Nearly the hottest place on Earth, India swelters under intense heat wave
accuweather.com
accuweather.com
I'm from the south of India and now live in Europe. My body tolerates heat quite well compared to my European friends. I remember tolerating 38-40C indoor temperatures and sleeping through it with heavy sweating. But air temperature of 42C is where I draw the line. It is almost biologically impossible to survive this.
So this story isn't just about record high temperatures, it's about record high temperatures that coincide with biological limits. If air temperature reaches 44C, it's impossible to survive this without artificial cooling and I predict a state of emergency will be declared every summer starting 2030.
There's one additional factor. The hottest months in the equator are June to August. This happens to coincide with the monsoon season in India. So I remember dreading May but looking forward to the monsoon in June. If climate change messes with the monsoon season, the Indian subcontinent is f'ed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
If I were in a position of decision making in India, I would invest in large deployments of passive radiative cooling films: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/energy-conservation-us/applicati...
These reflect nearly all the sunlight energy and cool their surroundings night and day by controlled black body emmisive radiation. (interestingly, for cooling applications, per unit area they are more power efficient than solar panels + AC, because solar only is working during the day, whereas passive cooling films also work at night)
PV on the roof can normally provide 100% of the energy needed for AC.
https://www.betonconsultingeng.com/passive-radiative-cooling...
“”SkyCool arrays work by cooling a fluid that moves below the panels and is pumped through refrigeration systems. The cooling helps reduce the run time of motors in the refrigeration system to reduce electricity consumption. All told, the SkyCool system can reject heat at about 100 watts per square meter, saving between 450 and 550 kilowatt-hours per square meter every year—twice the average production of a solar panel.—Brooks Johnson, Star Tribune, 12 March 2022“”
And that’s assuming you need to remove heat 24/7/365. A solar panel can also provide electricity when cooling is unnecessary. Things get even worse if you need pumps etc to circulate a fluid under the film, which is presumably why that 10-20% cost savings figure was suggested.
This is what I was thinking of in the case of India :)
Edit: wanted to add, application of this technology might require government level systems thinking.
With an air conditioner, that heat being moved is being pushed to your neighbor, passive cooling technology rejects much of the heat out of the earth.
I.e., AC contributes to the urban heat island effect, the situation snowballs and makes everyone’s AC have to run even harder.
Passive cooling films are a mitigation for the urban heat island effect.
“We found that waste heat from air conditioning systems was maximum during the day but the mean effect was negligible near the surface. However, during the night, heat emitted from air conditioning systems increased the mean air temperature by more than 1 degree Celsius (almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit) for some urban locations,”
https://news.asu.edu/content/excess-heat-air-conditioners-ca...
“By the end of the century, greenhouse gas emissions from air conditioning will account for as much as a 0.5-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures, according to calculations by the World Economic Forum.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-prevent-ai...
Anyway, their using the most extreme data that they can find to base their calculations which is rather suspect. They regularly mention 65% of electricity useable for AC, but that’s peak during a heatwave not the general average etc.
Still, a peak of 0.5-1C at night and ~0C in the daytime is a much larger effect than I was expecting especially when nighttime energy usage for AC is only averaging around 1W/M2 in their data.
Truer words were never spoken, no qualification needed.
“To evaluate the contribution of AC systems on air temperature, the WRF AC100%, AC65%, and AC35% simulations were compared against the AC_NoOut experiment.” It’s even in the conclusion: “Sustainable development and optimization of electricity consumption in cities would require turning “wasted heat” from AC into “useful energy” which can be utilized inside houses for various purposes including, for example, in water heaters.”
In other words they simulated the cooling effect of AC without the heat produced by the AC systems entering the environment as the baseline. Not what would have happened if the AC had been turned off.
We have a word for that.
Imagine something like that happening in a slum. It's the combination of humidity, temperature and poverty that is deadly. Think mass casualties (millions of people). No air conditioned environments to escape the heat. Limited access to clean water. Flaky electricity systems that cause what little capacity there is to cool anything to fail. Temperatures at night drop a little but not by enough to provide much relief. Robinson does a great job of making you believe how real this would be and what it would look like.
The human body loses the ability to cool it self with 100% humidity. Sweat no longer evaporates. Basically, people start dropping like flies once that gets out of control. It's not survivable for more than a few hours. Any water you'd use for cooling no longer evaporates and would in any case have an ambient temperature that is close to or higher than your body temperature. Instead of cooling your body, it would just heat it up quicker.
