Dangerous humid heat extremes occurring decades before expected (2020)
research.noaa.gov
research.noaa.gov
I say "depending on the source" because there are some extreme doom and gloom types for whom these changes are happening more slowly than expected. However, the difference is negligible. The doom and gloom types might say the end of the world is only 2 years away, which is extreme, but now even peer reviewed research in respected publications are starting to mention very severe outcomes within decades. In previous decades, these publications wouldn't publish anything like that at all, then eventually they began to publish papers that mention these events happening within centuries, and now papers are coming out with very serious consequences being only decades away. The really scary thing is that the likelihood of sudden catastrophic change (eg: methane bombs, Thwaites Glacier collapse) is increasing, which could make the shorter time frame predictions actually come true.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
"Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...
It was a lost opportunity to shift the Overton window, which led to the moderate — rather than the extreme — projections being labelled as alarmist.
Both-sideism works in your favor in the latter case, and if someone digs into the numbers a bit more, they would find that the alarmists outnumber the complacents.
The only real risk is that the alarmists provoke an "it's already too late to fix anything" response, which I don't think is terribly likely, as there isn't an upper bound on how bad things get until you hit a tipping point of civilizational collapse.
Because, well, nobody wants to listen to 'alarmists' and 'extremists'.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-202... -- In 2020, Glacier National Park in Montana had to remove signs saying that the Glaciers would be gone by 2020, since the glaciers were still there.
Predicting a specific date limit for a specific area was probably not a great idea. Maybe someone wanted a photo-op. Disappointing. The point remains: faster-than-expected is going to depend on whose expectations you're talking about and at what time. But things are accelerating, and in the wrong direction. Also, some of the dozens of tipping points have likely already been triggered.
According to the latest Global Glacier Change Bulletin[1] compiled by the World Glacier Monitoring Service:
"The percentage of positive annual mass balances decreased from 28% in the 1980s to 9% (2017/18–2018/19), and there have been no more years with a positive mean balance for more than four decades. The melt rate and cumulative loss in glacier thickness continues to be extraordinary. Furthermore, the analysis of mean AAR values shows that the glaciers are in strong and increasing imbalance with the climate and hence will continue to lose mass even if climate remained stable (Mernild et al., 2013)."
Another infamous too-early prediction is Maslowski's 2007 projection of an ice free arctic by 2016 +- 3yrs. There will always be too-early predictions out there. But whether we're EOL in 2 years, 20 years, or sometime within a millenial's lifetime, I think is the wrong thing to be focusing on. [1]: https://wgms.ch/ggcb/
I'm saying a prediction about a specific timeline in years or decades is not important. Whether you're right that it was a few years or decades sooner than expected, or right that it was a few years or decades later than expected, doesn't really matter to me.
I, for one, might be a doomer, but have no illusions about us meeting goals to keep warming under 1.5C, or even 2C for that matter, and it is going to happen "faster than expected".
It's already too late.
Interestingly, before the IPCC was formed their precursor had set the magic number at 1.0 degrees C. Then IPCC set it to 1.5 degrees C. Then they moved the goalpost by changing the baseline from pre-industrial 1750 to 1900 (or maybe 1850). Personally, I'm not a fan of arbitrary numbers anyway. I prefer to look at significant events. For me, the big slap in the face will come when we see an ice free arctic ocean.
Could you elaborate + provide a few sources for this?
I'm not doubting you -- I'm just curious about this assessment and would like to understand how you've come to it.
No one talks of the "end of the world" being 2 years away.
There are some who speak of "tipping points" happening N years from now, but that is something very different. Right?
There's some we have pretty good idea about (perhaps not exceptions to this rule, because we are to an extent already experiencing them to a certain extent) such as ice-albedo feedback.
I'm in a subtropical zone (Brisbane) and in high humidity weather I do about 30-50% of the physical work I can on a non-humid day I'd estimate. OOften it's best to work outdoors for an hour then cool down for an hour in pool/aircon as if you overheat yourself itcan be hard to get back to normal that day.
That said its a good HN opportunity too for entrepreneurs. We see more and more kit like ice jackets that you freeze then wear outdoors etc for outdoor workers. Tech has to kick in here too.
Reminiscent of Frank Herbert's stillsuits in Dune (1965).
Unfortunately they're still manually assembled, so not quite readily available yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE <- Adam savage building one for an astronaut cosplay suit.
