In Phoenix, this is life at 113 degrees for more than 20 days

Futurology and progressology are the new religions that's why. They think science can and will resolve everything, we'll bend the law of physics, extract ressources indefinitely, live forever, &c.

These are not the same groups. The people who think we can go to Mars also think we can live in hot places on Earth and can decarbonize without returning to the Iron Age.

Doomers and anti-modernists are pessimists all around.

Personally I think the doomer thing (and political fantasies like significant degrowth) is as bad as climate denial in that it keeps us from even trying to solve the problem. Instead we throw up our hands and wait to die or waste energy promoting fantasies.

If we only do the latter we should prepare for 4 degrees or more. You are not going to sell the world on becoming poorer. It’s a fantasy of the naive and privileged.

The people with the resources and thus power to effect real dramatic change don’t feel the pain that most depicted in this story are experiencing. I’ve spent some time in Phoenix and they (say, Scottsdale residents) can afford to have a well-watered, green yards and golf courses even during this and live with the A/C blasting 24 hours a day.

Until those people feel real pain from this, nothing will change. Not that that’s a sufficient condition though because most of the residents I mention can easily move or spent summers elsewhere. But the people in power have to be more than mildly inconvenienced before there’s a chance of anything happening. So maybe ten years before this is truly horrid in places like Arizona and Florida.

The way I understand it, we can change a lot about the planet if we don't care about side effects. For mars - we don't. You can try changing whatever you want there and you're not going to affect the ecosystem, because it doesn't exist yet.

(I'm not claiming this is a reasonable / good idea)

I don't see what baffles you.

1. Predicting that humanity will be able to geoengineer Mars in the future says nothing about our current abilities

2. A single person/company/government deciding to geoengineer Earth is obviously incredibly controversial, as siblings already pointed out

3. Mars habitat wouldn't be free and Phoenix doesn't have the budget to cover the entire city in some kind of domes

4. People who settle Mars choose what they are getting into. I doubt that all Phoenicians would want to live indoor even if someone rebuilt their city into a space colony for free

It's more about per unit cost of existence vs per unit revenue from existence. We're at the point where it's definitely possible to take rockets to other planets (and probably possible to get back eventually) and it's probably possible to live there with continued help from earth, it's just really expensive and it will never be cheaper than just living on earth, as long as earth's climate stays within a reasonable band around where it is now and Earth doesn't become so uniformly corrupt that there is a massive savings available just by changing the venue to a less stupidly run venue.

So, that being said it's pretty obvious the people that think we will be living on other planets are pretty delusional unless our birthrate explodes (unlikely) or our death rate drops from living way longer (unlikely but more likely than birth rate exploding) and so we actually need more living space. Revenue potential could drive colonization but you have to ask yourself if there is more revenue potential on mars or in something like an o'neill cylinder(s) mining things with miniscule gravity wells to overcome like asteroids and it seems pretty obvious that the latter will always win over the former.

The same reasoning applies to Phoenix. Biodoming would make cost of existence per unit of revenue from existence hugely negative but it turns out providing good air conditioning with backup power to upper middle class and higher to cool their homes and crappier air conditioning with no backup power to middle class and lower to take the edge off of the horrible 2-4 months of summer is still a net positive venture, despite sucking a lot for a part of the year, so we do that instead.

One simple and relatively cheap way Phoenix could be more survivable would be to build underground.

The temperature at 12 feet below ground or more really doesn't change much throughout the year.

The reason they don't do that in Phoenix is that they don't need to dig foundations because there isn't any frost rise or fall at the surface. Since that is the case, the extra cost of digging a basement, which is around 3%, cuts into the margins of large home builders enough that it isn't done.

They could also drill into the ground even deeper and use it as a heat sink and pump air through pipes to cool homes. Again this is more costly at construction time, though it would save money for the homeowner and provide protection for the city in gear emergencies, and put less pressure on the power grid.

Finally, every home there should have solar on the roof to offset AC charges, and a passive dew condenser to provide extra water for the house. They don't.

odd that you mention it -- as an environmentalist at a time I raged and gnashed teeth at this idea of remote planet colony 'fantasy' while rivers were in dire trouble globally. Yet one day, an issue of Whole Earth Magazine arrived with a cover story about a trial of a survival dome in the deserts somewhere, with Federal funding, as a complete testbed for off-world living.