This is a very near future science fiction novel that describes a very scary reality that we might be dealing with on a regular basis pretty soon. North West US and Canada actually got a sneak preview when temperatures in the US and Canada hit record highs last summer.
The terrorism aspect is interesting though. He's not the only one that is predicting conflict as a direct result of global warming. Mass population displacements due to things like wet bulb heat events, droughts, the middle east routinely hitting temperature of over 50/60 degrees Celcius, etc. have the potential to get really ugly.
The basic argument is that peaceful protest is effective when it is an alternative to a more militant and disruptive extremist movement with the same goals. You negotiate with the peaceful side so the violent side doesn't tear your shit down.
When there is no extremist movement, you really have no powerful incentive to acquiesce to the demands of the peaceful movement. At this point mass peaceful climate protest is decades old but we've seen virtually no meaningful changes addressed.
We're tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis and it's only just barely getting started and those with the most agency to change it very obviously have no intent to. Why is ecoterrorism considered a morally abhorrent line that cannot ever be crossed, but their choice is not?
The normative answer is "that is bad too they should stop" but by what means can we make them? Our options seem very limited.
Whose minds do we need to change? Climate change is a major issue with massive popular support. There are relatively few people actually able to take action on it and they will not under the current circumstances. Specifically because there's no credible non-peaceful consequence they have to confront, they can ignore the demands of everyone else.
The actual historical effectiveness of terrorism alone is questionable. It's not a reliable or sustainable way to change the minds of a large mass of people. But that's not actually what we need to do here. Making a powerful few frightened enough to do what they ought may be sufficient.
And the effectiveness of the credible threat of violence, combined with a mass peaceful movement, is well attested.
Also, How many innocent people do you think you need to kill exactly to sway the CCP.
The CCP isn't my problem honestly. Most of the major contributors to climate change are operated from within my own country, so I'll focus on that. There's plenty of work to go around, I'm sure someone over there can handle that part of the project.
The fact that people can never really come up with anything except "but well CHINA" speaks volumes to me. You aren't rejecting this stance because you abhor violence. Climate change IS VIOLENCE. Where is your outrage, what are you willing to do about it?
The fact that you can't even understand this is a global problem and just figure "someone over there can handle that part of the project" is telling.
You are a dangerous ideologue.
My actual position is that there does need to be an extremist counterpart to the peaceful climate movement that can plausibly escalate to violence against people. But that there are several steps along the way with chances for those in power to de-escalate first.
Things like targeted destruction of fossil fuel facilities and harassment campaigns against certain politicians and executives are likely to be very effective at raising the cost of contributing to the climate crisis. If those with the power to actually respond to those measures do so, it won't need to escalate further. Hopefully violence isn't necessary but at this point unfortunately, the credible threat of it is.
The credible threat of violence doesn’t even work unless you can credibly threaten a huge portion of the population. Just look at how ineffective terrorism has been for the last 50 years.
Have you considered the civil rights movement was not successful because of the threat of violence but was instead successful because people actually changed their minds?
We have same sex marriage now, which was as unpopular as desegregation a couple of decades ago. When Obama went into office he was against same sex marriage. Society changed rapidly and without violence.
It likely changed so rapidly because it was not a coercive movement at all, but that’s just speculation on my behalf.
You just said “not my problem”, which means you don’t actually care about stopping climate change. You need to stop thinking about how to kill locally when the problem is global.
Since India is also the start of this whole conversation Gandhi especially comes to mind.
I mean, really considered? Not, my friends all think the same way, and so do the charismatic politicians I prefer, so it must be true?
You could start with your "tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis" claim, which is highly dubious. Have you swallowed the false claim that hurricanes and tornadoes are worse now than before? Are you looking at net deaths, for instance counting not just higher deaths in heat waves, but also fewer deaths in cold snaps? And are you accounting for the beneficial effect of higher food production due to CO2 fertilization?
There is plenty of data that supports climate change, on a Global scale. Whether it kills millions or billions or nobody at all is simply a question of attribution.
What I meant to say was less nutrients in same amount of weight/volume eaten.
https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond...
I wonder whether there are practical/efficient ways of decreasing humidity in situations like this in closed spaces?
So that you could use a regular fan again to cool yourself by means of evaporation of water off of your skin.
The cold heat exchanger coil can cause condensation, which dehumidifies, but if the air temperature is 'correct' the AC control thermometer will keep the AC unit off.
