others. Both sides may be disappointed.

The facts

Let's review what we know: The ocean's surface temperatures are warmer than usual, and that's what drives El Niño weather. The global pattern sets up every three to seven years or so, and it usually brings mild winters in some places — Japan, the U.S. Northeast — and very wet ones in others, such as the American southeast and in parts of the tropics.

A report last week called attention to rising the ocean surface temperatures, which have reached a peak that beats the 1997-98 El Niño. That's a bad sign. But the prediction models actually call for a more moderate, traditional El Niño pattern: wet across the south, warm across the north.

"Even if the ocean temperatures are exactly the same [as in a powerful El Niño year] that doesn't mean the impacts will be,' says Mike Halpert, the deputy director of the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center.

Here's why

The surface of the equatorial ocean is indeed super warm. That's the first ingredient for a record year. But the second part of the equation is atmosphere: For record conditions, the air in the tropics needs to take up lots of extra moisture.

That then produces higher rainfall across the equator, which butterfly-effects its way into the unusually warm and wet conditions in the U.S.

So far, the second part of the equation isn't happening the same way — the atmosphere in the tropics is drier than it was during the 1997-98 season.

Weather is, of course, a squirrely thing. But as it stands this El Niño is looking milder than that record-breaking year.

Take a look at these maps for re-assurance. We've overlaid the prediction for this winter with the records of the last Big One.

Will this winter be wetter?

Yes, in some areas.

The 1997-98 El Niño brought extra rain to a big chunk of the U.S. But this year, the current prediction has a wetter-than-normal winter likely (green) in the south and drier-than-normal conditions likely (brown) in the north. The 1997-98 chart shows the historical record, relative to a typical winter.

The forecast for this winter season shows the likelihood of atypical conditions.

Will this winter be warmer?

Yes, again, in some areas.

Two decades ago, El Niño created an unusually warm winter for much of the U.S. That's still likely in the north (red), where December is already proving mild.

But Texas and parts of the central south may see colder-than-normal (blue) weather — the more common El Niño pattern. The 1997-98 chart shows the historical record, relative to a typical winter. The forecast for 2015-16 shows the likelihood of atypical conditions.

All of which means, there's probably no need to freak out — at least in the U.S. But let's all enjoy this Chris Farley classic together anyway:

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This man is wearing 500 plastic bags to show what humans are doing to the environment.

Jim Ries is demonstrating how many bags the average person wastes in a year by attaching 500 of them to his body and walking around town.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the US recycles only 34% of its waste. That's not a lot compared to the world-leading Germany, which recycles more than 60%.

Ries got the idea after his daughter Olivia was upset after learning about dangers to the environment at school. Soon after, the family started the environmental non-profit One More Generation, which aims to educate communities on environmental issues.

Story and editing by Adam Banicki

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On Thursday, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics fired up a monster machine that it hopes will change the world.

The machine is called the Wendelstein 7-X, or W7-X for short. It's a type of nuclear-fusion machine called a stellarator and is the largest, most sophisticated of its kind.

Nuclear fusion could prove to be a clean, inexhaustible energy source. But humans are still a ways from successfully building a reactor that could power a small town, let alone entire cities. But now, we're one step closer.

On Thursday, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics tweeted out a beautiful image of the machine's first plasma (shown below) — a gas in which all the electrons have been stripped from their atoms, a task that requires tremendous amounts of energy and is critical to achieving nuclear fusion.

The key to a successful nuclear-fusion reactor of any kind is to generate, confine, and control plasma. This is the first confirmation that the machine is performing as planned.

Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics completed construction of the $1.1 billion W7-X.

The black horse of nuclear reactors

Known in the plasma physics community as the black horse of reactors that use nuclear fusion, stellarators are notoriously difficult to build.

The GIF below shows the many different layers of W7-X, which took 19 years to complete:

From 2003 to 2007, the project suffered some major construction setbacks — including one of its contracted manufacturers going out of business — that nearly brought down the whole endeavor.

Only a handful of stellarators have been attempted, and even fewer have been completed.

By comparison, the more popular cousin to the stellarator, the tokamak, is in wider use. Over three dozen tokamaks are operational around the world, and more than 200 have been built throughout history. These machines are easier to construct and, in the past, have performed better as a nuclear reactor than stellarators.

But tokamaks have a major flaw that W7-X is reportedly immune to, suggesting that Germany's latest monster machine could be a game changer.

How a nuclear-fusion reactor works

The key to a successful nuclear-fusion reactor of any kind is to generate, confine, and control a blob of gas, called a plasma, that has been heated to temperatures of more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

At these blazing temperatures, the electrons are ripped from their atoms, forming ions.

Normally the ions bounce off one another like bumper cars, but under these extreme conditions the repulsive forces are overcome.

The ions are therefore able to collide and fuse together, which generates energy, and you have accomplished nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is different from what fuels today's nuclear reactors, which operate with energy from atoms that decay, or break apart, instead of fusing together.

Nuclear fusion is the process that has been fueling our sun for about 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another estimated 4 billion years.

