Nearly 200M in U.S. under heat advisories, warnings as two heat domes form
axios.com
axios.com
I personally think that's incredibly far off base, but if you are confident in your prediction for mass doom, I recommend throwing some money into prediction markets around it. It could be a great way to calibrate your model of reality (and potentially make money if you are right!).
If you're betting against collapse, and you are wrong, you aren't going to be around to pay up.
If you're betting on collapse, and you are wrong, you will be around to pay up
If you bet against collapse, and you are right, you will be around to collect
It should also be said that with prediction markets, you don't have to wait until the event happens before selling your position.
I doubt heat related deaths will be a large factor in the next decade. More people than ever have access to AC and clean water.
Also, I feel like this should go without saying but the climate has changed perceptibly since 1999 and will continue to get warmer for the foreseeable future, so relying on past trend lines like this is a mistake.
This is true, but even in Portland, which is regarded as having one of the lowest rates of air conditioning in the nation, three out of four homes have it. We experienced around 100 deaths statewide (getting an exact count eludes me, as recently as three days ago NPR put it at 83, though earlier reports put it over 100) due to the heat wave.
As long as we can keep the power going, Portland can probably find practical ways to keep the death toll very low in future heat waves. I'm guessing we will get an opportunity to test that.
Don't count on AC saving all that many lives as the decade wears on.
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
It’s unfortunately roughly double the cost of a regular roof (and 3x as much if your current roof is already due for replacement).
Tesla's solar tiles are interesting, but cost prohibitive for anyone but the wealthy.
[1] https://solarapp.nrel.gov/
(i facilitate, pm, and help with rooftop solar installs as time permits in the US)
Roughly, the math for my situation worked out like this.
$20K out of pocket for a 13.5kW system, installed. This should, over a year's time, cover close to 100% of my average consumption.
Break-even time was something just over 11 years.
Existing roof is 10 years old. Reasonable life expectancy of the roof is 15 more years. Value of panels in 15 years is likely to be dwarfed by uninstall/reinstall costs when roof is replaced, so I call that EOL for the system.
The most optimistic scenario I can come up with, assuming PGE raises their rates 2.5% a year, is an ROI of 56K, which works out to about 10% annually. Not bad. But this only happens if nothing breaks, the roof really does last 15 years, the installed cost is only $1.5/W, and I invest $20K out of pocket (i.e. no loans).
So the way I see it, this is something to do for the non-economic benefits, e.g. installing battery so it will work when the grid is down.
In rich countries like the US throwing money at the problem works, but for the much of the world the extra infrastructure simply isn’t worth the extra comfort.
[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...
[2] https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewab...
I think batteries-- distributed or as part of utility-scale deployments-- can help a bit but are not economical enough to use to solve this problem.
It's going to take more of everything-- more solar overprovisioning, a lot more wind power, a fair bit of battery, more load shedding and demand pricing, more DC interconnect allowing power to be shipped large distances... and other stuff, like gas-to-power-to-gas and/or more nuclear baseload... to really let us move to an overwhelmingly renewable grid and have stable power.
The issue, IMO, is that there's many different timescales/types of shortfall (very cloudy couple weeks in winter with no wind vs. daily duck curve)... and then there's the 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 events, too (heat wave in summer + overcast rolls in at 2:00PM trapping heat in all night with less insolation and little wind). Chemical storage can't blunt the longer timescale shortfalls much.
Alternatively: just don't overthink things and install a mini-split/window unit/small portable that doesn't get connected to the house thermostat in the first place.
(I saw some mention of a "smart switch" also installed under this program, which I assume is there to prevent "overriding" the meter by just yanking it off the wall and shorting the contacts.)
You signed up for a discount for them to have permission to adjust your AC condensing demand run time when necessary, correct? I have never heard of a mandatory residential load shedding program in the US, but that doesn't mean they might be out there.
https://bgesavings.com/programs/ac/
> BGE‘s PeakRewards Air Conditioning program helps prevent the need for additional power plants, keep down the overall cost of electricity and ease the burden on Maryland’s electricity delivery system as the state’s population continues to grow. Plus, participants receive up to $100 in BGE bill credits each summer (June – September).
> The PeakRewards program is completely voluntary and is open to all BGE residential customers with central air conditioning or an electric heat pump in good working order, regardless of their choice of electricity supplier.
No. You're right that the program is (currently) voluntary; I haven't volunteered, not least because I run the AC at 76°, I have and know how to use ceiling fans, and most months the bill barely breaks $150 if that - my house is 140 years old, and while that's not enough especially in Baltimore to say that its survival proves it is well designed, it is well designed.
This is targeted at two groups of people: fools who paid far too much for far too little and ended up house-poor in a place built last year that doesn't know how to stay cool, and folks for whom $100 a month makes a huge difference. One of those groups has my sympathy, especially because I expect they'll be first and hardest hit when these programs cease being voluntary because the state isn't investing enough in generation capacity and the city isn't investing enough in grid maintenance.
