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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

120°F = 48.88°C

48 degrees - the temperature record for Europe set in Greece in 1977 at least until any current records are confirmed.

It’s worth reminding this is at midnight. Many parts of the worlds are hitting 48 and 50+ temperatures these days.

Kerala had 50 degrees C a few years ago. Kerala! the state they call "God's own country" in tourism ads. It is anyway a hot state, being right down south in India, but 50 was crazy. Then what will hell be like, I wonder.

Edit: And Kerala also had abnormally disastrous floods around the same period, +/- a few years.

Some people got leptospirosis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptospirosis

>It is estimated that one million severe cases of leptospirosis in humans occur every year, causing about 58,900 deaths.[11] The disease is most common in tropical areas of the world but may occur anywhere.[7] Outbreaks may arise after heavy rainfall.[7]

Pakistan recorded 54°C several times over the past few years.

Shit.

I heard from someone who had been there, that Gulf countries such as Dubai routinely touch 50 or more.

We are doomed, aren't we?

Humanity survived ice age(s) with much less technology. It’s going to take much more than that.

A couple of problems:

1. We no longer have access to easy to mine resources, which is also how we know that there weren't any really advanced civilizations prior us.

2. A lot of knowledge has been lost on how to do the incremental steps between ice age to here.

3. Lots of people will die.

4. We have very little genetic diversity as a consequence of the previous ice-ages, and we haven't actually recovered.

1.) It's easier to contain or add energy that remove it from a system

2.) The ice ages occured more gradually so didn't disrupt food systems as much

3.) Ice age wood is great for instrument making so we got sweet string instruments out of it

4.) Most hominems died in the last ice age. It's speculated that all non homosapien species were wiped out during or due to the ice age.

So far we mostly used technology to fuck things up.

Especially Tinder and Grindr.

I think you're making the mistake of equating 'humanity' with 'the vast majority of people' rather than 'human survivors in a specific geographic zone', as well as underestimating the speed of change relative to historical fluctuations.

Perhaps, but I'm not exactly looking forward to a future where surviving is the main objective.

If there were only 1 million people alive in 2030, you could reasonably say humanity had "survived", but also say that most people today in 2023 are "doomed". The prognosis is certainly much better than that, but "humanity survived" is a very low bar.

We’re one tipping point away from really bad days.

I remember hearing this 20 years ago, and we've certainly hit at least one tipping point since then, no?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but when someone predicts a calamity for decades, they don't get credit when they happen to be right the 500th time.

The highest temperature ever recorded was in Death Valley, in 1913. [1] Hence the reason for this weird 'at midnight' metric. It also holds another pretty neat record of having 43 days with temperature over 120 each day. That was in 1917. The planet's definitely warming up, but seeing every single freak weather occurrence, let alone in an area uniquely geographically situated for such, as a 'sign' of the end times isn't going to serve much purpose.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley

The purpose is people are swayed by compelling anecdotes, not data. These types of anecdotes will continue to get pubished for the foreseeable future partially for political purposes, partly because data is dry and these types of things are compelling.

>> The purpose is people are swayed by compelling anecdotes, not data.

The purpose is people are swayed by fear and these anecdotes create fear. As much as I want us to do much more to tackle climate change, scaring ordinary people whose individual actions don't count for much is simply the media trying to make money. It's getting tired and annoying.

Everyone being afraid is WAY better than people being convinced climate change is a non-issue.

But it's those same ordinary people who have to change their voting patterns to do something against climate change. What if creating fear is the only way to sway them towards saving most of humanity?

> A higher reading of 134F, or 56.6C a century earlier, also in Death Valley, is disputed. It is believed by some modern weather experts to have been erroneous, along with several other searing temperatures recorded that summer.

> According to a 2016 analysis from weather historian Christopher Burt, other temperatures in the region recorded in 1913 do not corroborate the Death Valley reading

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53788018

Of more interest is how high the daily low. Being in a desert area, there are large temperature swings between the lows and highs. Midnight shouldn't be the low -- that would be about the hours before dawn. Basically, we're looking at a situation where the temperature had not cooled off enough during the night before the sun starts baking things again.

Metro Phoenix where I live, has been having lows in the mid-90s these past couple weeks. Part of that is the heat island effect from all the asphalt, concrete, but it means even after the sun is down, we are having 100+ degree temperatures here during the evenings.

Depends on who you mean by “we”. Air conditioning and insulation can protect you from high temperatures when you’re inside. Solar and storage can provide the electricity to power it.

The problem is it’s going to take decades at best to get that tech into the hands of everyone who needs it in many parts of the world. And that’s assuming economic development and international cooperation go the right way to make that happen (which seems doubtful).

Realistically, the world will contain many millions of people whose lives are improving dramatically even as millions of others are suffering in new ways. Same as it ever was.

Human beings are just one species in the many ecosystems that make up the planet's biosphere. We cannot exist without those other species. Our understanding of the interconnections is extremely poor (see: "Half Earth" by E.O. Wilson). We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.