Once engineers have heated the gas in the reactor to the right temperature, they use super-chilled magnetic coils to generate powerful magnetic fields that contain and control the plasma.

The W7-X, for example, houses 50 magnetic coils that each weigh 6 tons, shown in purple in the GIF below. The plasma is contained within the red coil:

The difference between tokamaks and stellarators

Tokamaks have for years been considered the most promising machine for producing energy in the way the sun does because the configuration of their magnetic coils contains a plasma that is better than that of currently operational stellarators.

But there's a problem: Tokamaks can control the plasma only in short bursts that last for no more than seven minutes. And the energy necessary to generate that plasma is more than the energy engineers get from these periodic bursts.

Tokamaks thus consume more energy than they produce, which is not what you want from nuclear-fusion reactors, which have been touted as the "most important energy source over the next millennium."

Because of the stellarators' design, experts suspect it could sustain a plasma for at least 30 minutes at a time, which is significantly longer than any tokamak. The French tokamak Tore Supra holds the record: Six minutes 30 seconds.

If W7-X succeeds, it could turn the nuclear-fusion community on its head and launch stellarators into the limelight.

"The world is waiting to see if we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse," David Gates, head of stellarator physics at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, told Science.

Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of W7-X on YouTube, or below:

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What makes the US so beautiful is how its topography varies so dramatically from state to state. No wonder it's called "America the Beautiful."

From arid deserts to lush forests, America's landscape is as varied as it is stunning.

Picking 50 wasn't easy, but here are the most beautiful natural attractions in each state.

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ALABAMA: The Heart of Dixie is home to Noccalula Falls, a 90-foot waterfall that has its own gorge trail that passes by an aboriginal fort, a pioneer homestead, Civil War carvings, and caves.

Source: National Park Service

ALASKA: Our northernmost state is the only place in the US where the Northern Lights are a common occurrence. Known as the aurora borealis, this natural light show is caused by the collision of solar wind with particles in our atmosphere.

Source: Alaska Tour Jobs

ARIZONA: The Grand Canyon is Arizona's best-known natural beauty, but it isn't the only one. The Wave is a sandstone rock with thousands of linear carvings caused by time and erosion.

Source: TheWave.info

Tourists looking for a room with an ocean view will be thrilled to hear about the development of a new submarine hotel, which will lie 8.5 meters (28 feet) beneath the waves.

Having recently received patent and trademark approval, the Planet Ocean Underwater Hotel is all set to be constructed in Key West, Florida, after which it will be shipped out on a barge to an as yet undecided location.

Access to the structure will be via an elevator, with all rooms boasting Wi-Fi, air conditioning, and panoramic vistas of the surrounding marine environment.

Even more extraordinary is the fact that the hotel is technically classed as a vessel, since it is able to navigate the ocean using electromechanical propulsion, allowing it to change location in order to avoid storms.

The hotel is being funded by Tony Webb, who also recently sponsored the SYNERGY MOON project, an official entrant in the Google Lunar X Prize, which is a race to land a robot on the moon. His new endeavor sees him switch his focus from outer space to “inner space tourism,” offering adventurous travelers the opportunity to explore the depths of the world’s oceans.

Costing around $20 million (£13 million) to construct, the hotel is designed to do more than just offer unique travel experiences; it is part of a larger philanthropic project to restore coral reefs around the world.

Recent reports have suggested that climate change has resulted in a rise in submarine temperatures, causing widespread bleaching of coral reefs, with around 38 percent expected to be affected by the end of the year.

To help address this problem, the team behind the hotel are funding a global coral reef restoration program, using a technique known as the Biorock process.

This involves passing an electric current through seawater, which causes minerals in the water to crystallize, forming white limestone (calcium carbonate) structures. Corals are then able to adhere to these and flourish. The technique is currently in operation at various locations across the globe, including the likes of Jamaica, Palau, Thailand and Mexico.

A number of countries are being invited to register their interest in hosting the Planet Ocean Underwater Hotel, including every Caribbean island nation. As long as these countries approve a mooring location for the structure, they will be able to temporarily host the hotel until it moves on to its next home.

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The same week Beijing issued its first-ever emergency red alert because of dangerous levels of smog, cardiologist Dr. Naresh Trehan released a photo showing the devastating effects of air pollution in Delhi, India.

The Indian city's pollution levels are estimated to be roughly one and a half times worse than in Beijing, where a single day of normal breathing can bring in the equivalent of 40 cigarettes-worth of carcinogens. 

Using the hashtag #DelhiChokes, Trehan showed India Today the difference between a healthy lung and a lung belonging to a 52-year-old man who spent 10 years living in Delhi.

"This stark contrast tells the whole story," Trehan told India Today. "It's saying that look if you are being exposed to this kind of pollution for prolonged periods of time, this is what it will look like."

As Tech Insider previously reported, smog levels and quantities of charcoal-based particulate in India are so bad that white shirts will gather a yellow tinge over the course of a single day.

While Trehan's photo hasn't been verified as that of someone living in highly polluted conditions (and there's no way to prove that this is typical for a longtime Delhi resident), a raft of other images back up the claim. Upon autopsy, smokers' lungs have been routinely found to contain the same jet-black traces of tar seen in Trehan's photo.