Once you identify which is easier (to implement and/or to monetize), it makes an unfortunate kind of sense.
There was always a lot of talk about carbon taxes, but since we're somewhat past that point now, what about a carbon capture rebate as well? If you can make money from thin air, I'm sure carbon capture technology and industry would boom. If a company can't avoid carbon tax from it's process, which some products simply can't, it then has to offset that tax with carbon capture rebates to be profitable and exist in society. If the math doesn't make sense, they don't make the money, so sad, tears in the unseasonable rain.
The reason you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor isn't because some jackbooted thug will put you in a cage, it's because you know it's the right thing to do. Sure there might be some laws you begrudgingly put up with because of the risk vs reward but making a lot of people do that at scale that doesn't work well.
Convincing people to voluntarily do what you want is far cheaper than violence or threat of violence and it comes with a much lower risk of you being shot in the hole you just dug.
Funny, the first three are covered by laws and regulations - local and international. I'm less certain about the conflict diamonds, but I believe there are regulations around those too.
> Saying the only lever we have is regulation is just saying the only lever we have is violence but with an extra intermediary steps
That's because there are enough people who value money and power that they will never do the right thing unless forced. The tragedy of the commons, as it is.
The Meditations on Moloch paper covers quite a bit of this.
But even on an individual level, money is still a huge guiding factor for society in general, so taxing certain items even at the individual sale level could influence things. Putting fuel in your car? 10% carbon tax, both you and the corporation paid a tax, that goes into the coffer to pay for other kinds of more active carbon reduction programs.
> The reason you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor isn't because some jackbooted thug will put you in a cage, it's because you know it's the right thing to do.
People do all these things, knowingly ignoring all the externalities of their actions. The world is full of decent human beings, and yet the above is still true. Just look at the roads, we're all thoroughly aware that cars pollute our cities even in the immediate tense, let alone long term, yet the roads are still full.
Let's not blame the individual for industrial pollution anyway, since the majority of emissions are still from industrial activity. People have marginal agency on changing that. What's a consumer going to do about bunker fuel in shipping ships? How am I going to influence the processes used in steel mills?
In the same sense, corporations are committing violence on us also, by destroying the planet that we all live on.
The issue is that there's no guarantee that the 10% extra burden is going to green initiatives. It ends up going to the ever ballooning government budget and pays for pension funds for underperforming government employees.
One of the few things that still works about capitalism is you make an expensive toy, it catches on, and then it gets cost reduced ruthlessly to the point that almost anyone can afford it.
See flat screen TVs and cell phones for two compelling examples of this phenomenon. See Corsi boxes for an example of how to build cheap alternatives to an expensive thing. In Beijing, they got as cheap as buying a $25 fan and strapping a HEPA filter to it in order to filter out small particles.
The outlook that nothing ever gets better and there's nothing we can do about it because the rich control everything is what will get us all killed. The rich will make money where they can even if they have to make it up with volume.
No, no, and no. Capitalism does not fix this. Capitalism exploits this and forwards the profits to the executives and shareholders.
Or if you call capitalism a failure because only rich people can afford MacLarens, you're just being disingenuous. See also cheap perfectly serviceable 60" flat screen TVs versus a 85" Samsung Goliath.
I don't want a society with zero wealth gap. They tried that during the cultural revolution and it sucked every bit as badly as the libertarian dystopia Peter Thiel wants to make happen. We have a really serious inequality problem with fairly simple answers that are politically infeasible until we federalize all campaign funding.
No, they didn't. That was the story the masses were sold, but power and wealth were a function of the hierarchy rooted at Mao Zedong. But also, I don't believe that zero wealth gap is a reasonable goal, so kindly lay off the strawman. Nordic countries show that there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of inequality, without a blush of the totalitarianism that you fear.
And libertarianism is just institutionalized cheating for all. Same result as communism in the long run - a tiny ruling class and a world full of peasants where it's good to be the king. I'll take neither.
But I'd love socialized healthcare, medicare for all even. Spoilers: a country infested with a bunch of temporarily embarrassed millionaires will never let that happen. And even in a global pandemic, if you don't get private money out of campaign financing, you'll never get a shot at convincing those temporarily embarrassed millionaires of anything else. But by all means, you be you.
But I thought we were talking about how if we have to wear stillsuits in the future, no one will be able to afford stillsuits except the rich despite the historical evidence 100% to the contrary. The rich will get them first though, designer stillsuits even, deal with it. Can't have everything.