To my guilty-delight it was found to be rotting with molds less than a year or two into the experiment, but I was humbled to find that multiple new materials-science products and techniques were realized in the process, with excellent application to difficult, real-life problems here on Earth. I realized two things: my emotional inner-war with the well-funded off-worlders was only costing me, nothing to them; second, excellent tech and invention is not predictable, and this experiment turned out to be quite productive for that.

who knew?!

A better comparison to Mars is Antarctica. Antarctica is far more hostile to life without technology than Arizona is, yet hundreds of people live on Antarctica. It costs a ton of money to support Antarctic research, yet we do it, and I believe it's relatively uncontroversial to spend that money.

I guess that would incur even more cost (ecologically) in the long term, making more places that miserable.

I think people in Phoenix would fare better if they were willing to make the changes expected for outer space colonization. How many of them would be willing to recycle urine, compost their own excrement, live in caves, become small farmers/yeast growers, only go outside in full spacesuits, repair their own equipment, get used to weird smells, etc.?

Civilization, as we know it, can't survive on Mars, Moon, or a space station. Think of them more as pioneers, and like pioneers, they will pay with life and blood every little mistake. Some people would kill for that adventure.

Geoengineering a planet with a functional biosphere that 7 billion people depend on is like testing a software change in production.

No one cares what you do the Martian atmosphere though, because it doesn't have any users

> Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.

The building codes on Mars (or wherever) will be more stringent: better air tightness, more insulation, efficient HVAC+D, etc.

What passes for "code compliant" is quite a low bar and a bit embarrassing. And it's not like you have to spend that much more to really improve things:

* https://www.prettygoodhouse.org

>> Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.

This is a mischaracterization. The majority of people that want a mars/moon/etc settlement believe that the future of humanity is multiplanetary. Serious people don't think that humans need to live on mars, they think the future of life on earth is bleak, and we need backups.

So far the person making the largest push to Mars also owns the largest electric car company, a solar power company, makes battery packs for storing the power from unpredictable renewable energy sources, advocates for nuclear, and set up a $100M competition for carbon capture technologies.

Maybe the person you're describing only exists in your mind.

Because on earth, it is much cheaper to move elsewhere. Or just use air conditioning. Mars doesn’t have that luxury.

We have year-round research stations in Antarctica. What is possible for a few is not necessarily desirable for the many.

I disagree. These cities have vast amounts of solar power to the point that they could, with storage, not only self sustain on mostly just rooftop solar but could perhaps even be net energy exporters.

They’re also not in areas likely to be inundated by flooding, and they are not in places where their expansion destroys forests. They are low density today too meaning they have tremendous room to build up.

Lack of freeze thaw cycles means roads and buildings last longer, reducing energy use in constant repair and CO2 from constant reapplication of concrete and asphalt.

Water is their big problem but with cheap renewable energy that problem is solvable either with pipelines or desalination.

Lastly air conditioning takes less power than winter heating in extremely cold climates and like I said above is more easily fueled by renewable energy. Solar generation peaks exactly with A/C demand. Cities up North tend to burn tons of fossil fuels for heat and that is harder to decarbonize. Heat pumps help but it’s still more intensive than A/C.

If the water problem is solvable these cities could become far more sustainable than say New York or Chicago due to all their cheap solar.

That's going to be peanuts against the reckoning of having incredibly population-dense places like Bangladesh, etc. mass-displaced. I think it's going to make the 2010s migrant crisis look like peanuts.

> Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Southern California do not really have any business existing in their present forms.

The Odd Lots podcast recently had an episode "An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert":

> Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa.

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/an-arizona-farmer-on-how-to-g...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owieQnPYfT8

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741112

One observation: some of the earliest civilizations in history have been in arid areas, e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt. They just happen to be settled near rivers—just like the Native American did with what is now know as Phoenix:

> The Hohokam people occupied the Phoenix area for 2,000 years.[23][24] They created roughly 135 miles (217 kilometers) of irrigation canals, making the desert land arable, and paths of these canals were used for the Arizona Canal, Central Arizona Project Canal, and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#History

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Phoenix,_Arizona

It is easier to keep warm than to cool down, but surprisingly these cities use less energy than their cold brethren. Also the cooling needs greatly correlate to solar availability so the potential to be very climate friendly is there. Cold northern climates mostly burn gas for heat which very climate unfriendly. In the US cold weather state use the most energy per capita, followed by hot states, and then of course temperate climates use the least.

