Heat Wave and Blackout Would Send Half of Phoenix to E.R., Study Says

I suspect most of the worst climate impacts in the coming years will be from issues much like this, with an interplay of factors. We've built a society with many complex systems, and the assumptions those systems were built on (e.g intensity and duration of heat waves) will no longer be valid. I'm skeptical we'll be able to adapt such large-scale systems to the increasingly rapid changes induced by climate change.

P.S: At 100% humidity in shade with unlimited drinking water, a human will die in about 2 hours at 35°C (95°F). The combination of heat and humidity is called the heat index, and those temperatures had already been seen in Iran 3 years ago, when this paper was written: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-potentially-fatal-combinations...

Next, from a methods perspective, while a single-value estimate is convenient, a distribution, in this scenario, would be much more useful to understand the range of possible deaths and their associated probabilities.

As for the rest of the author's own critiques, I'll lay them out here. One of the most important one is that the population's behavior and government responses are not taken into account. There is, of course, debate as to how much this affects the prediction.

> Our estimates do not account for individuals’ behavioral adaptations or the actions of first responders during such a severe heat crisis. In reality, if a blackout event was regionally localized, many individuals would be able to leave their homes and travel to cooler locations. We also do not account for potential governmental responses to a concurrent heat wave and blackout, such as evacuation of the most vulnerable to heat illness or the deployment of mobile power generators for cooling centers. Other important sources of uncertainty in our analysis include (1) the degree to which measures of relative risk based on outdoor temperatures are reflective of indoor heat exposures, (2) uncertainties in the precision of the ambient and indoor temperature models used for the study, (3) uncertainties in behaviors and locations of individuals throughout the day and hence their daily IETs, and (4) uncertainties in the exposure-response functions in the applied epidemiology studies (including the changing nature of population susceptibility with a period of prolonged heat exposure).

Coping strategies:

* drive a couple hours North and camp in the mountains. 3.5F drop/1000 ft elevation. Flagstaff’s highs in summer are 25F cooler than Phoenix and is a two hour drive away. (You do have at least one gasoline car that will work during an outage, don’t you?)

* swimming pools/water parks/water sprinklers/tepid baths…Salt River 40 minutes drive away. Very low humidity (i.e. Phoenix heatwave) + tepid water + cotton clothing + air drying with any breeze = very cool.

* free-standing evaporative coolers for outdoor sleeping. A 2kWh lithium battery would power a 90W free-standing (4 ft high) evaporative cooler for 20+ hours and blow a continuous 70 degree directable breeze during a 95F (and thus a very low humidity) night. A gas-powered generator would handle a few coolers simultaneously and continuously for not much gasoline. Maybe require such coolers and generators/batteries for any facility housing elderly and other vulnerable. Such coolers are about $200 US. Requires refilling with water every two-three hours, but larger units can be hooked up with a hose to public water utilities, and a float valve in the unit lets them run without intervention.

* adobe buildings

* shade, shade, shade (mad dogs and Englishmen…)

It is worthwhile to highlight the dangers from heat events (recent event in Chicago killed hundreds) and plan mitigation strategies, but making scary predictions outside the realms of common sense is counterproductive. Creative adaptation must be modeled too, for the actual forecasted impacts to be accepted as credible.

On one level its goal is to entertain but its also designed to educate about the likelihood and consequences of the carbon climate crisis causing crazy weather and ecosystem collapse. Especially if we dont Go Big soon enough.

It was 108.

As he said this, we were at a stop light next to a Speedy Oil Change facility. Shop doors rolled open, guys in long pants, thick shirts, changing oil and rotating tires.

People that don't work physically underestimate what the human body can do.

One group (representing fossil fuel-linked economies) doesn't want to admit that adaptation is necessary, as that entails accepting that the scientific understanding of our current climate trajectory is robust, and another group (representing politically-minded climate activists) seems to think accepting the necessity of adaptation means 'giving up' on stabilizing the climate and getting off fossil fuels.

Neither of these are rational viewpoints - the tipping point for the climate transition has come and gone, and even an immediate cessation of fossil fuel use would still entail 100+ years of warming at rates comparable to the past 40 years (likely greater) due to the lag in the system (ocean response times) as well as to permafrost thaw. Claiming this isn't the case is really just another kind of denialism.

On top of that, existing fossil fuel infrastructure and production appears set to continue for the next 30 years at current rates (just look at all the new fossil-fuel burning cars, trucks, jets, etc. coming off the production lines each year, or at the business model projections of all the major fossil fuel producers) and despite the political posturing of some politicians in the USA and other fossil fuel producers, there's no real interest in replacing fossil fuels with renewables on an accelerated timeline, except in those countries that have to import all their fossil fuels from abroad, and even there progress is fairly slow.

The only response that makes any sense is a massive nationwide infrastructure development project designed to mitigate heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods, extreme storms and seawater incursion.