53° C (127.4° F) is extreme, even for Death Valley. We're rapidly approaching the point where larger and larger areas will be uninhabitable for humans, not just uncomfortable.
This. And we're not even in the hottest part of the year yet. I'd like to see the wet bulb temperatures too, but I'm guessing they're in the low 70's because of their low humidity. So it's technically possible for humans to survive that level of heat there given enough water and shade, though we'd probably see deaths in the eldest and youngest populations regardless.
But should you move the location much in any direction, and you'd have conditions which would require artificial cooling for any human to survive.
Recycling. The answer is recycling.
> That's not something I worry about
Oh, we know. There are plenty of people thoughtlessly devouring irreplaceable things, consuming the habitat of life's creatures, and farting up a literal shit storm of carbon waste. Such people make lousy neighbors and their unsustainable habits are going away, one way or another. "Yeah I don't care about that" isn't nearly the burn you might think it is.
The difference with fossil fuels, overfishing the oceans, etc. is as was mentioned earlier, the huge reservoir of stored energy we've been consuming without replenishing, extending beyond fish populations' ability to reproduce and the system's ability to absorb excess CO2.
We can be sustainable on a finite planet as long as we find the balance, which means dramatically changing the way we interact with our world: dramatically less fossil fuels converted to greenhouse gases and sustainable fisheries that protect breeding grounds (for example).
This is the fundamental failure of capitalism: there is no market for global climate change, because humans have trouble en masse thinking in terms longer than a human lifetime. We're living on credit when the bill due will be paid by our children or grandchildren. It's not immediate and we mistake that for not being urgent. "Costs will shift around" falls down when large areas of the planet reach 150+ degrees and aquatic populations collapse. Then you're not simply paying in dollars. You're paying in refugees, water rights, food rationing, war, disease, etc.
"Disease? What?" Yep, just think of all of those cities at higher altitudes. Most were established at altitudes where biting insects that carry diseases don't propagate. Heat up the planet, and all of those disease vectors move up with the expanded heat envelope.
Compound interest is a real monster, and far too many of us refuse to look beyond the current balance sheet, expecting to pay just what they see today, not what the bill will look like a year from now.
Burning up trapped carbon that slowly accumulated underneath for millions of years in a hundred years is definitely not anything like the above.
Truthfully, as a species, most of us require artificial augmentation in order to survive, which makes that artificial augmentation a poor benchmark for survivability.
And to be clear, no, I do not consider the use of fire, animal skins, etc. to be artificial augmentation. I do consider electricity and inter-continental supply lines to be artificial augmentation.
I can do 1/3 there, only because of years in boyscouts, and there's no way in hell I'd survive without artificial augmentation, regardless of where you put me, I'm simply not prepared for it, same as almost everyone else.
If you're not basically the primative technology guy from youtube, very slim odds you'd figure it out quickly enough.
Power outages are inevitable, and above a certain wet bulb temperature you can't hydrate or shade yourself out of overheating. It's a when you'll die, not if.
This is hyperbole. Unaided? Sure. But few in the developed world bear these conditions without access to air conditioning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
Remember, solar can't keep up with that due to the solar constant and cell efficiency dropping with extreme heat. Even fossil fuels can't track as well because they're governed by Carnot efficiency where the cold sink is largely affected by ambient temperatures.
The world is heating up, and there only needs to be a few days at 160 to kill all the cows, goats, chickens, start fires, and overwhelm the power grid. In the past few years we've seen the old and vulnerable die in European summers. As it gets hotter, the threshold for "vulnerable" expands to include larger and larger portions of the population.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist or is not going to be serious will not help anyone.
Basically habitability and stability isn't just a matter of "will this land burn you alive" but also access to cropland and rangeland, clean water, or avoiding negatives like increased hurricanes and wildfires, or simply floods and droughts. Migration out of increasingly harsh areas is expected to fuel global instability, across large regions of the world at a time, often in some of the most populous or contentious areas.
While the DoD's regional analyses aren't released to the public, there are similar studies in academia... https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://par.nsf.g... (that one does go into detailed definitions of habitability).
Basically the hot and humid areas of the world, like Southeast Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, are expected to spawn a lot of climate refugees.
I believe more detailed models are out there, but I haven't looked too deep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling?wprov=sfla1
Where it gets really problematic is places that used to have a moderate climate (vs always having been hot) so the people and structures have no adaptations for the sudden extreme heat.
- The simplest is just having thermal mass to average day and night temperature. As long as the night is cold enough you can just stay in a brick or clay building with thick walls, preferably painted white.
- If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use evaporative cooling, like Persian Yakhchāls [1].
- If you go high-tech, certain paints can cool surfaces down by a couple degrees (by radiating heat at frequencies that don't get absorbed by the atmosphere, thus breaking the equilibrium between heat absorption and heat emission).
Of course there is a point where those fail. Evaporative cooling is dependent on a low wet-bulb temperature and fails quickly in humid climate. Thermal mass needs temperature differences. Paints only buy you a couple degrees. In contrast an AC can be scaled to much higher temperatures.
It wouldn't take much humidity to turn those temperatures into wet-bulb of 100+ - fatal to humans. Expanding the area of this level of heat a couple of hundred miles in any direction would probably be enough.
I'm not sure who we is, and it wasn't clear anyone was talking about wet bulb temperatures. It's a comment on an article about Death Valley. At this point, you're just responding with things completely unrelated(behind paywalls).
Sure, it takes no technology to start a fire in an emergency, but that can't be done at a mass scale for non-emergency habitability without making the problem worse in the long run. AC can run from the very same energy that's heating up a dwelling, and power grids will need to be adjusted to incorporate more clean power sources.
...only in low humidity. Also, PV solar efficiency drops quite a bit as the temperature goes up. Carnot efficiency also drops noticeably as your cold sink, the ambient environment around you, heats up.
Are you going to provide AC to all the livestock and crops as well? Because they're kind of important in the long run too.
Temperature control for livestock applies to cold climates too, so kind of a moot point to mention one and not the other.
Running AC in hot areas does not necessitate making climate change worse. Heat pumps are very efficient in cold climates too, but it doesn't change the fact that much more energy is required due to the temperature deltas being dealt with.