Delhi suffers at 49°C as heatwave sweeps India
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Freeman Dyson was talking about this even way back in 1979, echoed by Edward Teller (yes, that Edward Teller!) in 1997: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB877028953900981000
Or in USAF's 1996 presentation "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025": https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af.... (PDF)
There's probably no way for us to publicly know the extent of what all has been considered or tested in secret, but it's reassuring to me to see that there's historical interest from groups who would have the clout and the means to actually do something about it. Even if we haven't discovered a safe and workable sun-shielding technology that can be deployed widely, ruling out things that won't work is an important step toward getting there. Maybe this can be the Space Force's defining moment!
https://e360.yale.edu/features/urban-heat-can-white-roofs-he...
But generally I'd agree if everything else possible was done (like a 10x reduction of fossil fuel) but we've not even started. In fact CO2 emissions increased 6% in 2021.
This is a pretty odd way of referring to attempts to intentionally introduce foreign animals into ecosystems where they have no natural predators, with predictable results (rabbits, foxes, cane toads etc).
India in particular is insisting on their right to build more coal plants and ramp up the amount of fossil fuels they burn over the next decade. The sense of urgency is a bit lacking over there. They feel entitled to helping destroy our planet. And you could argue it would be fair given other countries have done their part and continue doing so. But it's our planet. Let's stop destroying it instead. Cop 26 nearly got some broad agreement on this. Two notable countries that could not commit to this: India and China. Even the US was broadly OK with the timelines.
India is a likely ground zero for wet bulb heat events and other global warming related misery. Burning more coal is not going to help them. They'll spend billions more on cleaning up the aftermath of that then they will save building those plants.
If we still need to do geo engineering & terra forming after we get to net 0 carbon, we can do that of course. Those new SpaceX starships might help getting some hardware into orbit at scale. But short term it's neither the cheap, fast, nor easy way out. Current ETA for net zero is around 2060. And that's if everybody is on their best behavior. I think we could do better than that. We're not trying anywhere near hard enough. Any carbon not added to our atmosphere is carbon we don't have to remove or mitigate.
https://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/power-crisis-india...
Western countries developed through the use of fossile fuels, and contributed to most of the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere, as well as increase in global temperature. We also have most of the world’s wealth. If we want to stop destroying the planet, then a good way to do it would be to pay India and China to stop using fossile fuels.
India is not a developed nation. Other developed nations developed through exploiting it. If a zero carbon technology were cheaper, then of course they would use it, but by and large right now most are more expensive. Western countries can afford to buy the technologies by adjusting for future externalities, but for India the extra money could very literally be the difference between life and death for a large section of the population.
If we want to save the planet so badly, surely we can afford to pay them to decarbonise as well.
India will be ground zero for a lot of global warming related misery. Sure, it's our problem but mainly their problem. Let's face it: it will be them shoveling corpses into mass graves when this goes wrong. We'll send help and best wishes and maybe some financial support. Sure. But they should be the biggest activist for tackling the issues related to that. But that's incompatible with their short term agenda of growing at all cost. So, they are not and are acting like they are in denial.
Coal is only cheaper if you consider Indian lives to be worthless. Wet heat bulb events and smog are going to be a likely combination. Cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and other large cities all over India are going to have to deal with that. Potentially very soon and very regularly. That's going to be costly and disruptive. Who's accounting for that cost? India? Coal plant operators? Anyone? IMHO as soon as wet bulb heat events become a regular thing in India, they'll be shutting down coal plants in a hurry. Accounting for that now would make building new ones super expensive. The math does not add up if you only get to operate a plant for ten years or so. So they don't. The smart thing would be to adjust plans now and take into account future events.
Why isn’t the west that’s able to be concerned with the earth and environment pooling its resources and providing India the subsidized billions now in the form of solar panels et al? (Not just India - all the developing nations). It is not like Indians like living in the smog and 50c temps.
I'm all for international collaboration on this. That was what cop 26 was about. India ended up blocking a more positive outcome there together with China. They have their reasons. But especially India is going to have a front row seat to the misery caused by global warming. This is a problem that they are going to have to deal with one way or another. Coal is not the answer. It's part of the problem, they need to lead not follow here.
Besides, India's GDP is getting there in terms of size. About the same size as the UK; bigger than Russia. They are not an impoverished nation anymore but a growth economy.
When you get out of big cities in first world countries you very quickly discover that the world lives like it's 1950. This is what the streets of Delhi look like: https://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-of-daily-life-in-ne...
