Deadly heat threatens the well-being of 1B people in India
wired.com
wired.com
The USA is like the UK dialled up another notch. It's of course very US-centric, as you would expect.
The overwhelming majority of them don't even publish every month, let alone every quarter. They're also categorized and prioritized. E.g., a vuln in a piece of software I or a client uses is going to be weighted differently to say a recipe from my wife's blog.
As organized as some aspects of my workflow are, there's areas of my personal life that are quite shambolic.
Some other things that changed my working life:
* Putting a numbered label on all of my several hundred cables that relates to a spreadsheet with connectors, length, colour, where I bought it from (with a URL for fast replacement), warranty period, any notes (condition, suggesting not to buy another or that it needs re-terminating).
* A 'flexible' area of my home office where it isn't my desk, but a usually empty space where I can setup a secondary workspace for myself or others with smaller items. It's always torn down after use so that it can be anything it needs to be on a given day. Even having the ability to get a change of scenery when working from home feels much better mentally than staring at a wall or one of my monitors most of the time.
* Keeping a digital zettelkasten and also treating it as a knowledgebase. I'm very good at having ideas, but appalling at retaining them. Everything reasonably compelling gets written down, that includes solutions to problems that require some degree of complexity, or alternative solutions that may work better for the next time the problem emerges for me or someone else. These little cards are nice to provide others with an actionable and documented solution.
* The "Johnny Decimal" system has been great for digital file management.
As a disclaimer, I was diagnosed with ADHD in the '90s, and if I wasn't somewhat anal over my workflow then very little would happen, if anything.
The human element:
* My closet organization is borderline nil. There's a system emerging if I can stick to it, but we don't talk about the 'laundry chair' in the company of others (heh, hello).
* Organizing food and eating things before the best-before can be challenging at times. I can do a lot better with this. I saw a few compelling FOSS options for this, but I'd have to check my zettelkasten to figure out the names.
* I struggle with responding to IMs. I wish I could 'mark for follow-up' or simply 'mark as unread' on them. I love email from an organizational perspective, but most folks don't like email (no surprise there).
Continuing conflict isn't new, especially if it's not local. Warzones are dangerous, and if none of the sides is interested in protecting reporters, and no side has an affiliated and large contigent of independent risk-taking reporters, there's just not going to be much coverage. If just being an independent reporter is a large risk, also getting close to combat is less likely.
At that time I had visited many different countries in Asia (Cambodia is the only one that could compete with India in terms of raw heat), but to this day I will never forget that feeling of just rapid heat acceleration in such early morning hours.
Imagine what that does to the environment "behind the scenes".
Right now, I am in Norway (northernmost part of Western Norway) and it will be May in two days. Last night, we had a snowstorm so strong all the mountains in the area got covered in snow. The Winter itself was average, with hardly any cold periods except for a month of "expected" Winter.
I don't know how anyone plans to address global warming, I really don't, but I know for a fact that weather 20 years ago was much different to what it is now. Where I grew up - Winters used to be -30C (-22F) for 3 months straight and Spring would kick in. For the last 10 years or so, in many places in Eastern Europe - a Winter consists of a little cold a bit of damp weather, that's it.
Wet bulb temperature measures heat and humidity at the same time.
It's the lowest temperature that can be achieved through evaporative cooling, measured using a thermometer covered in a water-soaked cloth to simulate the cooling effect of evaporation on the surrounding air.
If the wet bulb temperature stays above body temperature for a long time, you will die since there's no way to cool off.
The book speculates that even when tens of millions of Indians die from the heat, that won't be enough to get nations and corporations to fix the problem.
In his narrative, the only solution is a global clandestine black-ops campaign of sabotage and assassination to target the powerful individuals blocking progress to protect their own wealth.
This narrative sounds familiar.
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regime, noun
1) a regular pattern of doing something
2) a method of rule or management
3) a system of principles, rules, or regulations
4) a governmental or social system
It was suffocating - I couldn't wait to go out for a walk that single-digit Celsius rainy day
They are an existing emerging technology. White paint helps somewhat but doesn’t work well in the IR. The current best performing film is made by 3M: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/energy-conservation-us/applicati...
Mirrors on every roof? Polished steel? Brick or concrete walls? At a city level, low tech could still make a difference.
I wonder if there's an low-cost additive that could give these existing products high emissivity in the atmospheric IR window?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeZDrFqJcj8
https://www.panachegreen.com/high-sri-coatings/cool-tops-pre...
>Usually low cost options have to be replaced so quickly to actually have an impact that they are actually more expensive.
I don't think that's what's happening here. You're comparing a product from 3M that's at the "fill out this form for a pilot project and we'll contact you" phase, whereas the Indian products can be bought by the bucketful, today.
Some of these coatings have real-world service lifetimes of 5-8 years.
How does this compare to your preferred 3M film?
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/passive-radi... Describes the arpa-e funding
https://www.startribune.com/can-a-new-3m-technology-help-cli...
Shows the fruits of the research already reducing energy usage by 10% for supermarkets in a cold climate…
Anyway, exciting future!
A real life example: think of your experience with a hot stone/glass surface and a hot steel surface. It’s much harder to tell the steel is hot until you touch it due to how it emits radiative heat.
>But government authorities have underestimated the danger, the study found. Officials rely on a climate vulnerability assessment, designed by India’s Department of Science and Technology, that indicates a smaller percentage of the country faces high risk from climate change than the new findings suggest
The Indian state's persistent denial of science and criticism will continue to cost Indians their lives. It happened during COVID and will happen again in years to come.