So you can have have an 'uncomfortable' environment because the temperature is 22C/70F but the humidity is >70%. This is why separate (whole house) dehumidifiers are often recommended: they have a separate hygrometers that cause the unit to start, regardless of what the temperature is.
Owing to the pandemic, I had spent the last couple of years in the foothills of the Himalaya where the temperature rarely went beyond 30C. It has been really hard coping up with the heat as it literally sucks the life out of you.
Ref: https://www.accuweather.com/en/in/delhi/202396/april-weather...
Humidity is the other key factor though.
When younger I remember a day of walking all around Phoenix for many hours on a day where it was 122F (50C) and while it felt like being inside an oven, it was ok because humidity was close to 0%.
But high humidity with high temperatures is what makes it unsurvivable.
- Solar chimneys draw cool air in when it’s sunny via pressure differential
- Building orientation along with natural shading from deciduous trees prevent excessive solar insolation heating the building
- Building on top of a thermal slab to provide enough thermal inertia to prevent excessive heat during the day
I wrote more details on this on my blog: https://uplevelgreen.com/passive-solar-cooling-in-hot-humid-...
- thermochromic windows
paint is not free and needs replacement every few years. hardly a solution.
I mean, I like houses made from big stones but it is probably cheaper to paint an existing house, instead of tearing it down and replacing with stonewalls.
Does such thing exist?
And, doesn't high emissivity in the IR mean high IR absorption as well ?
[0] https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/materials-innovation... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_window [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Illustration-showing-des...
On the other hand you go into a 200+ year old building and you notice it's cool in summer although there is no air conditioning. The building is positioned in such a way that it stays cool for the most of the day, the walls and windows are placed to optimized for this. It's not 100% but if you added a cooling system you would have a perfect setup.
We rely to much on technology to build these ugly boxes instead of also considering the building shape and position itself.
I don’t know how applicable architectural cleverness will be in densely populated cities in the developing world that are threatened by global warming. That seems like an impossible situation.
but I see this as related to a more general attitude of imposing our will while disregarding what is already there.
"why would we want to position the building according to where it is? specially when there's an alternative of putting it however we like, and then involving a sophisticated air system which will isolate the building from it's environment (which is going to shit anyways) and also, think of all the jobs, the infrastructure, electricity, generators, coal-mining, ac technicians, etc that come with an AC based building! if the building, just by virtue of where it is, can do without all this then the economy will shrink, we cannot have that."
By the end of that summer I was dreaming about moving back to north america where air conditioning is much more common in rental units.
Most of the Continent is mild enough in winter that an air-loop heat pump will reliably heat throughout the winter, and these aren't more expensive to install than other heating systems, they're less energetically intense to operate, and they provide cooling on demand.
I agree that the national programme must be more detailed than just declaiming "heat pumps!" and calling it even.
I gestured vaguely at the existence of parts of Europe where cheap mini-splits might not be sufficient, let's just agree I'm talking about the places where they will be.
It's hot, you live with it. I'm sure it's worse on the other side of the Med.
It's one of the reasons the traditional 'siesta' exists and towns and villages are virtually dead until 5pm.
The issue I have with aircon is that it makes people ignore the local climate and, worse, actively fight it, which requires even more aircon.
Exposing yourself to the elements is greatly rewarding.
For the average person, yes. But old and vulnerable people do die from it.
You need to drill down to access the constant temperature in the ground, to be able to really counterbalance the differences in the air temperature. Once you've drilled down I guess you can make a passive or minimal energy circulation system that would be much more energy efficient than air conditioning.
It's great in the winter though. I haven't had to turn my heat on in years.
Just to make a silly pedantic af point, those building structures are also technology
Is that the case in India? I was under the impression that while underground temperature is consistent across seasons, it does vary considerably across climates, with warmer climates generally having higher underground temperatures. For example, while much of the central US has underground temperatures around 50F, southern Florida, California and Arizona have areas with temperatures in the upper-70s[1].
[1] https://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooling/EarthTemperatu...
My point is, is 2 to 3 degrees Celsius enough? From what I read is that I need to really move very large columns of air to make a sizeable impact. TBF my energy bills did come down by ~10%
For example if you go from 40°C to 37-38 that’s a quite good improvement if you don’t have to spend energy for this. I don’t know if that also applies to more extreme temperatures like 47°C, I cannot really imagine how that feels like.
Ref: lived in LV,NV for a decade.
Another aspect is how real-estate and building construction works in India, across rural and urban regions.Some of the regions have strong clouts of companies that control building/development in urban spaces, while supplies and other aspects in rural region.
