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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see it. Literally billions of people live in tropical countries and somehow seem to manage fine. I myself live in a country that's almost entirely below the tropic of Cancer and while summer heat gets uncomfortable, it's far from unbearable. Let's put a brake on the hyperbole, at least so far, in the absence of concrete evidence of temperatures truly becoming unbearable for billions of people. If millions of migrants from tropical underdeveloped regions of the world are fleeing to the northern world, for now at least it's definitely not because of climate problems. Political troubles of all sorts are a much more immediately pressing issue.

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Your 40C doesn't equal my 40C when one country has high humidity, and the other has close to zero. That's precisely what the "wet bulb temperature" for humans is all about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

People ie in south Iran or maybe also Pakistan have very high temperatures and high humidity at the same time and they are still living there.

I can imagine it has big impact on productivity of anybody not under 24h AC, but there is still construction, roadwork, maintenance etc. work done. I guess a mix of adaptation from birth plus suffering through work thats just harder than elsewhere, but still possible.

Also schedule adaptations and building styles. It's not like high wet-bulb temperatures instantly kill you, it's the accumulation of heat in your body you can't get rid of fast enough. So you can go out for short times to move between buildings that either have AC or are built to stay cool enough (reflective roof and enough thermal mass to keep temperatures manageable during the day). Anything that requires you to be outside for extended times can just be done during colder parts of the day, or even in colder seasons.

As things get hotter places like Iran and Pakistan can adapt with more AC. The problems will be worse for places without electricity grids and a population that is too poor for alternative means like running AC from solar.

My house is currently getting remodeled in Austin where it has been over 100F the last few weeks. They don't have electricity, so not even fans. I asked them how they handle it and they said "you get used to it".

According to weather.com, the predicted humidity for when it will be 100F in Austin next, is only around 50-55%, giving a wet bulb temperature of around 30°C, which is below the 31°C from this study.

Further context: At that humidity level, Austin would reach the 35°C threshold at 110°F.

Our mornings are very humid, often +80%. It tends to burnout late afternoon making hotter evenings actually more bearable than cooler early mornings IMO.

The same amount of water in the air at a lower temperature is more humid than at a higher temperature. So as temperature rises, relative humidity tends to go down. Which is why air can feel so dry inside in winter.

This. I frequently go out into 40C around here (desert)--hazardous only if you run out of water. In high humidity it's deadly.

You may not see it because its not an issue today.

The entire point is that it will be.

I believe it's been demonstrated and accepted by the science community that there is "concrete evidence of temperatures" (short of waiting for it to happen) that this level of change can happen and is now likely unavoidable.

This world is full of hyperbole but this looming change is not an obvious exaggeration. We've seen it in action already and we know where its going.

Water and food scarcity in the Middle East, as a consequence of the changing climate and its reliance on the global food supply chain (wheat imports), is IMO one of the most important contributors of political uproar that lead to the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-f...

Edit: possibly a better source describing some of the correlations between extreme climate events and recent global food shortages, and its adverse impact on Middle East and Northern Africa.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-arab-spring-and...

Water shortages in the middle east are being caused because Turkey has dammed the rivers from their source to provide for their local agriculture.

It's a major dispute. Turkey basically took advantage of the wars to reneg on previous agreements to allow water flow.

A small percentage of billions is still a lot more people moving than most countries can handle — economically or socially, especially in that part of the world.

Don’t take for granted the status quo. It’s already yesterday, and the systems we’ve been depending on to tolerate and supply us with viral services haven’t been respected. What happens when the next famine hits India? What happens when South Africa has no water left? It might not be the spark on another regional conflict, but it certainly adds lots of potential for another conflict.

Exactly, areas nationwide can’t handle 0.5% of wealthish Californians moving and being simply able to afford stuff lol because that’s still 200,000 people, dispersed nearly randomly.

You are wrong, the maximum of average daily wet-bulb temperatures in the tropical region over the past 40 years has been 33°C. The highest ever recorded wet-bulb temperature is 36.3°C, for a brief period. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were the first to break the 35°C threshold.

With climate change the risk is that we will increasingly experience such temperatures.

I also live in a country close to the equator with high temps and humidity. No one basically goes outside all summer, it's hell here, homeless people and people doing manual labor simply die each summer. Many residents simply leave for the whole summer to go somewhere cooler. If this is your idea of "good," then I'm worried for you.

Temperatures are already unbearable in South Asia when there are heatwaves. It's estimated ~1500 people per 3 days of heat wave in Bangladesh. An increase in the average by 1 or 2 C could have very serious effects.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1603322

Climate change affects the conditions for growing crops: food crops that people live on, and cash crops that the economy rides on. Climate change also affects which regions get flooded more often and how intense these are. All of which are reasons to migrate. Those aspects do also feed political instability: e.g, the "Arab Spring" had started with protests against rising food prices.

Also, not having a viable substitute for fertilizer when trying to move away from the use of fertilizer. Sri Lanka has collapsed with widepread food shortages following such a policy.

