What if a deadly heatwave hit India?
economist.com
economist.com
I highly recommend it if this stuff scares you, and you need a little climate hope.
I did appreciate some details, like the idea of airships for long distance leisure travel and large swaths of land being returned to wilderness. But overall it didn’t live up to the hype.
Especially the CarbonCoin idea. Possibly a good approach, but it made for some bad storytelling.
Why is this an imagined scenario? It happened in 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pa...
Why is this an imagined scenario? It happened in 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pa...
One of the things the article horribly fails to even mention is that when resources are scarce, people don't just sit there patiently and go into a physiological breakdown. Not at all. People get up and fight. When the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy isn't met, all civility goes out the window and violence breaks out, as people fight for what resources are left.
From the Wikipedia article about what ACTUALLY happened in 2019:
"Conflicts over access to water have also occurred throughout India. On 7 June, six people were stabbed in Jharkhand during a fight near a water tanker, and one man was killed in a similar fight in Tamil Nadu. In Madhya Pradesh on 5 June, a fight over water led to two men being "seriously injured", while in a separate fight a day earlier, a water tanker driver was "beaten up"."
I'm sure there were numerous other instances not in the news.
Sometimes. And sometimes they don't. Groups that don't are often far more successful. Fiction betrays us into thinking most humans are evil when facing adversity. It's not really true.
Ancient Indian architects already knew how to passively cool buildings - pools of water or stepwells at the base of the building (https://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/ancient-air-co...). It was used in Jaipur, Rajasthan but may not be that effective in humid Chennai, however.
I did not realize this. Does anyone know where this statement came from?
This tracks with the general tone I get from the Economist's (excellent) climate coverage: unconvinced we'll get where we need to be quickly enough to achieve the best case climate scenarios, but optimistic that we will eventually hit more of a medium-case scenario, and therefore may need some interim solutions (they often allude to geo-engineering) to bridge that gap.
But net-zero carbon emissions means that till that year, the GHG will keep accumulating, the carbon cycle is slow enough to not significantly reduce the amount that you have in the atmosphere for decades.
So the problem won't be solved that year, nor 10 years after that goal is achieved, but when GHG are finally below of pre-industrial levels (I don't know, near half of what is it now) so we lose more heat than what we keep.
All the way till that point, the global yearly average temperature should be rising. And extreme weather events will continue to pile up.
And, of course, net zero doesn't take into account the positive feedback loops that either emit more GHG or rise global temperature.
I feel a bit overoptimistic that article. Or that they try to push that solution tried by Hyderabad as a magic wand (or a cash cow).
The only thing that matters are actions that are happening now which is... not very much.
Maybe different kinds of governments, with less variation of ruling parties (China, Russia) or broad agreements in their political systems (EU?) may keep their promises in this topic.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...
To my knowledge, carbon emissions are still increasing every year, and increasing in their rate of increase every year. I would love to be wrong.
This site doesn't include pandemic data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
It was effectively flat from 2012-2017, then small upticks in 2018 and 2019?
The second derivative of CO2 seems to show a huge decrease in the last few years.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html
Year-by-year is alot of noise, but over decades we see mostly steady accelleration.
If you had a plateau with twice the number of points (years) than any previous plateau then I would buy that something was going on.
But sadly - we don't.
Seeing an apparent flattening in a period of major economic growth is really encouraging.
And no, trees will not cut it.
I'd love to see sources supporting that; it sounds a lot more optimistic than I would expect.
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
There are identical stories to write about onshore wind, offshore wind, and lithium ion batteries. This summer has seen a huge number of new storage chemistries announced from startups with skin in the game and experienced management that will close the gap for longer term storage.
The most optimistic prediction for renewables were too pessimistic. It's likely that we are still in the same situation today, and not nearly enough people are predicting the future accurately by short-changing new tech.
There probably aren't too many people on HN these days that remember computer tech in the 80s and 90s, but it had far fewer doubters, and didn't have an industry dedicated to creating a propaganda cloud about how awful computers are. And still, the internet and computers are far more advanced and penetrant into everyday life in ways almost nobody anticipated.