Can see the realties changing and newer construction projects taking in newer & greener designs, in both urban and rural regions, but its got a long way to go!
We used to have thick mud walled houses which stayed cool during scorching heat. People who could afford would go with stone constructions. Things such as sun and wind direction were also considered while constructing the houses. All that knowledge is discarded in favour of high rising concrete jungles.
But all that is replaced with concrete based constructions with almost no insulations. This makes inside even more uncomfortable than outside once the wall have absorbed heat. Commercial construction is even worse with lots of glass.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/literally-hotter-than-t...
What's this mysterious special fruit the article strangely forgets to name?
Aam Panna, Bel ka Sharbat, JalJeera, Shikanji, Neera, Ragi ambli, Jigar Thanda, Nannari, Kokam Sharbat, Coconut water, Chaach/ButterMilk, Thandai, Roohafza,
and many more...
Quoting Death Valley temperature as only “99F” to make a point that Delhi is really fricking hot at this time. Well, Death Valley currently isn’t at its peak temperature and the summer has barely begun. It’s also not experiencing a heat wave.
The whole article appears to be GPT’ed.
[1]https://phys.org/news/2022-03-hot-poles-antarctica-arctic-de...
[0]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Humorism.svg#/media/...
That's the second time I've seen it referenced here. Cheers.
I stopped reading it after a couple of chapters.
The subject chosen is really interesting but the way the novel was written (fiction mixed with facts) and some chapters where the author directly communicates with the reader is really weird. I wouldn't be surprised if this is their first novel and reads like a middle school essay of some kind.
It's Kim Stanley Robinson...
I prized the trilogy for its vivid descriptions of the Mars in the beginning to how it was transformed using technology. The pace was good and never boring. Not so in this latest one - some characters and their feelings are given so much space in the book without moving the plot - like that character who survived the heat wave - by the 3rd of the book, you would wish he didn't - just chapters and chapters of PTSD descriptions.
My main gripe with it was that it leaves the reader thinking that climate change can be combatted with sensibility and reason. The idea that our global elites will come to their senses if we shove a few incidents in front of their faces goes against the fundamental narcissistic arc western civilization is currently enamored with.
The world he presents is predominantly western and China barely gets a mention. While he does start off in India most of it takes place in Switzerland, a country that doesn't really matter all that much for the climate. He's American, so he probably thinks China is inherently a bad place where stupid things happen. But I don't know why one wouldn't center a fictitious future of climate change there, and worse leave it out entirely. It's civilization is ascending while western white European culture is obviously descending.
I don't want my criticism of the book to lie entirely on Robinson's euro-centrism, but it is my primary complaint. Not because this makes the book racist, and I'm not accusing Robinson of that, but because it shows how Robinson's limited view of the world shapes his fiction. He gives us a white saviour story primarily taking place in Switzerland and yet claims to be speaking to the world. It's just dumb.
Maybe they don't talk about climate change as the reason perse, but it is wrong to say they are doing nothing, and in fact I would argue they have done much more than I see in my native country (the U.S.).
Is it something about discussing China that triggers people to engage in whataboutism for the US? My post that you just replied to literally just roasted the US for being shitty when it comes to climate change and your defense of China is “it might be better than the US because it’s hard to get a gas car”. GTFO with that crap.
China is left out because their per capita income is lower than romania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
And their per capita CO2 emission is nothing. Most of china's emissions are to provide manufacturing goods to europe.
> European countries are likely where this innovation will be.
Europe isn't at the forefront of anything anymore.
> Right now both the US and China are the problem, this has nothing to do with “white”.
No. The problem is europe. And climate change is most definitely a white problem. It was a result of europe's decision to colonize, genocide and industrialize. On a per capita basis, europe at near the top of C02 emissions. You don't get to live a 1st world lifestyle without causing environmental harm.
The idea that china or india or africa has to fix a problem caused by europe is a non-starter.
Without speaking to the book’s Eurocentrism, I can confirm this is not true. KSR has said in interviews he believes China is the world’s best hope at mitigating climate change because the United States is too politically decayed to accomplish anything at that scale.
Mining and such, you know?
Or Nestlé, making billions with water:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nestle-ceo-water-not-human...
IDK, make up your own mind.
China's had a below-replacement birthrate since 1991. It's TFR was 1.7 last year, 132nd in the world, putting it next to demographic powerhouses like Latvia and Denmark.