*But if you had any idea how many weird tricks the $100M+ class employs to avoid paying taxes, 100% legally ATM because our 2500+ page WTF tax code, you'd probably want to storm the Capitol again (or maybe not because you might have convinced yourself those weird tricks might come in handy some even though they probably won't).
Yes, they're called Android phones.
Why can they afford it? Capitalism. Don’t forget they tried the alternative and it failed.
There isn't just one alternative to capitalism, and Leninist state capitalism isn't really an alternative to capitalism.
TLDR It's an urban planning story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_tunnel_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
http://hdr-photographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/barce...
But yeah, being in the shade doesn't help that much either as the temperature is still high (and even remains high at night).
Coober Pedy (/ˈkuːbər ˈpiːdi/) is a town in northern South Australia, 846 km (526 mi) north of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway. The town is sometimes referred to as the "opal capital of the world" because of the quantity of precious opals that are mined there. Coober Pedy is renowned for its below-ground dwellings, called "dugouts", which are built in this fashion due to the scorching daytime heat.
But heat pumps are actually extraordinarily efficient, so ice production isn’t bad compared to the cooling it would give the wearer.
Which is one of the reasons many buildings build up big blocks of ice at night and then use them to cool themselves throughout the day.
But if the ambient temperature is 30 C, how much did it take to make that 1 kg of ice or that 8 kg of 20C water?
With a heat pump, like your refrigerator or freezer, producing cool water is much easier with high efficiency multipliers, while producing ice is a lot harder.
If the outside temperature is 30 C, the the ice machine radiator must be at a higher temperature, say, at 40 C, to radiate heat, and the cold end must be below freezing to actually freeze the water. So, the radiator might be at 40C and the cooler at -10 C. So, the compressor must transport the 300 kJ of heat energy "against the grain" from cool to hot, a temperature difference of 50 C.
With the refrigerator, the hot end might be at 40 C and the cool end at 10 C, meaning the difference is only 30 C.
COP or Coefficient power is the amount of energy (J) the heat engine uses to transfer 1 Joule of energy.
Some formulas:
eff = 1 - T_cold / T_hot
Refrigerator:
T_cold = 10 C = 280 K, T_hot = 40 C = 310 K
eff = 1 - 280/310 = 0.0968
COP = 1/eff = 10
Freezer:
T_cold = -10 C = 260 K, T_hot = 40 C = 310 K
eff = 1- 260/310 = 0.161
COP = 1/eff = 6.2
I spent like 8-10 months every year trapped indoors with AC. Just being a couple of minutes outside meant sweating _a lot_. Heck, after showering you had to dry yourself two times because you got way too sweaty unless you had AC in the bathroom.
No thanks. I really don't understand how people like living in tropical weathers.
Btw before you write angry replies accusing me of not knowing what I'm talking about I grew up in a part of Asia that gets extremely warm/humid in spring and summer. We're talking way above 80% average humidity for over 4 months, some days close to 100% and subtropical temperatures around 30-35 and above 40°C when it gets really hot.
These are vests like you describe. You take ice packs from the freezer and fit them into pockets of the vest. Not very high tech but they work.
No, it isn't an opportunity for anybody, the only opportunity we get is to get off our asses and address the root cause instead of the symptoms to see if we can make money off the symptoms. That's what got us in this situation in the first place.
Edit: At 500 watts, you could combine your personal cooler with a solar panel. The system would be 2-3000 dollars. A bit more than a parka but less than a car.
The web bulb temperature of the top 0.1% of hot and humid days over a 38 year period?
Models like the one mentioned (without references) are created by humans and the parameters they use are arbitrary. Scientists make some assumptions about parameters and run them through the system and get some results. They do this many times and vary the parameters to see what happens. It's the change in results vs the change in parameters that is the interesting stuff. Claiming they can predict the future is dishonest.
Why do all references to climate models refer to 'The models or model'? It's like they are supposed to be oracles -- they are NOT. There is not just one or a few. They do not all show the same things.
Models are a useful way to learn, but picking one result, not showing any work or stating assumptions, and then publishing click-bait referencing it is not ethical.
> Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century.
Which Climate models? Oh sorry it's the ONE so I won't question further. It could never be wrong.
Do other models show anything different? Oh there are no others I see.
What parameters were used? What datasets? There are zero references to any of this in the original paper but that didn't slow down the click-bait climate-fear-porn author who is not a scientist but a corporate communications person.
> Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else.
As others have said the 'survey data' they do reference seems to be mostly about how many stations a region has.
Who funded this?
> The study was supported by NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program.
Big government looking to get bigger.
For my part I have many years experience designing and running HPC scientific computing models in related domains.
TFA is a gloss on a paper published at Science Advances. The details you seek about the data and the models are there in the journal article and in the supplemental material of the article.
The lead author (http://www.regionalclimateperspectives.com/) is a PhD in Earth science and is a postdoc at a reasonably well respected lab (JPL in Pasadena).
Taken together, all this makes your comment look both foolish and wrong. What’s the point of writing such junk?
Wet-bulb temperature is to first approximation the average of the dry-bulb (ambient temperature of air) and dew-point temperature (direct measure of amount of water vapour in air). So we're looking for places that can be both hot & wet in summer (e.g. eastern US) or really hot and still somewhat moist (e.g. near Arabian Sea) [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...
The local grid particularly in (parts of?) California is everything but robust.
How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.
My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.
Also beware of Bronteroc's on alien planets...they're pretty but they're not friendly....
It make me think about how we could prevent death in case of a massive humid heat wave, and how we could do it at a low enough cost, especially in a situation where the grid fail. My best guess will be some tent with high isolation fabric (think emergency blanket) cooled with a tank of liquid nitrogen.
The formerly split country of Germany is also sharply split on the map! The western part (BRD/FRG) has significantly more hot humid days than the eastern part (former DDR/GDR). The colored area edge almost exactly matches the border.
A political map of FRG/GDR for comparison: https://www.stepmap.de/karte/brd-ddr-ddIwvxHotF
Why does this data follow political borders so sharply in this case? Is that effect real or caused by methology error or skewed data?
Apparently the basic data stems from the HadISD database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/index....
This file lists the stations (version v311_2020f) in the database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/files/...
Many stations in the former GDR seem to be present, for example:
104880-99999 DRESDEN 51.133 13.767 230.1 1931-01-01 2020-02-06
094690-99999 LEIPZIG/SCHKEUDITZ& 51.417 12.233 142.0 1975-07-01 1991-10-31
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media...
Other parts of West Germany also sport lower population density (Lower Saxony in the North, Bavaria in the South).
It is absolutely astonishing how strongly human behavior (industry and metropolitan areas) influences local environmental conditions. I guess most cities may (be forced to) change radically.
> Because of the loss of life, damage to crops and vegetation in general and the impact on water supplies, these recent heat waves have stimulated much interest in their climatological features, recurrence times, and, especially, whether they are a portent of greenhouse-induced climatic change. For example, Trigo et al. (2005) state that the hot summer of 2003 in Europe exceeded any over the past 500 yr, and Schär et al. (2004) claim that this event was statistically very unlikely, and was also consistent with results from climatic change simulations. Stott et al. (2004) estimate that past anthropogenic influences doubled the probability of the occurrence of the 2003 heat wave. More intense and frequent heat waves are also predicted by Meehl and Tebaldi (2004) and Beniston (2004) on the basis of greenhouse simulations.[1]
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/20/15/jcli42...
In the climate science literature, there's a recent focus on the humidity factor:
> Recent studies have pointed to a growing concern on increasing heat stress considering humidity effects as well as extreme temperatures. Kang and Eltahir emphasized the important role of humidity, and pointed out that North China Plain is likely to experience deadly heat waves with wet-bulb temperature exceeding the threshold defining what Chinese farmers may tolerate while working outdoors [15]. By applying 35 °C as a threshold for human adaptability, Pal and Eltahir predicted that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this threshold under business-as-usual emission scenarios [16]. Lin et al. determined trends of heat wave variation and stress threshold in three major cities of Taiwan based on WBGT, and suggested that the heat stress in all three cities will either exceed or approach the danger level (WBGT ≥ 31 °C) by the end of this century [17]. Russo et al. quantified humid heat wave hazards in the recent past and at different levels of global warming using the apparent temperature, showing that humidity can amplify the magnitude and apparent temperature peak of heat waves [11]. There have also been some studies assessing the adverse effects of heat stress on health and labor productivity [18,19]. [2]
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539408/
Ultimately this is going to result in population migration away from the most severely affected areas, or drastic (and expensive) measures like shifting to living underground in termite-mound-like habitation will have to be implemented.
i expect a switch in the coming decade
it's speeding up
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/earth-mag...