Air pollution in China and India has become a severe problem because of massive industry growth over the last decade. The two countries have taken insufficient steps to reduce the emissions produced by their coal-burning factories. The result isn't pretty.

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PARIS (Reuters) - At the tail end of the hottest year on record, climate negotiators in Paris will aim on Saturday to seal a landmark accord that will transform the world's fossil fuel-driven economy within decades and turn the tide on global warming.

After four years of fraught U.N. talks often pitting the interests of rich nations against poor, imperiled island states against rising economic powerhouses, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will unveil the latest text of a climate deal on Saturday at 9 a.m. (0300 ET).

He hopes to secure a sweeping agreement to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions within hours. If that fails, the talks could run into Sunday.

Officials from 195 nations were locked in negotiations through the night, seeking to resolve the final sticking points, none seemingly insurmountable: the phrasing of a goal for phasing out carbon emissions later this century; the frequency of further negotiations meant to encourage even faster action.

"All the conditions are in place to have a universal, ambitious final deal," Fabius told reporters late on Friday, urging a drive to resolve what are still deep disagreements on issues such as finance for developing nations.

"There has never been such a strong momentum."

The result, including pledges to expand billions of dollars in funding to ease the shift to low-carbon fuels and to help developing nations cope with impacts of climate change ranging from floods to heat waves, is likely to be hailed by many for its ambition, while vilified by others for its lack thereof.

If successful, it will be a powerful symbol to world citizens and a signal to investors -- for the first time in more than two decades, the world will have a common vision for cutting back on the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for overheating the planet, and a roadmap for ending two centuries of fossil fuel dominance.

By charting a common course, they hope executives and investors will be more willing to spend trillions of dollars to replace coal-fired power with solar panels and windmills.

"It will be up to business, consumers, citizens and particularly investors to finish the job," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Yet unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the last major climate deal agreed in 1997, the Paris pact will not be a legally binding treaty, something that would almost certainly fail to pass the U.S. Congress. Instead, it will be largely up to each nation to pursue greener growth in its own way, making good on detailed pledges submitted ahead of the two-week summit.

And in the United States, many Republicans will see the pact as a dangerous endeavor that threatens to trade economic prosperity for an uncertain if greener future.

A deal in Paris would mark a legacy-defining achievement for U.S. President Barack Obama, who has warned not to “condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair”, and puts to rest the previous climate summit in Copenhagen six years ago, when attempts to agree even deeper carbon curbs failed.

A late break

Leaders of vulnerable low-lying nations -- who brought together more than 100 nations in a "high ambition coalition" at the talks, striving for the strongest possible language -- have portrayed theParis talks as the last chance to avoid the catastrophic consequences of rising temperatures.

Without joining together for immediate action, they had warned, greenhouse gas emissions would be certain to push the planet’s ecosystem beyond what scientists view as a tipping point: 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures. It is already 1 degree C higher.

The current draft seeks to restrain the rise to "well below 2C", a more ambitious goal than past efforts stopping at 2C, but one that faced opposition from some oil-exporting nations.

While scientists say national pledges thus far are still too little to prevent that happening, the agreement should set out a roadmap for steadily increasing or ‘ratcheting up’ those measures in order to head off calamity. How often to do so was one of the few remaining points of dissention.

President Xi Jinping has promised that carbon dioxide emissions from China's rapidly developing economy will start falling from around 2030, and does not want to revisit the target. Delegates said China had also reasserted demands that developed nations do far more to curb greenhouse gas emissions, mostly the result of burning coal, gas and oil.

A final deal is expected to provide developing nations greater financial security as they wean themselves away from coal-fired power, and also suffer the financial consequences of a warmingclimate on the earth's flora and fauna.

Rich nations are likely to increase and extend an earlier pledge to provide $100 billion a year in funding by 2020, one of the principal sticking points.

The strength of that commitment was still being crafted late on Friday, with some of the negotiators showing the effects of a two-week-long diplomatic marathon.

"There will be a new draft text tomorrow and hopefully a final agreement. I hope so because I want to go back home," said Izabella Teixeira, Brazil's minister of environment. "I love France but I miss Brazil too much."

(Reporting By Emmanuel Jarry, Bate Felix, Lesley Wroughton, Nina Chestney and David Stanway; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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Keurig Green Mountain, which makes the Keurig coffee brewers and single-brew K-cups, recently got acquired by JAB Group for $92 a share, a deal which values the company at $13.9 billion.

Shares of Keurig closed in the trading session before the deal was announced at $51.70 per share, making this acquisition price a 78% premium.

Shares of Keurig were up as much as 75% in pre-market trade after the announcement crossed last Monday.

But the burgeoning coffee empire is still failing to address a much bigger problem: A warming planet that is slowly devastating coffee crops worldwide.

Global temperatures are forecast to rise by at least two degrees Celsius over the next few decades, and it's likely that many of the major havens for coffee production will suffer as a result. A recent report in the journal PLOS One predicts that pressure from climate change will drive down supplies, forcing coffee prices up.