Let me reiterate: If these other forms of life go extinct, homo sapiens will go extinct. What point is there in air conditioning if agricultural yields plummet over a huge portion of the earth's surface?

Consider birds for a moment, because they are familiar to most people and widespread. Bird populations have decline by a third during my father's lifetime. This is a multi-factor problem, but we know climate change and sea level rise leads to excess migratory bird mortality.

For more, see: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393608908

> We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.

The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.

I don't say that to discredit concerns about environmental change, its impact on future populations, or its near term impact on existing individuals. All I'm saying is that arguments based on existential threats are not persuasive to me and they tend to be used to assert power over others than to mitigate risk or improve the lives of people on the earth today.

> The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.

But throughout all of human history, there hasn't been a change in climate as drastic as what is starting now. So why does our ancestors surviving in a variety of climates make it likely that we'll adapt to the destruction of our environment due to rapid climate change?

It's not humans that need to adapt, right? It's all the other species we depend on. Their adaptation will not necessarily make our adaptation easier. We cannot manufacture a habitable environment for ourselves ex nihilo.

For example, fungal infections are on the rise because fungi prefer warmer temperatures. Mammalian species like bats, that hibernate, are the canaries in the coal-mine, succumbing to these infections before other mammalian species. We are engendering countless such changes in the adaptive strategies of other species. It will not end well for us if we can't get greenhouse gas emissions down quickly.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1188101048/blight-warns-of-th...

> Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates

The sad truth is that we are even unable to stop a fucking war created by a handful of beyond repair insane people. War that has been releasing huge amounts of heath and energy in the northern hemisphere for more than 500 days of bombing everything at sight. 500 days that curiously came with top temperatures never registered before

Climate is just a direct representation of energy movements on the atmosphere. If we add a lot of energy to the system, the logical expectations would be that, at some point, the weather will lose its buffer function and start including this fact somehow. I'm still expecting somebody addressing this issue seriously.

There was a Radiolab podcast two weeks ago that covered how tree ring width patterns could be decoded to match hurricane season intensity and this was matched to sun spot activity. They pinpoint a lull that allowed sugar to become a cash crop in Caribbean, allow chattel slavery and later piracy to flourish and noted that right now is a similar inflection point for an end to a lull and start of worse weather via the sun’s cyclical activities. We’ve only just begun.

We are not doomed. The climate is changing but we can still adapt. We can still lower emissions. We can still remove GHG from the atmosphere

Doomerism is an awful mindset to have. It’s difficult to feel this way but there’s still a lot of hope and a lot of amazing people working on this.

There is certainly lots of pain ahead. My home nation will be underwater by 2100s, lots of animal species will go extinct, but we are not doomed.

ah I think even that is a bit pessimistic. I'm optimistic that we can figure out carbon sequestration and transition to renewables in the next few decades and prevent any catastrophic sea level rise. I fully admit that the global North will not give a shit if some peripheral nations are destroyed by climate change, but I think this summer is starting to show people living in Vegas and Phoenix that their days there are numbered if we don't do something. Maybe I'm being optimistic though.

The recent news that Greenland was ice-free at +1.5C has increased my pessimism again.

yeah I think it's becoming clear that stopping emissions isn't enough and we will have to do carbon capture but Iceland has a functional carbon removal plant up and running and Exxon apparently sees it as part of their economic future. Lots of bad news out there and we need to accelerate the pace but optimism gives us energy for pushing the political front.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...

The Iceland plant will pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 / year, so my toilet-paper math says we're going to need at least 9 million more of these plants to achieve net zero.

oh ya I'm saying we need to achieve net zero plus have carbon removal. We need to be net negative, we are already in catastrophe territory as far as much carbon is in the atmosphere (I am not a scientist to be clear).

To be clear, Net Zero requires massive direct-air carbon removal, i.e. the only way to achieve it 'net zero' is the permanent removal of billions and billions tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere.

36-37 Billion tonnes of CO2/yr, ..

That's actually a bit less bleak than I would have expected.

/sarcasm . dark humour

Sorry for the misplaced optimism , if it makes you feel more bleak, building all those DAC facilities, transporting them and running them will require millions more of DAC facilities.

I just mean that it seems like actually a somewhat possible number for humans to build, though obviously it's more like infeasible than impossible. I pretty well realized how fucked humanity is around a decade ago, so it has been interesting to watch the realization spreading.

We aren't doomed as a species, but billions of people will die.

> We can still lower emissions.

If the world were to decrease to net 0 today and until 2050, we'd still expect average and mean temperatures to continue to increase through 2050.

> We can still remove GHG from the atmosphere

These are mostly prototypes and we do not have the capacity to get to 0 with these technologies yet.

Yes, but the good news is that the majority of people reading this are both old enough and rich enough to be insulated from the worst effects during their lifetimes.

This makes it very easy for them to say, “No we’re not doomed, the smartest people are working on this and will figure it out.” Once they do that they can go on living their lives without really caring about whether we are doomed or not.

I mean, we're all going to die and humanity is going to go extinct. One climate or another doesn't have much bearing on either fact.

Yes

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