This is an ascendant civilization?
Coming to climate modifying aerosols I haven't heard/read this being discussed. A comparable exercise, cloud seeding, was done couple of years ago. But it was very geographically limited. What we are experiencing right now is unprecedented. So I guess we just have to wait it out.
For comparison; Bangalore used to see high summer temperature of 32-34 about a decade ago. It's gotten progressively worse. To an extent that Bangalore reached ~35-36 as soon as summer months began, mid/late March.
By far the harshest heat I've experienced is back in 2015, early May in Delhi, India. I don't know what the temperature was but the blast of heat wave as soon as I exited from office building is vivid in my memory. Couple of days later I read in news that a few cars spontaneously caught fire around the office building I visited.
Also, fire broke out last week in Delhi last week[1]. So yeah, it's quite bad.
Edit: more content.
[1] https://www.india.com/news/delhi/video-delhi-bhalswa-landfil...
Various states in India are deprioritizing power supply to industries in favour of consumer household use. So domestic news is playing those "govt reduces power supply to industries by 50%" headlines. [1]
Use of ACs and air coolers has skyrocketed the demand for power (38 year high), thereby increasing demand for Coal. Internal politics is now totally fixated on Coal stocks and supply for each state. National govt even blamed some states for "not taking ample steps to end power shortage, not buying enough coal". [2]
National govt cancelled 650 passenger trains to ensure timely delivery of coal supplies by train rakes to states.
[1] https://twitter.com/CNBCTV18Live/status/1520308462533550080
[2] https://twitter.com/CNBCTV18Live/status/1519929083588902912
I get the immediate need for electricity, but talk about increasing coal stocks sounds weird nonetheless in light of what the goals are now in Western countries.
But if talk of an "accelerated coal phase out" were to come up, it will face some pushback and phasing-out pace will only be in line with development and growth targets. I wouldn't be surprised if politicians point to emissions by developed nations over the years and term India as a victim of it.
Consumers would happily switch to EVs that are priced right. That shift may occur fairly quickly. The grid going hybrid is a work in progress. Coal is now showing how "elastic" it can be to meet demand spikes like these, so it may stick around longer.
The rest of the world, of course, is full of pompous hypocrites who say one thing to arm-twist nations like India, while doing exactly the opposite at home (see, climate-change, Russian-oil etc.). Little wonder there is little trust of the West in the global south (except in "elite" circles).
Probably. That said, the brunt will be born by the poor. America may face a deep recession. India, starvation and a political reboot.
Are you a visitor from 1900? That's exactly what people were saying 122 years ago. Prophecies of Doom are easy to make but appear to be hardly take in account a key factor: technological progress.
Even the ipcc report this year says we are fubared.
This is the ultimate "do as I say, not as I do", never seen a single person who has argued that there are too many people on this planet follow it up by removing themselves from the tally. It's always other people who are the "too many".
This may surprise people, but places near the equator are really god damn hot most of the time and when they have a heat wave it’s even hotter.
People already think that the avarage temperature in the last 3 years was always like that
I mean, any farmer can tell you some growing seasons are really warm, others cold, some very dry and others very wet. No two seasons are the same.
> Meteorologists from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) found that March 2022 was the hottest March for India as a whole since 1901, with average highs jumping to a staggering 3.35 degrees Fahrenheit (1.86 degrees Celsius) above the climatological average.
Heat waves happen, and have happened before, but if they become more common, longer, hotter on average etc you can see this in the statistics.
It's literally more than 100 years since the last time this level of heat occurred. Sounds similar to 100-year floods?
> Characteristics of Average maximum, minimum and mean temperature for the country as a whole and over four homogenous region during March 2022 and its comparison since 1901
> [...]
> The country averaged monthly mean temperatures of 26.67ºC is the second warmest since 1901 (The warmest year on record was 2010 (26.671 ºC)).
[0] https://internal.imd.gov.in/press_release/20220402_pr_1551.p...
That is what is actually the thing that climate change models say: more exteme weather events.
Climate != Weather
But climate shapes weather.
I can see several million or even billion people die in the next 20 to 30 years.
It's difficult to be optimistic, but it seems there is nothing that will truly limit fossil fuel consumption.
Maybe some oil producing countries could get in some sort of alliance, and artificially limit the amount of oil they extract, in return for subsidies? Those countries could also put a tariff on oil.
The fact that cars manufacturers don't even try to increase MPG, by reducing the engine size and car weight, is also quite hilarious.