Where our java comes from

Americans love coffee. But most of the java we drink comes from places around the globe where warming temperatures and altered weather patterns are decimating coffee crops. A combination of coffee rust, a fungal infection that attacks the leaves of the coffee plant, and invasive species like the coffee berry borer are slowly destroying coffee plantations across the globe.

The PLOS report found that the number of coffee-growing regions in Africa — where Goldilock's mix of just-right temperature, altitude, and soil moisture allow the plant to be grown in bulk — could be reduced by between 65% and 100% in the next seven decades.

On a recent visit to a coffee farm in Costa Rica, considered one of the havens for consistently smooth andfruity, complex coffee, I saw firsthand the problems that plague the current industry. At the frm we visited, the vast majority of coffee came from Coffea arabica plants, a species which accounts for roughly 75% of the world's coffee. Here's a shot of the many rows of coffee plants, which are interspersed with corn and other crops to help cycle nutrients through the soil:

It is thought that the first place where C. arabica plants were farmed was in the southwestern highland forests of Ethiopia. Today, coffee plants are rarely found in that region. Instead, the crop is grown all over the world, from Africa and South America to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. 

A global threat to coffee

Unfortunately, since nearly all the coffee we drink started with just a few wild Ethiopian plants, the current coffee crop is far from genetically diverse. In fact, experts estimate that all the coffee currently farmed has less than 1% of the diversity of wild Ethiopian plants.

This is a big problem: It means coffee plants — wherever they are grown — are highly susceptible to changes in the climate.

One example of these changes is the emergence of the coffee berry borer, a small species of beetle native to Africa. It is thought to rank among the most harmful pests to coffee crops worldwide and is considered the single most economically important coffee pest in the world. Together with a pesky fungus known as coffee rust, the borer is devastating coffee crops. Higher temperatures have expanded the range where the pest can survive, thrive, and reproduce.

Here's a photo of an adult coffee borer beetle (Hypothenemus hampei) on a damaged coffee bean:

All of these threats to coffee will put many pressures on the industry, and it's left to see how the growing industry will cope.

READ MORE: I went to the source of the world's best coffee — and saw firsthand why the industry is in trouble

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The ocean is big.

It's so big that even with all the cutting-edge technology available to modern science, 95% of the ocean still remains completely unexplored.

To help shrink that knowledge gap, the nonprofit Xprize — known for awarding millions in prize money in public contests— announced its latest competition: to explore the ocean at previously uninhabited depths.

Jyotika Virmani, senior director at Xprize, says the contest was designed with a raft of different breakthroughs in mind.

These range from archaeological findings, including shipwrecks, to the discovery of novel disease cures in ocean life, to the many unknown benefits human can't even imagine right now.

"One of the main goals is to bring the deep sea to the public," Virmani says.

As per the usual Xprize conditions, the competition is open to everyone who submits an idea. Registration will last until September of next year, Virmani says, at which point Xprize will start winnowing down the contestants over the course of three years based on several criteria.

Of the $7 million in total prize money, $4 million will go to the team that produces the highest-quality image of the ocean floor, while $1 million will go to the second-place team. Another $1 million will be divided among up to 10 teams that advanced to the second round, and the final $1 million will go to the team that best detects the source of a biological or chemical signal, like an oil spill.

The teams' devices must also be able to do all this at more than 13,000 feet below the water's surface, where pressures reach 5,800 pounds per square inch.

And unlike the multi-million-dollar vessels normally used to explore the ocean, the Xprize devices will be deployed from the shore or by air.

Virmani says the constraint follows in the footsteps of past Xprizes, which routinely demand their participants to create a solution that can be produced on a wide-scale and be accessible to millions.

"Without understanding the environment, it's very hard to value it," Virmani says. "And without valuing it, people will not care and respect it."

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BRUSSELS  - The omission of aviation from the Paris climate deal could cause "a very big problem" if talks next year fail to make progress on a global plan to reduce aircraft pollution, the European climate chief said on Monday.

Earlier efforts to tackle the issue have foundered. Under threat of a trade war with China, India and others, the European Union had to suspend part of a law, meant to apply from 2012, that would have required all aviation using its airports buy pollution permits on its EU Emissions Trading System (ETS).

Aviation and shipping make up around 5 percent of global emissions, a share expected to grow to a third of all emissions by 2050 if left unchecked, according to European Commission data.

Just back in Brussels from U.N. talks that delivered a global climate pact, EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said a deal agreed by nearly 200 countries could never be perfect.

He said the European Union got most of what it wanted, but had been forced to drop its demand to include aviation and shipping, sectors that were similarly left out of the Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to the Paris Agreement.

"For sure we would like to have had more and aviation and maritime are a clear case. We were fighting for it until the last moment," Arias Canete told reporters.

Inclusion in the deal would have injected momentum into the quest for agreement at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which has been charged with finding a market-based global solution.

The EU was forced to limit the scope of its aviation law to flights within the European Union under pressure from nations including China and India which also opposed inclusion of the sector in the Paris accord, delegates said.

The EU only suspended its law on international aviation on condition the ICAO found an alternative market-based solution.