Quoting the article "Pakistan, India reel under intense heat wave" from https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistan-india-re... : "More than a billion people are at risk of heat-related impacts in the region, scientists have warned, linking the early onset of an intense summer to climate change."

"Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths / An increase of 1°C could mean thousands of additional deaths on very hot days, according to a new study" - https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-temperatures...

"The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838 : "The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36)."

"Increases of extreme heat-humidity days endanger future populations living in China" - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac69fc/... : "Many urban population centers in eastern China are expected to frequently experience the extreme heat-humidity events featured by the TWmax well beyond the survivability threshold of 35 °C by the end of this century under SSP5-8.5 scenario"

Political troubles come from food and energy costs going to high or supply being disrupted.

That will almost always be long the weather in that specific area really shocks everyone, because the food and energy come from a different place where there was a weather shock.

Right now we are only seeing these extreme temperatures during brief heat waves. As warming continues though, these periods will become longer and more frequent.

Small changes in the median have big effects when you're looking far enough out along the tail.

That's at least part of why professional basketball is so black--there is a tiny difference in average height between white and black, small enough that on average you won't notice it at all. At the very end of the tail, though, it has a big effect.

> Let's put a brake on the hyperbole, at least so far, in the absence of concrete evidence of temperatures truly becoming unbearable for billions of people.

Are you saying we should literally wait for billions of people to die?

I hope this was satire.

I'm not sure what "concrete evidence" means in this case other than "wait and see"

We already have Venus as concrete evidence of how bad the greenhouse effect can be.

You really stomped on the hyperbole brakes there…

I think they're saying it is not hyperbole and people are actively down playing the harm that is to come to protect profits

I'm just not sure what more research the poster is implying other than "let's wait and see if people die"

I agree, there's a ton of research at this point and the people saying otherwise are just trying to obfuscate reality to protect themselves and the way they do things

Exactly, it's an avoidance tactic. We already know and there is still huge consensus, but the problem is so huge and difficult and requires so much sacrifice that everyone is just like "welll maybe we should wait for a bit and see what happens, just to check..."

I know it's trite but, don't look up

It's part of the scientific rule that says that speculating about the possibility of something happening before it has already happened is just fearmongering i.e. "it always worked perfectly until it didn't", "don't worry, I haven't fallen yet..." or "these safeguards are just slowing us down."

I'm a scientist, I never learned that rule nor have I heard any other scientist mention it. Where does that come from?

We literally try to build models to make predictions, that claim is nonsense

I thought it was sarcasm, or more exactly how some people say science should be when they do not agree with reality.

Of course, the whole point of science is to make predictions. Kind of like “global warming will increase the probability of heat waves significantly in the near future” they were saying 10 years ago.

That's definitely possible, but with statements I've seen from people in earnest it's quite hard to tell

So you expect, without exaggeration (aka hyperbole), 2 billion deaths or more from heat effects? If you believe that, I can see the claim that “billions of deaths” is not hyperbolic.

Yes, the changes the planet is going through are going to be catastrophic for humans and other current forms of life

Your fears are unfounded and overblown.

Literally over 95% of the people who study the issue say that you're wrong

Are you a flat earther too? Might as well be if you're trying to maximize the volume of evidence you're ignoring

The fear of billions of people dying directly from global warming is overblown and sensationalized in the media.

How many people live in India alone?

About 1.3B

This is a conspiracy theory, scientific consensus is that it will have devastating effects

Sure but not billions of people dying from global warming or increase in surface temperature.

There are literally billions of people living in climates that are already humid and hot. Those are the areas that will be hit the hardest, first. Yea there will be migrants and some people with wealth will likely be okay, but there are billions who won't be. That is the point

That might be the point but it’s not founded in science. “billions” is plural. The consensus is that it will be catastrophic for low millions at most. Unless you change the definition to be “people inconvenienced by higher pricing, required diet changes, and/or being required to move”.

Low millions? Where are all of the people in the hot areas of India, China, Africa, and the middle east going to go? How are they going to migrate? Do they have money? Will it be on foot? Will they have resources for the journey?

In your worst case scenario, what are the global TFR, life expectancy and annual population growth rate etc etc?

It seems to me that you don't take these variables into consideration and just assume they would remain constant or follow their historical trend into the future which needless to say is shortsighted to say the least.

Does any of that prevent people from dying in weather that is too hot and humid for humans? If not, I don't see how it's relevant

Like what does population growth have to do with people dying from heat? Okay so the population is growing, that didn't stop the extra deaths from happening.

Why does life expectancy matter? Obviously that's going to change rapidly in these circumstances, but again, still not changing the number of deaths

Why do you think they need to move? Air conditioning will just move from luxury to necessity like it is in many places already.

From heat effects and their knock-on effects, yes. Famines, refugee crises, water shortages. Diseases exacerbated by all of the former. Wars and civil wars fought over all of the former. What William Gibson called the Jackpot.

Plus if it does happen we can settle them in the newly fertile Polar regions :-)

Let's say only 1% of the global population lives on the cusp of unbearable temperatures.

That's 80 million people. That's more than 10 times the number of Syrian refugees.

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