This is a difficult equation to balance when India and China burn cheap fuels while petrostates trade their reserves for bombs.
New York is the land of subways, and was known for its endless taxis at one point.
I know other US cities have light rail, elevated tracks, transit.
Even SV has things called buses, and rail transit too.
I think people just like to shout random ideas sometimes, without thinking.
Driving from Corporate Woods, Overland Park to Westbottoms Missouri is 19 minutes. The bus takes over an hour including a sixteen minute walk. In other words, nothing has changed in ten years. It takes about three times the time to take a bus as opposed to driving.
Public transit is pretty great in most big French cities ( including mini metros in not huge cities like Rennes, Lille Toulouse).
I don't understand why we aren't pouring massive amounts of money into public transport. Apparently many people in Western Europe seem to enjoy being stuck in traffic for hours every day. For some reason, company cars are still a thing in Belgium, very nearly everyone working in IT gets one. I can't wrap my head around how stupid this is.
Not only does there seem to be no sense of urgency, there doesn't seem to be much interest in doing anything at all..
Same as in the Netherlands: It's a cost/tax dodge. Looks like you get 500-800 euro/month in car but it actually only costs about 200 to the company and the company doesn't have to pay a significant amount of taxes over it. Scrap that advantage and it will quickly go away.
Then there's timeliness. Deutsche Bahn is known for frequently their trains are delayed. In summer, even on the Intercity connections (IC, ICE) trains will be filled to the brim and air conditioning unavailable.
I love trains. I want to use public transport. It's just so goddamn inefficient.
I live in a small town about 70km north of Frankfurt am Main. A lot of people will commute daily from here to Frankfurt. The drive is 45 minutes to 70 minutes depending on traffic. If I were to take a train I could: - Walk to the bus station (5 minutes) - Take a bus to the train station (25 minutes) - Take the train to Frankfurt (60 minutes) - Take the metro to the closest location for my office (10 minutes) - Walk into the office (5 minutes)
The time given is assuming no delays, and a schedule that matches up perfectly. Realistically you'll lose another 30 minutes just standing around on platforms.
Ultimately the whole trip, even with a daily ticket will already cost you double your fuel costs for the same ride while sacrificing air condition, quiet and comfort.
We need better solutions for a lot of things. I loved seeing how Oxford in the UK has massive parking lots outside the city center with free buses connecting you to the city. It means that people can take the highway to the city but not get stuck in city traffic.
2. If we used cars less, there is a good chance public transport would have less of those issues you're talking about. It's a vicious circle. Urban planning has been favoring cars for a long time.
Having good public transportation would mean having a bus stop within 100m of every house.
Beyond that, yes, transit schedules need to be frequent and reliable, with frequency especially being important if you have to make lots of transfers. It’s no big deal if you miss your train if another one will be there in a few minutes; if you have to wait 15-30 though, a slight delay can be a problem. For buses, giving them their own right-of-way is important.
Long-term though, as another commenter mentioned, we need to enable more people to live closer to work. I’m not sure what much of Germany is like (have only visited Berlin and Munich) but in the US we have a ton of sprawling suburbs because it’s not legal to build anything denser than single-family homes in most places here. Especially those places that already have good transit connections need to densify, and then the places nearest them need to do the same and build good transit connections.
Maybe e-bikes do change the calculus a bit there too though.
Ebikes really extend the range
By foot, bike, trotinette. If it's too far, that isn't good public transit and/or you live too far.
I believe we call that a scooter in English. Had to look it up.
Because it would be seen as a socialist measure.
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/california-high-speed-...
Eventually oil production will decline [1]. Right now, it seems as if this is the only thing that will limit consumption.
Because most public transport sucks, is unreliable, only works at certain hours, is dirty, unsafe, and covers only a small ridiculous amount of space limited to key cities. No wonder.
The pandemic will only make public transport less desirable as well.
When everyone has to use it, all of a sudden, everyone becomes invested in improving it.
> unsafe
Driving is unsafe. ~40,000 people die while driving in the US every year, and many more are seriously injured.
Public transit is so much safer, it's not even in the same ballpark.
It's safer because it goes nowhere in the first place. I can't even believe you guys are even trying to compare public transport which is super limited in the areas they can possibly cover (by definition, because it's made to cover denser areas), and stuff like cars which can go virtually anywhere, anytime, in pretty much any weather condition. In video games that would like comparing a rail shooter to an open world one: they are too different products and the overlap in utility is very narrow.