We can talk about tech progress and geoengineering all day long, the vast majority of the world simply can't afford it at scale.
I doubt India could manufacture solar cheaper than China which already has all of the necessary ecosystems for massive scale solar panel manufacturing.
> solar energy could help with the extra demand in energy because of high heat
It may seem counter-intuitive, but solar panel efficiency is affected negatively by temperature increases. Most solar panels have a temperature coefficient of around -0.3% / °C to -0.5% / °C. So at 50C , you're expecting more than 10% loss.
Most people don't realize a lot of electronics just isn't designed to operate in such extremes. Plastics start to lose rigidity, glues start to detach, liquid crystals start to behave slightly differently.
Some of their systems are already deployed in India. One example:
Site: Bikaner Solar Park
Location: Bikaner, Rajasthan, India
Capacity: 438 MW
Bikaner solar Park it is located in the north part of Rajasthan surrounded by the Thar Desert. While providing optimal irradiation, this geographic location poses great challenges in terms of soiling losses, which fluctuate between 17-25%. As such, it requires between 12-36 conventional wet manual cleaning cycles.
With the installation of Ecoppia’s E4 fully automated and water free cleaning solution, there was no longer a need to perform manual wet cleaning, saving billions of liters of water every year. Moreover, Ecoppia’s daily cleaning, significantly reduced soiling loses, maximizing the site’s productivity.
It's not unfathomable that a cheap, automated method of doing this could be developed.
And that cheap, automated method will require energy as well. Perhaps a bigger concern maybe that such a method may require a cheap fluid to prevent damage to the panel coatings and that might be water, already a scarce resource in those places.
> Each of the 400,000 installed panels required one litre of water to clean. A 15 days cleaning cycle required 124 million litres of water (enough to sustain 9000 people) while rain in the Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning methods allowed setting of dust before it was re-cleaned.
My only problem is I can't find the data for local weather temperatures!
Previous high in Delhi was recorded at 48.4°C at the Palam station on May 26, 1998 (11 days later).
Palam station highest temperature in last 24 hours = 46.4C
https://city.imd.gov.in/citywx/city_weather.php?id=42181
this 49C is questionable record with never used automated stations with no previous data
You can select those from the left nav on IMD's website and see the results yourself.
However, it is in some weird binary format which I have no clue about. They have also shared some C and Fortran (yes Fortran) code to read the files.
Edit for sources from Norway:
- https://www.met.no/en/weather-and-climate/It-will-become-wet...
> Climate change will also increase the risk of summer drought, particularly in southern and south-eastern Norway.
And this is where most of the agriculture is.
- https://www.met.no/en/weather-and-climate/It-will-become-hot...
https://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/urbanisation-high-land-s...
Scandinavia has more extreme winters, but not significantly milder summers (unless you head quite a ways northwards).
A better bet would probably be scotland or ireland.
Depends very much where you are. Denmark and Southern Sweden hardly ever see any significant snow or cold these days.
Around 2010 we hit 100F for the first time when there was a Europe-wide heatwave.
The very south east corner of the UK closest to Europe (where I grew up), is getting worse year by year. When I was a kid in the 70s, we had one humid long summer in 1976. Now it's pretty much every other year, in the 30s for a few days and horribly humid.
To make matters worse, in the pursuit of "green" policies, the government mandated better insulation for new build houses. Which is fine for most of the year. Except the "summer" now starts at the end of May and finishes in early October, and then insides of these new houses and flats can be over 30C, even at night.
There's no UK policy for keeping houses cool in the summer, despite "literally everyone" talking about how the world is going to get warmer. Houses don't have to be painted white, or require solar panels, or passive heating. Just masses of insulation.
I'm a Michigander, and in my lifetime (I'm 33) our summers have changed from bearable without A/C (Temps topping out around 85-90 with 70% humidity for a day or two) to requiring it (weeks over 90 with high humidity). A major compounding factor is that almost none of our homes are designed for cooling. Tons of the houses don't have A/C, and in my case, our building is built out of solid brick and is insulated. The floor is all warm carpet. Air flow is non-existent. Once it heats up, it doesn't cool back down and it's unbearable.
I never saw A/C in the UK when I was younger, and in the last 5 years, I can point out a good dozen houses within walking distance of my house that has had units added. We're going to be one of those shortly.
The insulation used here in Scandinavia helps keep the indoor temperature lower in the summer as well, what are you doing differently in the UK?
There was a TV programme recently where they were pointing thermal cameras at buildings and you could see the temperatures very much above "ambient" long into the evenings.