The renewables revolution will likely be as big. We will have more cheaper energy accessible to us than ever before. This may be enough to jump to a new stage of technological development.
We could expand production even more, but private producers would probably need some guaranteed buyers for that expanded future production.
Fossil energy is on its last legs. The question is not if it will be phased out by 2050, but how many more years of new fossil fuel infrastructure we let FF companies invest in before banks stop backing it entirely. Already, large institutional investors and banks are demanding changes. It's only crony capitalism that allows for new extraction, and this will end up hurting share holders in the long run. FF companies are already taking our loans to pay dividends, so as not to spook investors. The future is clear.
Africa and other places will skip over thermal fossil fuel electricity generation, just as they skipped over sites telephones to cellular networks. Micro grids and batteries will be far cheaper to deploy than large transmission lines and large central generation.
As for carbon dioxide removal, we will probably have to start that in the 2040s, but the best tech is not yet clear. You are right that trees are insufficient, and recent fires are showing that forests can by carbon sources in addition to climate sinks. (I believe that Canada's "managed forests" have become net carbon sources this year, for example.)
But I have my doubts that this is likely to play out...
These are all solvable problems. Christopher Clack has been doing global optimizations for renewable grids for a long time, and finds that lots of upgrades to the distribution grid today, along with additions of storage and distributed solar, is a surprising cost optimal route.
People always doubt the new, but it's really hard to prove that it's not possible. And once it's done, it will seem obvious in retrospect.
The difference between the two couldn't be bigger.
Consider changing your career path to work on climate issues.
Invest in moonshot ideas like sustainable fuel, small-scale nuclear, fusion, etc.
Get involved locally. Set a good example, and help others follow your lead.
Call your senators.
I'll add, at a personal level:
* promote remote work: commutes are an astounding part of the carbon footprint, and unlike a warm home and diverse food, often not that enjoyable; this is the one where you can influence your colleagues the most: if you are at home, why would _they_ go to the office have a meeting with you?
* set-up a heat pump, preferably a ground-based one, if you have a heating bill; isolate your house better either way, have horizontal shades to block Summer but not Winter sun;
* eating less red meat and dairy — once a week, once a month; I’m no vegan and I’ll gladly share a Porterhouse with you for either of our birthday, but in the Wednesday bolognese, plant-based substitute are fine;
* travel less far, by train if you can.
There’s more you could do, like recycling, but if you check, the impact of those is minor for now or at least, your ability to encourage those as a consumer isn’t great. Running a personalised carbon estimation is a good exercise to see what’s your most impactful effort.
Before you do that, check where and how your power is generated. You might never break even (carbon-wise) on your solar roof.
If your energy is already clean, gas heating and electric cars are the way to go. EVs are getting better and better, especially if you have two cars, check if one of them isn't only used to make small sub 100 miles trips.
Cut it down to a really good and well produced $steakthing on sundays and skip the crappy everyday burger or switch that to veggieburgers.
Don't have to become vegan. Simply reduce volume.
Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata.
Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before.
The average individual view of the world must stop 100 miles from the place he/she was born. As a New Yorker, seeing an image filled with beaches and palm trees advertising Cabo vacations should raise the same level of revulsion as an image filled with vast open spaces and wild horses advertising for Marlboro cigarettes.
https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
Aviation is also a sector where emissions are pretty much unavoidable (long distance electric flight is untenable), and offsetting emissions is the only path forward. Drawing a line and restricting aviation can't work: think of all the important connections, collaborations, business deals, etc that require aviation. One might argue they aren't needed, but such restrictions will reduce the rate of progress/innovation, which is a necessary prerequisite for climate change action. A new solar cell (for example) will not be developed in isolation.
The fact that governments don't mandate carbon offsets for aviation at this stage is appalling though. Trivial to do relative to the impact and doesn't really raise ticket prices a whole lot.
Assuming we want to preserve some semblance of social order, the task ahead is to downsize our intimate desires and expectations of the world.