2. If we used cars less, there is a good chance public transport would have less of those issues you're talking about. It's a vicious circle. Urban planning has been favoring cars for a long time.
> only works at certain hours, is dirty, unsafe, and covers only a small ridiculous amount of space limited to key cities
For starters, I think public transportation should be free for the poor, and low middle class.
All air travel that uses fossil fuel would would be taxed if you are above middle class. Outlaw the private jets. (It just bothers me to see the Elon, or Saturday Night Fever types jetting off to Ibesa. (Too disenfranchised to check the spelling of the party port.)
Give companies federal income tax credits if they can keep their employees at home, and not commuting.
Encourage solar with incentives. Yes--we have been doing that, but in my state (CA) PG&E seems to balk at paying customers for the energy produced.
And more Nuclear power plants, but not on faults.
Bring companies back home if their product is in a county that dosen't care about Carbon. More than just a tariff.
(In the end I'm afraid Global Warming measures will be paid for by the poor, and middleclass. Their will be more taxes on gas. Their will be more effort to keep older cars off the roads. (poor can't afford electric vechicles right now. Those two year smog checks are really getting stringent, and don't make sense. I put 500 miles on my vechicle a year. Why am I paying every two years for a smog check. DMV has our mileage. Same gripe goes for mandatory insurance.)
Nothing will work while companies and consumers are free to ignore the externalities of their own actions.
Tax carbon.
Some common definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
In France, if you add those two modes, you barely get over 10-12% of the number of moves people make.
The number of cars has again increased by 10% in the last decade. It has doubled since the 80s, when we thought that almost everyone who needed a car had one, and that they were already too many and had bad influence urban planning and many other aspects. The progression seems to never stop.
It's a flood of cars. If I take my municipality, there are more individual cars and vans than people who can drive them. It is not uncommon to see households with 3 or 5 cars. Cars are parked everywhere (rarely on owners' property, though); and that's before city people come over for the week-end or holidays (2/3 of houses are secondary residences)...
Everywhere but in large cities, local elected officials keep on pushing projects of motorways 'for economic development' like it was 1972 (a strategy which hasn't worked in 60 years, but eh...), spending tens and hundreds of millions of €, sometimes in direct competition of an existing or abandoned railroad. A case a few dozen miles away from my place: €200M for a 2 km bypass (no 0 is missing or extra). They have bottomless pockets for roads.
And this is in the sunniest place on earth with a significant investment in solar energy.
Several times in the past 20 years I have seen the heat index break 50C[1] and it is normal to experience >95F temperature at near 100% humidity in the summertime.
The issue with the Minnesotan climate (in both winter and summer) is that there is no moderating coastal effect for thousands of miles and it is possible for heat (and cold) to "pool" in that center of the continent.
My understanding - and also my personal experience - is that Minnesota summers are a few degrees away from being life-threatening.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Minnesota_weather_reco...
This text is problematic as well. It mentions climate change twice, but frames it as the personal opinion of some people that there's a relation between heat waves and climate change.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
but poor people dont consume as much energy as rich Westerners.
First, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, it stays there for a very long time (centuries to millennia). So stopping emissions would not stop the heat.
Second, emissions also contain sulfer dioxide, which has a cooling effect through the formation of sulfate aerosols. These do not stay in the atmosphere for very long (only weeks). So in a scenario where these emissions stop, the immediate result would be a loss of that cooling effect and thus even more heat.
Food security is another quesiton.
I wonder how much more effective in economically damaging Russia it would be to push solar (and efficiency, insulation etc.) in regions on its southern border.
EU should do it at home too, as its the smart thing to do regardless, but bang-for-buck probably depends more on a) geography, b) growth rate of electricity usage, c) displacement of coal power, followed by poorly regulated methane extraction.
Morocco gets cheap, clean energy independence and industrial investment, the world gets less fossil co2 and even if they get taken over by Martians in the future that don't respect human laws, the climate benefit is already delivered and can’t be "cut off".
However, the same groups that have poisoned the well on carbon "taxes", seem to have really done a number on the whole concept of offsets and emissions trading.
Free market economics? Not acceptable if it hurts fossil fuels and helps the poor, only vice versa it seems.
https://www.goldstandard.org/our-story/gold-standard-feature...
But fossil fuels oligarchies destroy society and civilization just as much as they destroy the environment.
Faith in government, science, rule of law, democracy and economics have been polluted as thoroughly as the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta... sort by year and by capacity for highlights.