"If that doesn't happen, if there is no movement, then we will be in the middle of a very big problem," Arias Canete said.

Officials said the European Commission would decide on the next steps depending on the outcome of the ICAO meeting late next year.

Shipping is less far advanced than aviation towards agreement on a global scheme, environment campaigners say. The European Union has introduced measures to monitor pollution from the sector.

(Editing by Estelle Shirbon)

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As the founding director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Jeremy Bailenson firmly believes that statistics don't make people care about issues.

Experiences do.

That's why Bailenson has spent the last few years developing an underwater virtual reality (VR) experience that shows people firsthand how climate change impacts ocean health.

It sits beside a mountain of past research Bailenson and his team have conducted into empathy and altruism that determine how and why people care about various subjects.

All the data in the world won't make a problem seem real unless people care about it on an emotional level, he says.

According to Bailenson, virtual reality solves that problem without creating new ones.

"What you get is this wonderful catch-22, which is that the brain treats it like a direct experience, but you can do it without harm, risk, or expense," he tells Tech Insider. "You can get free experiences."

That promise — a free way to show people how badly their daily habits pollute the environment — is one Bailenson is now turning into a commercial product.

He has plans to bring his underwater experience, which puts people directly inside the rock-filled reefs off the Italian island of Ischia, to middle school and high school classrooms around the country by 2016.

First, they'll rely on rudimentary platforms like Google Cardboard, with stories similar to the New York Times' roll out of "The Displaced," a VR story focusing on children forced from their homes because of war.

Later on, Bailenson says the goal is to move into more sophisticated systems, like Oculus Rift, that can be rigged in larger settings to make the experience totally immersive. In September, Tech Insider visited one such facility— The Void, in Lindon, Utah — where users navigate built environments and feel real temperature changes.

For Bailenson, the trick will be incorporating experiences focused on larger social issues into an industry that thrives on sports, dystopia, and war.

"When I meet with the video game companies, I say 'Alright, so you have your game of going around shooting people. And that's fun; that's your call. How about this compromise: every time you level up in your game, you pause and do a 30-second public service announcement where you learn about deforestation?'"

Surely, the powers that be would find such a prospect jarring and unpleasant for the gamer in question?

"You know, I've gotten surprisingly good responses to that," Bailenson says. "I certainly don't have anything in writing yet, but video game makers — they aren't trying to hurt anybody. I think I can get good reception on these environmental conservation scenes in between levels on video games. I think it's a neat way to think about it."

Ultimately, and unfortunately for planet Earth perhaps, Bailenson's main challenge in the future could be competing with an industry he helped create.

As VR takes off — and many sayit's almost sure to— new immersive video games will saturate the industry. People will grow to expect more from their games, and activists like Bailenson could find themselves fighting for the same kind of attention they're currently trying to capture in this reality.

"It's always a challenge to create media that people want to look at," Bailenson says. He concedes that the best he can do is make the experience engaging and fun and educational without it feeling preachy.

If he checks those boxes, people might discover that a brief dive into Italian waters to learn about the harmful effects of CO2 ends up being a richer and more eye-opening activity than shooting aliens with a ray gun.

SEE ALSO: Virtual reality will replace smartphones, says Oculus founder

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Over the past two weeks, leaders and delegates from 195 world nations have been formulating a global agreement on the reduction of climate change at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference.

They've now reached this agreement, and governments are expected to follow through with their various commitments to make it happen.

The final draft of the agreement was released to the public over the weekend, and outlines the various measures that need to be made to limit the rise in average global temperature to well below 2°C, with 1.5°C being the ideal benchmark.

The attendees called the agreement, "The single most important collective action for addressing climate change ever agreed upon."

First off, the agreement recognized two fundamental facts:

• "That climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires the widest possible cooperation by all countries."
• "That deep reductions in global emissions will be required in order to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and emphasizing the need for urgency in addressing climate change."

The most important thing for the global community to do is to keep things below that 2-degree mark, the conference delegates agreed, to ward off the most severe effect of global warming. As Justin Gillis reports for The New York Times, while we don’t know the exact temperature at which the entire Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will melt, staying below 2°C to avoid this is a good bet. And 1.5°C is an even better bet.

To meet this goal, we need to stop burning fossil fuels and limit the CO2 we’ve been releasing into the atmosphere, and the richest nations at the conference have agreed to raise enough funds that by 2020, US$100 billion a year will be made available to developing nations to help them achieve this. 

As it was noted - developed nations have essentially gotten away with using fossil fuels to build themselves up, and can now afford to invest in renewable energy sources, whereas developing nations never got that chance. 

To ensure progress and to enforce the individual goals set for each country, delegates are legally required to meet up again in 2023, and then every five years following, with new reduction targets for emissions to be evaluated by committee. 

"So the individual countries' plans are voluntary, but the legal requirements that they publicly monitor, verify, and report what they are doing, as well as publicly put forth updated plans, are designed to create a 'name-and-shame' system of global peer pressure, in hopes that countries will not want to be seen as international laggards,"The New York Times reports.

You can read up on the individual commitments of each country in the final draft.

