Let's also not forget that the Indian subcontinent will be too hot to feasibly live in in the next 50 to 100 years. As someone who came from there, there is no way I'd go back to live in India given that fact alone, not to even mention any others.
While I understand that the climate change will hit India hard, (I witnessed it this summer personally), I still think we should not be quick to jump to assuming the destitution of millions as if it was a simple matter of statistics.
I have faith in science, human resilience and ingenuity and I tend to believe that the future doesn't have to be so grim and humans will find a way.
Unfortunately, if humanity wants to prevent that outcome, we would have to start doing massive changes now.
Relying on "humanity will find a way to work around in 30 years" is foolish, simply because when the expected progress doesn't happen in this time frame, humanity in 30 years is going to have to commit much more effort and resources than if current humanity would start now.
It's a crappy solution for many different reasons but it does seem to be the direction we're heading.
Afaik, for healthy humans, staying outside > 35 C (not 36 C) for even long durations is physiologically impossible. Even healthy humans have trouble from 31 C (87.8 F).
I don't have access to historic wet bulb data, but Houston appears to be in the mid-70s[1].
Places which have wet bulb temps > 35 C essentially shut down outside. You can use air conditioning indoors, but unless you have a Fremen-esque suit for outdoor workers, you can kiss outdoor activity goodbye in the daytime.
In reality this mean the place essentially shuts down during the day. E.g. in Pakistan last year[2]. Being interested in history, I'm particularly mindful many historians speculate that climate change was responsible for ending the earliest known civilization in this area[3].
[1] http://cms.ashrae.biz/weatherdata/STATIONS/722430_p.pdf
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
[3] https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/climate-change-...
It's the wealth of Houston that makes this possible. Pakistan and India will adapt it as soon as they're wealthy enough. It'll come at a lower wealth point than Houston because their problem is more severe than Houston's.
I think it's a little different. Houston by your account struggles in the afternoons today -- similar to parts of Spain and Portugal, but it's only at peak wet bulb ~75..76 F going by ASHRAE[1] data. Wet bulb 88 F is much worse, and 95 F is really when the human body gives up.
Again, this is wet bulb, not air temperature.
But if anyone has peak wet bulb data for major US cities, please share! It'd be an awesome resource.
[1] American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, https://www.ashrae.org/
Two things stand out from the article you shared.
> it is an agricultural hub fed by irrigation canals.
John Jacob used his civil engineering skills to build the Begaree canal which made this possible. It was an arid semi-desert landscape before that for centuries.
> The region sits on the Tropic of Cancer, meaning the sun is close to overhead during the summer.
So do Bikaner, Agra, Aligadh, Lucknow etc along with half of India, but they've never had a wet-bulb scenario in history like Jacobabad had. I will search for the data, but so far nothing comes up.
I understand the threat of climate change is real , but I would love to see more data that supports this wet bulb theory in the subcontinent.
E.g. the number of Indian cities inching towards high 40s (Celsius) is climbing. Heck, New Delhi this year saw 49 C air temps, which was unheard of. But re wet bulb temps, the trend is troubling[1].
Plenty of Indian cities are crossing wet bulb > 31 C, which puts the elderly and infirm at risk when they're outside. Yes -- going from here to > 35 C is a big leap, but if you say it cannot happen that's ... a "hope for the best" mindset.
Who knows, nothing might come out of it, but if the climate change models are correct, there's more pain ahead.
Let's take a midpoint scenario between 'absolute best' and 'absolute worst' and assume summer wet bulbs increase slightly over time, not enough to breach 35 C. That's still temps in the 31...34 C range in major Indian cities, that basically makes it hell for the elderly and infirm. What are the social costs of that? Bear in mind, despite India's progress, it still has a fair number of people with limited means. And the number of elderly in India will grow over time as its "youth bulge" tapers off.
It's also well suited for solar power, and the price of solar power has dropped 90% per decade for the last 5 decades, and that trend looks to continue.
Getting air conditioning to most Indians is a difficult problem, but it's an easier problem than solving climate change or accommodating 1.3 billion climate refugees.
1: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
The next decade and a half, with the rise of authoritarianism and populism, and the clear and miserable failure of the Grand Experiment — that openness and trade would bring liberal democracy to authoritarian states like RUS and CCP — merely make it even more obvious that governance is forked, and not in a good way.
Overall, it looks like the technology trend is from 1) barely possible, to 2) scaled up and dirty, to 3) scaled up, efficient, clean, and sustainable. We're sort of moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3.
But, can we get there in time? The disaster is already upon us, faster than expected, and there are a number of tipping points and feedback loops just starting to come into play (e.g., lower reflectance at the poles, melting permafrost set to release gigatons of stored methane which is ~22x more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, etc.).