But that gain, unlike the carbon output, will be bounded by the national border, unless there's some way of exporting it for cash.
EU carbon tariffs will have a similar effect, making Indian goods relatively cheaper on the export market if they invest in solar.
This comes up again and again. The famous "Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air" for example is about how the UK could generate it's own power cleanly.
Which is effectively irrelevant in a global context of 60 Million vs 11 Billion people, but it makes phasing out fossil fuels seem harder so there's a lot of people pushing it as an unstated assumption.
For blame: all this pales in comparison to the US, which consumes over twice the oil per capita (27 kWh/capita) vs. EU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-oil?tab=table which make 27 kWh * 334M = 9000 BWh from oil alone and is barely reducing their total co2 emmissions. They reduced it by a whopping 1% 2009-2019
But at the end, poor + middle class of India suffer due to this. Sure the rich world ruined environment, but that cannot be reason to say India can do similar. The first to get affected will be the poor world (yes, incl. India) and then only the poor people in the west.
I understand this is a sensitive issue, as my wife is from India, and people do not like complaining about India (especially they do not like foreign news organisations like BBC/CNN/NYtimes posting negative news).
Please start thinking as global citizens (heck your people are running Twitter, Google, MS).
It does, but similar risks have come by before (in S Asia). India & Pakistan had a full confrontation in 1990s, when they were both nuclear capable & backed by Russia and US respectively. People at the helm of warcraft perhaps know where to draw the line. It is highly unlikely Putin will use tactical nukes or pre-emptively strike US/EU, no matter how grim the war looks.
People do not realize that the game of brinksmanship has played out several times in the past. We empathize Ukraine because news coverage & social media have brought the sounds of guns and rocket right to our doorstep. Horrific war crimes have happened, countless people died & children orphaned in Kosovo, Palestine, Kashmir etc. - but we can't connect with it because we don't see it flashed in the daily news.
My gut tells me that the balance of power is not at all as "equal" as it's claimed ("both sides have nukes") but there is enough uncertainly on all sides to want to test it.
The "usual" rules of gradual escalation probably apply. Of course, it's best to avoid any escalation because it can be an uncontrollable situation.
If a country is experiencing mass psychosis and wants to commit murder-suicide, it doesn’t really help that the other countries have nukes too
I wouldn't be so sure about this. He has working hypersonics and this advantage would last very short time. Currently those hypersonics can't be even detected in time before they hit their targets and there is no real defense against them. He might just launch 100-200 of them with 100kT payload at military/strategic targets in Europe at the same time, level down parts of countries without any response outside submarines or US strategic nukes (their flight time is in minutes anywhere in Europe, insufficient time to react), and then given Europe would be written off for a century, he can try to negotiate terms with the US, assuming MAD is given if diplomacy fails and there is a proof already (destroyed Europe).
He perceives UA effectively in NATO (given heavy arm supplies) as an existential risk for Russia, so he might go all in.
India is paying attention but India also knows that Russia has been good partner in the past, lot of Indian military has Russian equipment. You dont want to piss off your military partner.
US killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans, yet Europeans still support the US, is it because Europeans are slaves and the US is master or is it because brown lives are worth less than white lives?
If you cannot agree on that, or negotiate and compromise on that right or wrong, or influence your partner when you think things are going wrong, then ... it's not a partnership.
Sorry you couldn't stick with it.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/9/infographic-which-co...
When half of your military weapons depend on another country you don't really risk angering them over some inconsequential vote.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...
Similar to the India criticism above, in Europe it is always Germany that is criticized for importing natural gas from Russia. This week it turned out that Poland and Bulgaria (which Russia has just cut off) relied to the order of 45% and 90% on Russian gas. Poland is now re-importing Russian gas from Germany!
Other European countries also rely on Russian gas.
I suppose we should instead buy from virtuous countries like Saudi Arabia (Yemen war, human rights violations).
What we should really be doing is following France's shining example of complete nuclear power independence, but the time for that was 15 years ago and we're basically all fucked right now.
Other European countries benefit from the NordStream pipelines as well, which were originally built to circumvent Ukraine after Ukraine stole gas in transit (another example that the history is more complex than presented right now).
Germany is rich on paper for the elites. The population is poor, suffers from wage dumping through influx of Eastern Europeans and already suffers from sky high energy costs for private households.
Germany is particularly criticized because they shut down their nuclear plants about 10 years ago, which makes them seen as huge hypocrites when talking about reducing fossil fuel use.