While President Obama called the deal"the best chance to save the one planet we have", critics have pointed out that, at this stage, the commitments laid out in the agreement are simply not enough. 

"For example,"says Sarah Perkins from Australia’s Climate Change Research Centre, "current pledges in greenhouse gas reductions will only limit warming to 2.7 to 3°C by 2100".

She adds that to reach a target below 2°C, "dramatic, and quick reductions in fossilized energy sources are required, as well as removal of atmospheric carbon", but the problem here is that everything is going to be set to a five-year timeline from 2023, which isn't exactly the pace we need to make a meaningful change.

Others have criticized the vagueness of the agreement, as Morgan Clendaniel notes over at Fast Company:

"[T]he agreement is largely free of specific emission numbers, targets, monetary commitments, and penalties for non-compliance. Even the temperature increase threshold is left up in the air, somewhere below 2 degrees if possible. This will help the Obama administration, which doesn't want anything in the agreement that would require Senate approval (which they very likely wouldn't get), but makes the agreement seem largely toothless to many climate activists."

And George Monibot over at The Guardian says:

"While earlier drafts specified dates and percentages, the final text aims only to 'reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible'. Which could mean anything and nothing."

We will have to wait and see what will come of this historic agreement, but the one thing to be excited about is that it exists, and that’s a pretty huge shift from the recent past, where governments could get away with denying that human-caused climate change even existed. You can access the full agreement online here.

SEE ALSO: This video of astronauts pleading to save the Earth may bring you to tears

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what the US would look like if all the Earth's ice melted

WASHINGTON - The melting of glaciers caused by the world's rising temperatures appears to be causing a slight slowing of the Earth's rotation in another illustration of the far-reaching impact of global climate change, scientists said on Friday.

The driving force behind the modest but discernible changes in the Earth's rotation measured by satellites and astronomical methods is a global sea level rise fueled by an influx of meltwater into the oceans from glaciers, the researchers said.

"Because glaciers are at high latitudes, when they melt they redistribute water from these high latitudes towards lower latitudes, and like a figure skater who moves his or her arms away from their body, this acts to slow the rotation rate of the Earth," Harvard University geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica said.

The movement of ice and meltwater is also causing a slight migration of the Earth's axis, or north pole, in a phenomenon known as "polar wander," the researchers said.

"Imagine a figure skater who doesn't stick their arms straight out but rather sticks one at one angle and the other out at another angle. The figure skater will begin to wobble back and forth. This is the same thing as polar motion," Mitrovica said.

The research looked at the changes in the planet's rotation and axis in light of the world's sea level rise in the 20th century as a result of increasing global temperatures.

The melting of the ice sheets and the rise in sea levels moved the planet's rotation axis, or north pole, at rates of less than a centimeter per year, Mitrovica said. This melting slowed the Earth's rotation and increased the duration of a day by about a thousandth of a second over the 20th century, Mitrovica said.

"These are small effects," but are another indication of the profound impact of human-induced climate change on the planet, Mitrovica said. The observed rotation slowdown does not pose a danger to the planet, he said.

If polar ice sheets melt at higher rates this century, as experts forecast them to do, the impact on Earth's rotation will grow, Mitrovica said.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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NOW WATCH: This animated map shows how different our oceans will be by 2050

For a second straight year, the Arctic is warming faster than any other place in the world, and walrus populations in the area’s Pacific and Atlantic ocean regions are thinning along with the ice sheets that are critical for their survival, researchers reported Tuesday.

Overall, the outlook for the frozen top of the world is bleak, according to the annual Arctic Report Card: 2015 Update released by the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Since the turn of the last century, it said, the Arctic’s air temperature has increased by more than 5 degrees due to global warming.

Warmer air and sea temperatures melt ice that in turn expands oceans and causes sea-level rise, which scientists say presents a danger to cities along the entire Atlantic coast, from Miami to Washington to Boston.

Walrus and other arctic mammals that give birth on ice sheets are struggling with the change, and fish such as cod and Greenland halibut are swimming north from fishermen and animals that feed on them in pursuit of colder waters.

The annual average surface-air temperature over the period of the report, between October 2014 and September 2015, was nearly 2.5 degrees higher than the time period scientists use as a baseline to compare temperatures, 1981 to 2010. As a result, Alaska was warmer in fall 2014 and winter this year, when the snow pack that usually melts to replenish rivers and moisten the earth was extremely low.

Lightning strikes on dry land sparked that state’s second-worst wildfire season in its history. According to the NOAA report card, “the 2015 spring melt season provided evidence of earlier snow melt across the Arctic” because of the increased warmth. As of early July, the Arctic melt included more than half of the region’s ice sheet for the first time “since the exceptional melt of 2012.”  The length of the melt season was up to 4o days longer than that of the average northwestern, northeastern and western regions, the report said.

This year’s report is largely consistent with the dire findings last year. Dozens of scientists from across the world contribute to the report card, including those from U.S. Naval Research and the Army Corps of Engineers, the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, Knipovich Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography in Russia and University of Victoria in Canada.

The age of Arctic ice generally defines the region’s health. Older ice is thicker, more resilient and resistant to atmospheric changes, and better at supporting mammals. Younger ice is thin and vulnerable to collapse.