It's something we should address in the UK but unfortunately the whole building industry in the UK is 100% in favour of maximising developer profits and minimising their costs. So rather than the old fashioned way of building thicker walls to stay warm in winter and cool in summer, we now have one skin of thin brick work, insulation (foam), breeze block, more insulation, steel/aluminium frame with insulation, covered in plasterboard (the final interior wall). Maximum profit, quick to build, cheap materials.
Unless the government legislates, the UK is building a whole stock of housing that's going to be rather awful for future generations.
But our description ("...one skin of thin brick work, insulation (foam), breeze block, more insulation, steel/aluminium frame with insulation, covered in plasterboard (the final interior wall.") matches pretty perfectly building standards in my town, yet the result here is that the insulation helps quite well against the summer heat. We have triple-pane windows, do you, maybe that is it?
But still, you can find a way in 36C heat for a couple of weeks. At 47C, I think it could be bad enough to leave.
for anyone who thinks 49C in Delhi is some extreme temperature it's not really that far from usual maximum (2019 and 2020 both May max. 46C), I remember when I traveled during similar period all across India in non-AC bus (must been easily 50-60C inside) and when there was a bit of rain and temperature dropped to like 36C it felt so cool and refreshing, somewhere outside Delhi had to literally run to shadow in early afternoon with 40+ C temperatures
"The temperature was recorded at 49.2°C in northwest Delhi’s Mungeshpur and 49.1°C in southwest Delhi’s Najafgarh. It was the first time any weather station in the national capital breached the 49°C mark. These two automatic weather stations became operational only this year, so no past data is available, but the previous high in Delhi was recorded at 48.4°C at the Palam station on May 26, 1998."[1]
so not really a fair comparison, they should show current data from Palam station to see whether this is record ot not
edit: Palam station highest temperature in last 24 hours 46.4C, so not beating Delhi record, typical BBC "quality" reporting[2]
[1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/temperature-tops-4...
[2] https://city.imd.gov.in/citywx/city_weather.php?id=42181
The other problem that you seem to be missing is that the article states that this heatwave arrived very early, which means nobody was prepared for it and as the article also states, this could cause problems in agriculture which would compound on the existing shortages from Ukraine. This is as usual unlikely to cause direct problems for people living in most of Europe or North America but bad news for countries relying on Ukraine or India for food imports.
for anyone who thinks 49C in Delhi is some extreme temperature it's not really that far from usual maximum (2019 and 2020 both May max. 46C).
Sure that's only a 6.5% increase in temperature w.r.t. to 46C but that's an incorrect way of looking at it. If you were to set your air-conditioning to 32C, then the energy required to cool from 49C to 32C is 21% more than the energy required to cool from 46C to 32C.
32C is also the wet-bulb temperature, so when thinking about tolerability, at least use 32C as the baseline (and not 0C) when comparing temperatures.
P.S. Humidity is a major factor. I'm assuming humidity is the same this year as it was the previous years.
Edit: To clarify, my comment was about not giving into your insticts and underestimating the effects of 3C rise w.r.t. 46C. Thinking of 3C rise in terms of energy increase or comparing it to a baseline of wet-bulb temperature give you better intuitions.
Ok, great, so maybe at some point in the past there was a hotter temp. It’s amazing how rather than focusing on the miserable experience nearly 50° weather is for those there, we get into a weird measuring fetish over who’s number is biggest.
Which means that places with weird microclimates that were 49C when the overall temp was 46C are now 52C and above.
> Sure that's only a 6.5% increase in temperature w.r.t. to 46C
That's not how this works at all. The Celsius (and Fahrenheit) scale sets an arbitrary zero point. To compute the increase in temperature, you need to use an absolute scale, such as Kelvin: 49 °C is 322 K, and 46 °C is 319 K. The increase from 319 K is about 1%.
Think about it this way: Distances are typically measured in absolute units – m, km, feet, miles, whatever. Suppose I introduce a new unit with an arbitrary zero-point, say "1 Blarf is 2 m, but 0 Blarfs is defined as 5 m". That means that 3 m is -1 Blarf, 7 m is 1 Blarf, etc. That still doesn't mean that 2 Blarfs (9 m) is twice as long as 1 Blarf (7 m), even though it would seem that way from naively considering the numeric values of the two lengths in Blarfs.
TLDR: Arbitrary zero points are stupid.