The politics are obviously decades behind where they need to be, and the VC money is only beginning to see the opportunity in clean energy after focusing for decades on worthless internet trends instead of real hard innovation. Will it still be enough for some breakthrough as the mountain we must climb becomes even steeper?
I agree a lot of these scenarios are 'doomsday', but the risk is real and hard to plan for / budget.
You're effectively fighting history (Indus Valley and its history with climate change), and human biology -- you cannot be outside when wet bulb > 35 C even if you're fully healthy. For older / less-well people, > wet bulb 31 C can be a problem. And India will be very middle-aged by 2040 with an increasing older population.
You're also fighting greed. Bangalore was told, repeatedly, that building apartments in flood plains wasn't smart. The message was ignored. Heck, even after the recent floods, it's unlikely this policy will change. India has a construction boom right now -- this is happening elsewhere too.
Managing these within budgetary constraints and the large population impacted will be challenging. It's not doomsday by any means -- e.g. the Konkan coast will probably be fine. But what happens when Vidarbha (already relatively poor and home to extremely cruel summers) gets worse -- can we stop people from migrating en masse? How will you stop millions of people internally migrating in a country with no border controls?
How this gets worse: Forget about en masse migrations. That's doomsday you say. Okay. But even a small uptick in migration figures will have massive consequences for already-overstretched Indian cities.
> I have faith in science, human resilience and ingenuity and I tend to believe that the future doesn't have to be so grim and humans will find a way.
Faith is great, but India hasn't invested in good urban planning or healthcare (the scenes in small-town India in early 2021 come to mind). To be fair, many other countries haven't either.
So the pessimist in me says that a Katrina-style or 2022 Pakistan-style floods event can be especially traumatic for such countries.
[0] https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-made-...
I’m very much starting to think we may, but I’m at least hoping they may be able to save themselves from catastrophe via nuclear energy & engineering.
I'm not seeing India fielding the cost. Those already well-off would manage anyway... But the rest, which is the majority, is the problem.
(And as other countries are also hit, they don't go much for charity or building other's infrastructure, it's "every man/country for himself").
To put it simply: when things go to shit is not the time when new infrastructures are built.
A lot depends on the rate at which migrants arrive, and where they go. If the migration is towards northern Asia, spread out over 100 years, with only a few tens of thousands arriving each day, Russia will probably be able to manufacture bullets in sufficient quantity. If 1.5 billion Indians descend all at once, nothing will be able to stop them.
These are extreme outcomes. There are so many other possibilities that could be negotiated. Perhaps India will gain economic leverage through exporting solar power, and be able to strike a deal to resettle some of its migrant population elsewhere.
I understand temperatures are already within a few degrees of the point that proteins in rice and wheat pollens get denatured (cooked, effectively).
Maybe new heat-tolerant strains have been developed since I looked, but I doubt much could withstand 55 celsius throughout flowering.
You can already see this happening in parts of Africa.
That's the current best estimate for warming in the time period you are suggesting.
India has a bigger problem with feeding it's population which is likely to be the biggest in the world by that point.
To suggest to the most populated place in the world in 2050 will have no people is hyperbolic.
The gates foundation has the best estimates on this topic and their estimates also suggest growth in the region.
While the mean temperature rises, e.g. by 1 centigrade, you have to account for variance increasing too.
India might become unlivable not because the mean temperature rises, but because extreme, deadly events will become standard during certain periods of the year.
Get a heat pump or an air conditioner and move on.
Yes, electrification is a solved problem. Look how quickly the US electrified rural America, and that’s when it was a new concept. For a more recent example of using known technology, look at how quickly China electrified from the 80s-00s.
We can't air condition the crops and our animal stock. We probably can't even air condition all the humans in every location. Texas can barely keep it's grid going right now.
I appreciate not everything grows in hot conditions, and there is a point where nothing will grow, but i would assume india would still be in the range where some things will grow, even if it sucks for humans.
We already see this too, depending on whether or not we choose to blame climate change there have been a number of weather events impacting the supply and price of various farmed goods. Lettuce became somewhat of a luxury commodity in Australia due to recent flooding, for just one example. That sort of thing will become more frequent.
Anyway, my two examples were Boston and Phoenix, which are on more stable major grids.
You are trying to change the temperature in an insulated apartment-sized block of space in an effectively infinite ambient environment which is either 0 or 110, while one or more 100W heaters is moving around in it. There's conduction and radiation and convection, all helping out or hindering.
People don’t live in perfectly insulated boxes and even the best insulation that is actually livable (doesn’t suffocate you) will let through more than the 10MJ a person gives off through the course of the day. For context, a plug-in space heater is 1500 watts and that struggles to maintain the heat in a well-insulated 300 sq ft shop when it’s under 40F.
Humans shouldn’t be living in the cold if you care about energy consumption. It’s just so normalized and we figured out how to burn wood so long ago that nobody thinks twice about it.
You are agreeing with it not on the merits but on the premises.