Las Vegas is very efficient with water though, for the city proper.

Cities aren't farmland, building one in a desert is basically an excellent use of land.

If you get rid of private swimming pools, golf courses, and water hungry farming in those regions, I think they’d be fine to continue as is.

Aka: be smarter with water

Weather is not climate. Phoenix being 113F for 3 weeks no more proves climate change than an extra snowy Twin Cities winter disproves it.

Moreover: Saudi Arabia exists.

Yes, this is exactly right. The wet bulb temperature in parts of Texas and Florida in the heat wave a week or two ago got close to the limit of human survivability. Five years from now Texas, Florida, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia are all going to be seeing that limit exceeded at least briefly every summer.

I think the writer means that the sweat evaporates so rapidly that it does not feel like you are sweating. That is, you don’t get drenched in sweat. I think during heat exhaustion the body stops sweating. Perhaps it’s easier to miss the signs of impending heat exhaustion in such conditions.

Yeah I tripped over that line too. I think maybe they meant you don't realize you are sweating excessively because it evaporates so fast which causes dehydration. Compared to a high humid area where you'd be drenched in sweat and realize you need to hydrate.

They clearly mean that rapid evaporation prevents sweat from accumulating on the skin, making it easy to miss rapid loss of water since you don't feel it very much.

Given that you explain exactly this, you seem to have understood it. If your biggest concern with this story is a relaxed use of the word "sweating" you might want to go back and reread it.

The United States military has, for some decades, been planning for how to deal with the effects of climate change, which include the expected migration of huge numbers of people. Here’s one article:

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/31...

Two excerpts:

As regions become too hot for sustaining livelihoods or human habitation, climate change may spur migration. Tensions over water and other resources could lead to instability and conflict. Climate change is already making the Arctic more accessible with nations vying over resources and access. Due to warming temperatures in many regions, diseases and viruses are expected to migrate to new areas of the globe.

And:

The world’s largest naval base, Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, is endangered by rising sea levels, Water in the bay has risen about a foot-and-a-half since the 1920s, and a normal high tide now comes close to lapping over containment walls. The Navy, the city and businesses that depend on the harbor must work to adapt to rising sea levels.

You may be attributing lack of financial means to resiliency. It cost money to move and if you are already struggling to get by you may not have the money.

Or when they do decide to move there are folks lining up to buy their house. Why would anyone move to AZ or even FL given the expected climate impact?

People are resilient here means that we have cheap enough energy and air conditioning as well as access to fresh water. Raise the cost of energy 100x and extracting fresh water and especially air conditioning becomes less economically viable than moving. Then again, the whole desert is wide open for building large banks of solar farms.

Nordhaus published a study how the economy is barely affected by rising temperatures because all high value activity happens indoors.

This ignores that in Africa there is a significant subsistence population that lives off their own food production which is exclusively conducted outdoors and very little of the produce is sold commercially which in turn means their monetary income is close to zero aka they are a low value industry. The fact that these people move away does in no way contradict the predicted impact on the economy, in fact, you would think that it expects them to move somewhere else with lots of indoor economic activity.

Dry deserts just aren't that hostile until there's no more water to be found.

When the water runs out is when shit will get real.

Until then, articles like this are just describing normal desert life while trying to be alarmist about it. Judging from a bunch of the comments here, it seems to work.

The real insanity is doing agriculture in these regions, stealing dwindling groundwater supplies in bulk from the inhabitants who'll need it in the future just to survive.

There’s a huge influx of refugees into Europe and the US mostly from hotter places.

I hadn't considered it before reading your comment, but it seems plausible when I google "air density vs temperature". It seems a few degrees is enough to change the density by several percent, and IIRC density is proportional to the lift you get.

Common thing is Phoenix. It's just harder for planes to take off when the ground is at such high temperatures.