Intervals can only be converted into percentages across another interval, you've decided that the whole interval is the interesting part but it isn't, 0K is as abitrary as 0C for this purpose. Is a day 1/7th of a week or 1/365th of a year? Yes. It's also some tiny fraction of all time since the Big Bang, but who cares about that? That's your absolute interval.
There isn't a proper way to do it and it's nearly always a mistake to try.
Your analogy about days relating to weeks or years is wrong. This is a matter of scaling. In this sense, Kelvin is of course arbitrary, but said scaling does not matter for the computations in question.
If the poster had written "49 C is 6% further than 46 C from the point at which water freezes", then we'd be in agreement that their choice of interval is no worse or better than others. But absent such a clear labelling, the only notion that makes sense is the absolute one.
> Kelvin is of course arbitrary
Listen to yourself if you won't listen to me.
Edit: read up on the difference between temperature and heat. I suspect that your mental model of that relationship is wrong, and that's why you're making this mistake.
> Listen to yourself if you won't listen to me.
Like I said: Kelvin is arbitrarily scaled. Scaling doesn't matter when it comes to ratios. Celsius on the other hand is also arbitrarily offset. That matters.
> Edit: read up on the difference between temperature and heat. I suspect that your mental model of that relationship is wrong, and that's why you're making this mistake.
I'm quite aware, thank you very much. This whole subthread is about temperature. To be clear: I'm not criticising OP's writings about energy requirements. I'm merely talking about:
> Sure that's only a 6.5% increase in temperature w.r.t. to 46C
Yes, that is indeed followed by
> but that's an incorrect way of looking at it.
but that refers to a discussion of energy that follows. My whole point is that it's *NOT a 6.5% increase in temperature". OP's point seems to be that we shouldn't be considering the increase in temperature, but rather the increase in energy needed. That's fine. No objections. I'm just saying that the statement about the increase in temperature is also wrong.
Percentages are unitless, you're making a trivial observation that didn't need to be said.
I conclude that you lack the appropriate education to discuss this subject.
My original observation was that Celsius and Fahrenheit are arbitrarily shifted, and that matters. Then you countered that Kelvin is arbitrary too, to which I write that it is only arbitrarily scaled, and that is fine (of course, for the exact trivial reason that you point out).
If your best argument is that I made a correct but trivial statement in addition to my main point, then I don't think there's much more to be had from this discussion.
I bid you farewell.
Their way of doing the conversion is far more principled than the original commenter's.
It's absolutely appropriate to do a percentage conversion based in Kelvin, the percentage has a fundamental meaning in terms of the actual increase in kinetic energy. You would get the same percentage if you did the calculation in Rankine because they're both 0-based temperature scales.
> Sure that's only a 6.5% increase in temperature w.r.t. to 46C ... but that's an incorrect way of looking at it.
I've added an edit to clarify what I was aiming at.
I can't see that the second half rectifies it though. The rest, the part about the energy needed being what mattered, I wholeheartedly agree with. It's still incorrect to say that the temperature is 6% higher.
Not if you don't compare apples and oranges, these high temperature data come ONLY from 2 NEW automated stations with no previous data to compare, other stations used for years didn't report such crazy temperaturs, so you should take these new data with grain of salt. You should be comparing stations in same location with comparable data from previous years.
Media and politicians helped - and are still helping - them do it.
One of the reasons I believe our current political system is bankrupt. It can't do the right thing even when it is crystal clear.
Ya know, people said the same thing about tobacco. Their FUD tactics were effective though. They sewed enough doubt to squeeze a few extra decades of profit out of people, at the expense of millions of lives.
This is that but worse. And it's so, so sad that people here are missing that point and carrying water for the fossil fuel mass murderers.
As an European my only hope is that the EU does something that's mandatory for companies to do in a way that it has worldwide effect (like GDPR or repairability rules for instance).
IMHO a big problem with this debate is the austerity framing. Austerity is a political loser. Always has been, always will be. Frame something as requiring austerity and it's guaranteed to fail. It's not necessary either. Nuclear and renewable energy can power modern society and then some.
If it were that easy, it would have happened. Other sources of energy have downsides, such as price, convenience, portability, etc. Mainly price, I would assume. Which goes back to the original point, that if the thing people want most is to live in large homes in far flung suburbs with large pickup trucks and SUVs and vacations to tropical destinations, they are not going to vote for policies that make those things less possible.
If 50 years ago, we had voted to make gas $10/gallon, then maybe those alternatives would have been feasible to develop and implement. But even today, $5/gallon gas will cause the incumbent politicians to lose elections. No one is going to touch that issue and win.