Why don't you just unenroll from the program? I only get a $30 rebate per year. You make it sound like someone's holding a gun to your head and making you live in hell.
Switches can be bypassed ;)
People who pay subsidized rates will be throttled but will still be colder than 10 years ago before ac was widely available, they will have to suffer at 80-85f while you crank it down to 68 and pay market rate for the privilege . That’s just how capitalism works and it’s not a bad thing
Norwegian company buildings are not allowed to install AC if you don’t have outside sunscreening. This is to save energy used by AC.
My point is you are cherry picking a starting point.
In 1999, there was just over 2 heat deaths per million
In 2000, there was just over 1 heat deaths per million
In 2018, there was just over 1.5 heat deaths per million
Can you explain how you extrapolate a downtrend if the starting point is 1, and the ending point is 1.5?
Won't air conditioners stop working altogether above certain temperatures? If the ambient air outside is too hot, then the heat exchanger in your AC will start absorbing heat from the outside air rather than dissipating it. On top of that, air conditioners are most efficient when the temperature differential between the outside air and the heat exchanger is large, meaning that ACs become increasingly less efficient as the temperature rises, disproportionately increasing energy usage, which exacerbates fossil fuel consumption and the risk of brownouts (at the worst possible time, no less).
Projections for the next century range from a 2-10 degree increase in temp. Even on the aggressive side of 10 most places on earth never see 110 today. This also assumes 0 innovation in AC technology over the next century.
"Heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s — on average at least six times a year in the United States in the 2010s. Record-breaking hot months are occurring five times more often than would be expected without global warming. And heat waves have become larger, affecting 25 percent more land area in the Northern Hemisphere than they did in 1980; including ocean areas, heat waves grew 50 percent."
Anecdotally, my central air didn't start to give up ground in the battle with the heat until the ambient temperature was about 115. Even then, the house only gained about 3 degrees F before coming back down a couple hours later when the ambient was back below 115.
IIRC, current residential air conditioner technology is engineered with the condenser expected to run at 120F. So it makes sense that this is the threshold where it stops being effective.
God forbid we ever get heat waves over 120 in Oregon, dang. I mean, we got close this last time, so never say never, but ... damn. I'll be moving if that happens.
We’re told it will affect us all, but obviously, some people believe that with money it will affect them less.
Although, it will be interesting to se what people with money do when their air conditioner breaks and the AC mechanic is out due to heat stroke.
No doubt there will be some schadenfreude. But there is a reason these things affect the poor harder.
Who grows your food etc etc?
There's also a coordination problem - if an individual rich person decides to slow down climate collapse (and many of them are, albeit possibly ineffectually), they're making their current life worse while not appreciably heading off the disaster.
There isn’t much that is bad that this doesn’t hold true for.
I think the resource shortages, water wars and refugee crises that precede the actual climate-driven apocalypse will get us there a lot faster than we imagine.
72+ degrees and 80% humidity the past two mornings at 5am when I started the dog jog and it was not fun. 95 degrees last night at 9pm.
For those unfamiliar we usually have very low humidity and cool off a lot at night. It could easily be 85+ degrees during the day and we will normally be in the 50s overnight, with the temperature starting to drop a lot by 8 or 9pm.
What does "typical high" mean? Wikipedia says that the average high for August is 82°F, but the mean maximum is 97°F.
There have been recent (huge!) advances in renewable energy, chemistry, and climate modeling that open the door to solving this problem.
The path I see in front of us involves temporarily geoengineering our way to a +1C ceiling while massively scaling up carbon capture operations. At the same time, we transition as much industry to renewable energy as possible.
This can be done. It's entirely within our grasp.
And therein lies the rub. A big chunk of the population thinks climate change is a lie, or there isn't anything reasonable we can do about it, or it's too expensive to try and do something about it. And the opposing side will only accept massive reductions in quality-of-life to fix climate change and absolutely won't support geoengineering.
Maybe the pragmatic middle is bigger than I think, and has the power to push the various wingnuts out into irrelevancy so we can get on with trying to innovate our way out of this mess like we always do.
Then there's those who realize that we won't solve the problem without some adjustment to the way we live.
For prevention the time is up.
The whole NZ citizenship for the rich is a mix of preppers nonsense and elite club FOMO. If it gets bad enough that NZ is the easiest answer, then NZ won’t be the answer.
Remember these are the same people doing young blood transfusions to stave off death. Hey, maybe history will prove me wrong, but it’s not impossible they’re flawed humans with fears and insecurities like everyone else.
The world's a big place. There's much, much better spots to be at than the middle of nowhere, especially if you have money and/or the ability to create large structures around where you live.