There is a worse problem here - heat causes electric power demand to rise. No gigawatt-scale power grid anywhere on the planet has supplied increased demand through renewables. What will happen is simple - coal and gas output will increase and this is an unfortunate but vicious cycle. Carbon emissions will only make the problem worse in the short term.
I expect that, for India, the solution will be to build a thousand megawatt-scale power grids, or, more likely, millions of sub-kilowatt-scale power grids.
Connect a solar panel to a battery and an AC unit, and you have a standalone AC unit that works whenever there’s lots of sun, and in India that correlates reasonably well to ‘whenever it’s scorching hot’.
With solar already cheaper to build than running _existing_ coal plants in India (https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/report-its-now-ch...), I expect that to even be economical, even if such standalone units waste energy if there’s sun but not need for AC.
I regularly point out that those "prices" of renewable energy are predicated on a VERY important assumption - that the rest of the grid exists to deliver power when the renewable generators are not running. That has a cost and it not currently attributed to the source of the problem - the renewable generators. Rather, you and i pay that price.
Perhaps this isn't an issue for the Gov. India losing 100-300 million people due to some catastrophic event would probably not even be noticed since it will be the poorest part of the population that will suffer the consequences.The only possibilities for salvation I can see is clean, renewable, endless energy or mass human migration to more temperate regions of the world.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/focus-fusion-is-the-hottest-id...
Remember when you take Carbon emissions per Capita, India is no where near China or US. So people pissing on India should know better, but they will any way because they an axe to grind.
At least the fact that the heat/dryness lead to suicide is true, although I can't verify if they would give up after hearing the weather predictions or after their crops failed:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=india+hot+weather+farmer+suicides&...
Well this was a morbid comment...
Indian state is one of the most useful for science and hence pursue vegetarianism and concepts like Life.
If you want perhaps start by yourself and reduce your carbon footprint.
But it would? It wouldn't solve the problem, but it would be part of not making it worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Like how Texas has lots of heat waves that cause issues, but there was far more havoc and death during that cold snap.
Mentioning facts like that would violate the narrative.
This is an unpopular fact to state for obvious reasons.
Most people are worried about "the end of the world" when they should be worried about way more practical things which are much more likely.
Until the zillions of mosquitos ignite in one big dust explosion(by lightning, or whatever), and thereby produce a new Tunguska event.
Or 'Life finds a way.' (c.f. Jurassic Park) and some old pestilence thaws up and multiplies.
This is yet again a direct consequence of technology advances and government meddling that has created a down-the-line humanitarian crisis by propping up unsustainable behavior.
We will sadly have either a billion dead bodies, or the rest of the world incurring the cost to house an extra billion.
Was the British Empire was too lenient to their subjects?
India's population being what it is, is not surprising.
Minor typo: but uninhabitable. Relevant simpsons clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8mD2hsxrhQ
We should take care of the planet. We all live on it and catastrophic heat waves and extreme weather are not polite and do not respect the thick black lines we've drawn on maps.
For avoidance of doubt, I am absolutely saying that if those of us who are citizens or residents of the United States, European Union (with or without the United Kingdom), Australia, Canada, Japan, and anywhere else anyone might think of needs to take a hit to our net incomes and economic circumstances in order to keep the planet habitable, I am all for it.
China will spend 400 billion to build at least 150 new nuclear plants https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
China currently has 24 nuclear power plants under active construction, with a combined power output of 26 gigawatts https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202304/27/WS6449c703a310b605...
In addition, one in five solar panels installed worldwide last year were mounted on a Chinese roof, providing locally distributed power that supplements the grid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-03-27/why-china...
China now dominates the world in solar power production https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...
This year, China has further widened the gap in renewable usage https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-widens-ren...
This is what can be achieved when a country directs its resources towards infrastructure projects instead of imperialism.
Again: if India were to tick all the boxes, what are the projected figures on mitigating the existing problem versus projected worsening of the problem in the future if they don't?
Are a significant number of them going to be able to afford the power generated? Are a significant number of them going to be able to afford the air conditioning units?
How much does this help the problem of failed crops in terms of reversing climate change?
India has 1.8m homeless people. Socioeconomics are going to play a part in this too, and the poor always cop for these problems the worst.
Whichever way you cut it, this seems to be a huge humanitarian crisis brewing.
Emissions are largely driven by people living in western countries who use stupendous amounts of energy and for whom the goods countries like India manufacture. The west moved much of its industry to the Global South, but the emissions from that industry are driven by demand that comes from western consumers. Seems to me that we need to look at this problem holistically, and all countries should be putting in at least as much effort as China to transition off fossil fuel usage.
Given that this isn't actually happening, I agree that we're likely to see a massive humanitarian crisis in India. As these events become more frequent and affect increasing number of countries we'll see refugee crises, wars, and likely collapse of the global civilization. That's the most likely scenario given the track we're currently on.
The article states "Even as power plants burned more coal to provide the power needed to keep people cool, the country experienced a nationwide electricity shortage.", so AC units aren't going to solve the problem.
Maybe even providing heat proof shelters (like bus stops etc) every x km may help immediately. Maybe.
How about the materials required? The scale of manufacturing? The impact of the manufacturing on the environment? The impact of shipping and installing them on the environment?
It would sooner make sense to create underground cities, but that's no small endeavour.
> How about the materials required? The scale of manufacturing? The impact of the manufacturing on the environment? The impact of shipping and installing them on the environment?
So we don't have the competence or resources to directly help people with heat waves but we have the competence & resources for a bigger than Manhattan Project scale effort for climactic scale projects such as carbon capture & moving humanity underground?
Perhaps there's some already invented devices which can cool a dwelling?
... heck I read all the stuff written here and am thinking now 'someone may have patents for that...' (-;