Yet in nearly all Arctic regions, sea ice is decreasing, the report said. In 1985, 85 percent of the region’s ice qualified as old. In March, that fell to 30 percent. “This is the first year that first-year ice dominated the ice cover,” it notes. “Sea ice cover has transformed from a strong, thick pack in the 1980s to a more fragile, thin and younger pack in recent years.”

Walruses are starting to teem on land as the ice fades, exposing their young to frequent trampling events. Walruses mate on the edges of ice, and females prefer giving birth and raising pups on old ice, which they use as a base to reach feeding grounds. Now many are on land, and the long path to the feeding areas are filled with animals that prey on them, such as sharks and orcas. That is further reducing walrus numbers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in its section of the report.

Ice melt “is already a pervasive threat” to walrus, the agency’s researchers said, but how much of a threat depends on the ability of animals to adapt to change, tolerate it or flee it for more suitable habitat. Scientists estimate that Pacific walrus populations have fallen by half as a result of declining sea ice and hunting. The Atlantic stock, reduced by 80 percent through unregulated hunting between 1900 and 1960, is unknown, but estimates put the population at 25,000.

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what the US would look like if all the Earth's ice melted

Long-standing drug policies backed by the United Nations and financed by the United States have not only failed to slow global drug trafficking, they may also be driving widespread environmental degradation and accelerating climate change.

In a report published by the Open Society Foundation, researcher Kendra McSweeney calls for a broad reconsideration of conventional "cat and mouse" policies that have driven growers, producers, and traffickers into new frontiers, causing deforestation and inviting chemical contamination into some of the most sensitive ecosystems on the planet, including national parks and indigenous reserves.

"Among the many forms of collateral damage from drug policy that we already know about, we want the global community to know about the widespread harms to the environment," said McSweeney, a geographer at Ohio State University.

The findings come ahead of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs, slated to take place in April of next year. Drug policy experts hope that the session, which aims to move "towards an integrated and balanced strategy to counter the world drug problem," will review the collateral damage caused by failed policies that have largely focused on eradication and interdiction campaigns.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion combatting illicit drug trafficking across the globe, focusing on tactics of eradication and interdiction. Despite the high economic and human cost of these policies, drug use has remained relatively stable and drug revenues continue unabated. Estimates vary widely, but the Organization of American states says $320 billion is generated annually by the illegal drug trade.

While the environmental impacts of drug crop cultivation have been discussed in policy circles — the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC) recognized that the herbicides and fertilizers used to grow and process coca are damaging to the environment, and more than 700,000 acres of forest were lost to coca crop cultivation between 2001 and 2013 — there has been little discussion about how drug policy itself is driving environmental degradation.

This is important, the report highlights, because UNODC policies work "in direct opposition to concurrent UN efforts to protect biodiversity, secure ecosystem services, ensure the rights of indigenous peoples, mitigate climate change, and promote sustainable development." It is a glaring institutional contradiction, McSweeney says, that should be confronted at the UNGASS session on current drug policy.

"The amount of land required to supply cocaine, marijuana, and heroin demands is quite tiny," McSweeney added. "It becomes an environmental problem because the fields keep getting destroyed, so in order to meet that demand, they have to keep moving around — drug policy keeps that cultivation mobile."

Fumigation campaigns, for example, are commonly used as a means of drug crop eradication. They have been a cornerstone of the 15-year, multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia, an aid package created by the United States to fight drug trafficking in the South American country. For years, government planes sprayed glyphosate — the active ingredient in Monsanto's Round Up — onto illicit coca crops, with notable impacts on wildlife, food crops, livestock, and the health of nearby residents.

The Colombian government vied for control of remote stretches of the country controlled by paramilitary and guerrilla groups, notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, who were accused of engaging in drug trafficking and terrorism. In 55 years, the civil war took the lives of an estimated 220,000 people, 80 percent of which were civilians. 

"At the end of the 1990s, when the internal armed conflict was intensifying, those who denounced the environmental damage caused by the so-called 'war on drugs and terrorism' were called out by members of the government as being aids to the guerrillas," said Guillermo Ospina, a researcher at the University of Cauca, Colombia, who has studied the impacts of drug policy.

He said that this attitude has since shifted, but when the country announced a ban on the use of glyphosate earlier this year, much of the damage had already been done: between 2001 and 2014, an estimated 1,124 square miles of primary forest were lost to coca cultivation in Colombia. By 2014, coca was growing in 16 of the country's 59 national parks.

"In Colombia, they went into national parks because these were off limits for spraying," said Vanda Felbab Brown, a senior analyst at the Brooking Institute. "But in Peru, the cocaleros have been given free reign to cultivate in national parks – not merely because they faced eradication efforts, but because there was less government control."

Bolivia has successfully reduced coca cultivation despite President Evo Morales kicking the US Drug Enforcement Administration out of the country in 2008. 

Beyond drug producing zones, as interdiction tightens security on known routes, traffickers push deeper into remote areas. These transit areas, according to the report, are sites of ongoing environmental damage. And given the current drug prohibitions, the illegal profits traffickers accrue are often laundered into ranching, logging, and agribusiness ventures, at an additional cost to the environment.