As long as a tax or a compensation program is announced in time, fair, uniform, rational and effective, they won’t have the political power to oppose it. You can encourage research and development of electric planes: it’s unclear if it will make sense for larger, or longer distance, but politically, encouraging a shift in technology is a better message than banning, or discouraging flying altogether.
If you demand it now, after 18 months of near bankruptcy, many companies will go down (which could be the goal, but I’m not sure that’s the easy way to put it) but if you make the impact on ticket prices progressive in time and clear, I’m not seeing anyone in the street — other than pilots and attendants, and they’ll find a new job.
Aviation contributes a relatively small amount of emissions in the transportation sector, which in turn also contributes about 1/4. So why does it have to go? Why not attack the actual big problems first? That would be passenger vehicles and medium/large trucks. I am pretty encouraged by where the industry is going so far, even if the trucking sector is not as far ahead as the passenger cars seem to be.
I fully appreciate your frustration. I have a similar reaction when I hear cycling being proposed as a solution, with one difference: flying is largely an optional luxury, driving to work is not.
As an individual, flying roundtrip once from LA to NY, is sufficient to eat up about half the CO2 budget for the year. That is too much in itself. It does not mean that there mustn't be deep cuts everywhere else too. Americans, and especially well off Americans like the ones I expect populate HN, fly around without even thinking of the costs.
Therein lies the immensity of the task ahead: nobody is willing to give up their creature comforts. Not even relative luxuries like the vacation in Cabo. No, we rationalize our inaction by pretending the problem will solve by itself, via some futuristic tehno wand: carbon capture, fusion, solar power, anything but downsizing our expectations and desires.
Beyond the personal, on the broader political scale, I also don't know that targeting any particular thing makes sense. All emissions, from all contributors, need to fall. Something like a carbon tax would cleanly attack the least efficient carbon emitters first.
There might be some targets that contribute more than their fair share: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-percent-power...
It's like optimizing code. You don't go optimizing everything willy-nilly, you profile first, and attack the most egregious hotspots.
It doesn't.
> even if the trucking sector is not as far ahead as the passenger cars seem to be.
Trucking fuel emits carbon, so getting an EV already reduces that footprint. Buying more durable goods also reduces shipping volume.
Ouch. Lots of one way tickets for anyone who isn't white in Europe or America.
I don’t know how many people you or everyone expect will die from global warming, but I believe that the number is some orders of magnitude around millions; I also believe that the estimated impact in people’s mind will consistently go up, and that more people will opt to make remote family function more common — of use trains, electric cars and boats to travel.
I anyone had told me, two years ago, that my elderly and technophobe mother would have an informed discussion about which VC technology to use for us to attend my brother’s wedding, I’d be dismissive (maybe not insulting) too: she barely understood that FaceTime and Facebook are not the same thing. But after her mother’s funeral on Zoom, and her nephew’s wedding on Hopin and her being asked to help film christening because she became her parish tech expert… Things have changed.
'what can I do'?
The easy answer is to point to some of the myriad things one can do. Aviation has perhaps the biggest bang for the buck, easy to unilaterally give up and with quantifiable significant impacts. And yet, utterly insufficient by itself.
The hard answer is that we need to downsize our expectations by an order of magnitude.
The real killer in Chennai is the humidity. The combined measure of heat and humidity in air is the “wet-bulb temperature”—the lowest temperature to which something can be cooled through evaporation from its surface. In dry air, even at temperatures well above 37°C—human body temperature—people can sweat to cool down. But at wet-bulb temperatures of 32°C and higher, “it becomes unsafe to perform most physical labour,” says Moetasim Ashfaq, an atmospheric physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Few people can survive a wet-bulb temperature above 35°C. In the past decade, wet-bulb temperatures in Chennai have regularly risen above 32°C. But for much of the past week, wet-bulb temperatures have repeatedly crossed 36°C—a fatal level.
Another way to say it is if we are already seeing this in Canada in 2021, the reality in southern India in 2041 is going to be a helluva lot worse than the article portrays.
Please read the article before commenting falsehoods about it. You claimed the imagined temperature was lower (it’s not). You claimed the imagined deaths are lower (they’re not).