This idea of automatic progress is one of the great fallacies of our time. Things don't get done unless action is taken. Progress is volitional and requires effort whether it's at the scale of a single individual or an entire global economy. If action is not taken the status quo prevails by inertia.
It might be cliche but I have to cite SpaceX and their reusable rocket cores as a classic example. Here is a video of a VTVL rocket called the DC-X created and flown in the early-mid 1990s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39cjZTCay24
We could have had reusable rockets by 2000, but unfortunately the project was cancelled. Instead we endured another 10 years of paper studies supposedly "proving" that reusable rockets couldn't be economical. These studies were funded and produced by people with a financial vested interest in disposable rockets.
Nuclear and renewable energy absolutely can replace fossil fuels. There is no physical reason this can't happen and with scale they could be cost competitive or perhaps even cheaper. It's not happening because nobody is pushing it hard enough to overcome the inertia of vested interests and... well... plain old inertia.
Edit: another way of thinking of this kind of thing is the common "has anyone called the police?" scenario. Imagine someone gets shot on the street. A crowd of people gathers around. Nobody does anything because surely someone has called the police, so the victim dies waiting for help.
I am under the impression that there has been much R&D towards fossil fuel alternatives. Perhaps there could have been more investment from the government side, but it is 2022, and a fossil fuel Toyota Corolla still has no electric alternative in terms of the utility per price.
But innovation and technology take time, and resources, and are not foolproof to produce an alternative to all of fossil fuel’s uses. But more importantly, low fossil fuel prices keep demand for alternatives low, and demand for fossil fuel high.
The requisite action that has to be taken is reduction of use of fossil fuels, regardless of progress in alternatives. Nature does not owe us the excessive use of fossil fuels in the mean time.
It’s already happening, but it’s occurring too slow. There were efforts by smaller groups to convert the US to renewable energy since the 1970s. Around that time, there was even an effort by the US government to address it, and the US Naval Observatory famously published a book series detailing different technologies, such as wave power.
Simultaneously, this is also when the oil companies first started funding so-called “think tanks”, which were lobbying fronts to stop climate regulation. They were tasked with infiltrating the universities, the media, and finally the government, where they helped draft policies to stop climate change legislation. This is all academic and many books have been written about these efforts.
> imo its much easier politically to remove CO2 or geoengineer planet when shtf
I’ve been following the geoengineering debate since the early 1990s, when there were only a few people talking about it.
There are no working scientists that I know of that think this will solve the problem in time, with the major issue being the interregnum between the time the new technology goes online and the time it takes for the climate to stabilize. People generally get upset when I tell them this, but it is widely believed that this time period will take at least a /century/, which means in many cases, people will either have to move into shelters or even underground, work only at night, or migrate by the hundreds of millions to safer areas, depopulating entire areas of the world to survive.
This is the known reality, and most people refuse to confront it head on. In other words, no matter what technological magic you work, it will take 100 years to see the result, during which time humanity will face a bottleneck event. When these facts have been brought to the attention of leaders, time and time again, the people presenting them have been dismissed as alarmists and sent packing. This is not the way to prepare for the future.
the problem is more subtle than it just being slow. its the distributed nature of it. everyone must reduce their consumption also its unclear by how much, as developed nations have achieved much using their 'carbon budgets' but developing nations are yet to. or should it just be an even percent reduction per capita, what about disproportionate consumption by income segments. now you start to see the tragedy of the commons angle of it? same decision tree applies at all levels including states & cities. in the end you need just a few bad actors (bolsenaro for instance) for the majority of reductions to be offsetted.
the only way I can even imagine it work out in my head is if there is some sort of global carbon pricing & the gains from that are strictly limited to preservation & geoengineering works. I know you dont think geoengineering is workable but imo humanity is good at focused efforts like moon landing & manhatten project. for instance today cost to pull a pound of co2 from air is $100-200 but if scaledup and more R&D (i.e.. more money thrown at it) it can potentially fall below $10. at that point it is at least thinkable in terms of global economy.
It's a positive feedback infinite loop: so hot we have to turn on the AC, which inturn contributes to global warming :(
Update: through comments here I learnt that this isn't as much of a problem anymore. No more guilt. Phew!
It was relatively trivial to switch refrigerants to something that didn't trash the ozone, compared to something like replacing fossil fuels. We could still use the same basic evaporative heat pumps for cooling, it was a minor change.
The CO2 released by electricity generation is a factor in climate change, though.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/2019-ozone-hole-is...