In other parts of the world, as in Latin America, current drug policies have often touted the promise of alternative economies. But often, according to Felbab Brown, the replacement economies that arise when the drug industry is restricted are often far more detrimental to the environment than the original trade.

In Burma, for example, when the poppy cultivation was successfully suppressed in the 1990s and 2000s, illegal logging and wildlife poaching took their place. "The two replacement economies for poppy cultivation, in this case, were vastly more detrimental than the consequences of poppy cultivation," Felbab Brown said.

The report offers concrete suggestions on how to improve current drug policy, such as including the costs of environmental degradation in drug policy decision making. It also calls for multinational agencies to explore regional solutions to the problem, citing legal drug cultivation in Bolivia. UN member states must double down on their commitments to biodiversity, offering financial support to indigenous and peasant communities, while reallocating interdiction resources to efforts to prevent money laundering in environmentally degrading rural sectors.

And, McSweeney adds, policy makers must recognize that these impacts are disproportionately displayed in the global South, where environmental damage has meant a loss of economic opportunities for local communities.

In the past, these arguments have not held weight with policy makers, but Ospina, who has worked among local communities in Colombia, is hopeful that a growing focus on the environment could help push what he sees as a slowly shifting tide in drug policy.

"Arguments related to environmental harm have not had sufficient strength to achieve significant changes in anti-drug policies in the past," he said. "But discussions of the environment have been gaining importance within the local communities, in the sense that this allows them to gain visibility and make demands in the face of abandonment by the state."

Four months ahead of the 2016 UNGASS meeting, and just days after a historic climate agreement was brokered in Paris, McSweeney is hopeful that the report will offer a new, perhaps more appealing frame for discussion.

"It adds to the mounting arsenal of evidence of how awful conventional drug policy has been at failing to address the problem, while creating terrible side effects," McSweeney said. "We have been pushing this argument for drug policy reform because the human rights consequences of drug policy haven't seemed to generate the interest that talking about the rainforest does – and if that's what will get their attention, I am happy to lay out the problem."

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It’s getting hot in here.

In a poster presented at this week's meeting of the American Geophysical Union, researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory found that over the next 45 years, intense heat conditions could become not only stronger, but also more frequent, eventually exposing 250 million people to potentially dangerous heat conditions, like the ones that struck Iran and Pakistan earlier this year.

As global temperatures rise, humidity is also expected to rise, with warm air able to hold more moisture.

This can lead to extremely hot and humid days in the summer.

The authors predict that by the 2060s, 250 million people will be exposed to wet bulb temperatures of 33 degrees Celsius (91.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and 750 million will be exposed to wet bulb temperatures of 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

That might not seem so hot, especially to people who live in areas where temperatures regularly rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. But as ever, it’s not the heat, its the humidity, and wet bulb temperature is very different from regular temperature.

Wet bulb temperatures are a measure of heat stress, taking into account not only the temperature, but also the moisture in the air. It is similar to a heat index. Both wet bulb temperature and heat index take humidity into account, with heat index adjusting the temperature to define what the temperature outside actually feels like. Wet bulb temperature, on the other hand, is the lowest temperature that can be reached by completely saturating the air with water (getting to 100 percent humidity).

To break that down even further, if a standard temperature reading is 96 degrees Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity is 89 percent, then it will feel like 150 degrees Fahrenheit. The wet bulb temperature for those conditions will be 93 degrees Fahrenheit or 33.9 degrees Celsius.

A high wet bulb temperature means that conditions are incredibly hot and muggy, which is bad news for people. Research has shown that at a wet bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius or more, humans can’t cool themselves off. In those conditions, the air can’t hold any more water, so sweat doesn’t evaporate, and the temperature is high enough that people will start to overheat, leading to heat illness which includes heatstroke, exhaustion, cramps, or rashes. Heat can also be deadly. The heat wave that hit Pakistan this summer killed over 1,300 people.

India, the Middle East, and countries in West Africa will be hardest hit, but countries all around the world will be affected.

To put these dire predictions of the future in perspective, the researchers looked at the past. They took the average of the maximum temperatures of the years between 1985 and 2005 to get the mean annual maximum temperature. They predict that by the 2060s, New York City, already notorious for its sticky, grimy summers, can expect to see 10-20 days a year that will be hotter than the hottest days of 1985-2005. Not only that, but the city will exceed the maximum wet bulb temperature from that same time period for 30-40 days a year.

Areas of South America, Africa, and the Middle East will see over 100 days of each extreme per year.

Such extreme weather conditions could lead to dramatic changes in how society operates in order to cope with the new normal. Physical activity during the daytime on those days could be deadly, so agricultural or construction jobs might have to shift to cooler parts of the day, such as the evening. And electrical demands during the summer could increase even more, as air conditioning becomes not just a luxury, but a tool of survival.

The study authors agree with other recent research that suggests that some areas of the world could become uninhabitable because of heat in the next century.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science.

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NOW WATCH: Here's what the US would look like if all the Earth's ice melted