Wet-bulb temperature
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Any tips for someone wanting to try this at home? Let’s assume that I have access to tap water at 60psi dynamic pressure and air at 90psi and 10 SCFM continuous (more for short bursts if needed).
I made snow in my front yard a few times. I also completely covered my tree and car in a blanket of ice a few times too.
It was a fun little project to hack on.
They definitely don't make as good snow at marginal temperatures but it's impressive what they can do given a lot use 1/20th of the compressed air compared to a tradition air/water snowgun.
A tradition air/water gun is just an 1.5" air inlet, a 1.5" water inlet, a mixing chamber and a nozzle. At higher temperatures, they take an incredible amount of air. We had a few guns that could take 300 horsepower worth of an air compressor, each, to run at -2.5 celsius wet bulb. As is gets colder it gets a little more efficient.
There are some designs that are basically the same but incorporate a "baffle" that attempts to cut down the size of the mixing chamber when there's a high air/water mixture to make them more efficient, but those baffles would often get stuck open, making them useless.
A fangun is the style of snowgun that uses a giant electric fan to project the snow out from the gun. There is an onboard electric air compressor hooked up to a few nozzles that spray out a mixture of air and water. The tiny droplets freeze into the "nucleus" (a tiny ice particle), which other droplets from water-only nozzles bind onto and freeze, creating a "snowflake".
An external mix gun is basically a fangun, minus the big electric fan, and suspended 30+ feet in the air on a pole. A small number of nozzles spray out an air/water mix, creating the nucleus, and then water only nozzles spray out droplets that then bind to the nucleus. It works but needs to be a bit colder, and they are much more susceptible to winds (especially cross winds). If winds don't allow the two types of sprays to mix, you get a nice skating rink instead of snow!
This coming winter I may try increasing the height of the mixer and positioning a fan underneath to help push the mix upward to give it more time to bind to the nucleus crystal.
When the water pressure drops below the air pressure, you get what we called "the helicopter", where the snowgun pulses and makes a "whomp whomp whomp" sound (like a helicopter).
I have always assumed this is happening because the air and water are "fighting" each other and instead of getting a constant stream of mixed air/water you are getting a period of water only, then a period of air only. The snowgun will actually bounce up and down. We'd run into this a lot when trying to turn down the water really low on days where the temperatures were very marginal.
I have heard of people using pressure washers to up their water pressure.
The passage was vivid enough for me to suggest preparatory measures to my retired parents. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in near-term climate impact!
"This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways."
https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compe...
Honestly, that just makes the book better in my eyes and I haven't even read it.
The sad reality is that the world's actual response to something like that happening will probably be about as disappointing and anticlimactic as the rest of the book was to read.
But of course, weather isn't climate. https://www.axios.com/2023/08/14/climate-change-heat-wave-ca...
If climate activists only wish to broadcast how virtuous and smart they are for not denying The Science, by all means, look down on the uneducated unwashed masses for arguing as to whether or not a hot day or season is definitive evidence of human caused climate change -- even though that's exactly what the climate activists taught them not too long ago.
b. Your own source is making a different point that the one you're making..
> What they're saying: Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather summarized the volcano's contribution to 2023's record high temperatures this way: "So, not nothing, but only a small part of the story in the exceptional warmth the world is experiencing," he told Axios via email.
> Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, also thinks the significance of the volcano's warming role pales in comparison to human-driven climate change and other influences.
> Dessler likens climate change to a "rising tide" that is elevating the baseline temperatures from which heat waves begin. "This means that our heatwaves become hotter, essentially 'floating' on the 'rising tide' of our warming world," he said via email.
You're really convinced I made some sort of argument blaming the fire on Climate Change when I did nothing of the sort..
Leto II, God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert
But, when the head of an international organization takes a week and a half to get to a meeting on the other side of the planet, and thinks that it's nicer to take a sequence of trains and sailing ships than it used to be to fly ... that seemed totally alien. When subsistence farmers were surprised by the large amount of money they were paid for getting more carbon into their soil, that seemed really implausible. When KSM glosses by how easy and quick it was to make giant wildlife corridors across North America, and talks about whole communities packing up and voluntarily abandoning towns to ceded those areas to nature ... that seemed wildly implausible.
There were a lot of these moments for me, and while I get the people that use these as a criticism against the realism of the book, I also think that gap is a criticism against all of us.
I'm not advocating for violence, to be clear, and in the novel KSM seems to take the stance that at some point violence is really counter-productive. But certainly there have been places and periods in which e.g. targeted kidnappings of rich people, assassination attempts on politicians, and terrorist attacks against high-profile targets have all been around -- why do you think is it impossible for those to be directed at people in power in the future? Especially if there are progressively more climate victims, it seems like we're setting the stage for a generation of people to be ripe for radicalization.
Submarine accidents not withstanding, I'm not convinced the UN in our current timeline could be transformed into one that engages in this behavior.
I'm going to go back to my comparatively easy computer engineering tasks after writing this comment, and have the greatest respect for those willing to confront coordination problems in the political sphere. That's playing the game on hard mode.
The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
> I can't help but feel like TS Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
The good news is that we've developed systems of governance and economics that are not exclusively worse than uneducated tribalistic hunter-gatherer anarchy - a very large number of people live in significant comfort in relatively ordered, mostly polite societies, generally free to do what they want, and for the most part those societies build things like roads, landfills, electric grids, and fire departments together that make the community better. It's not perfect, for sure, and we're really missing the ball on this particular externality of global warming, but I have some hope that we'll figure out a way to address the problem that doesn't rely exclusively on weak moral appeals.
> The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature ... - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation.
Are we not society? Do we not make up the system? But more importantly, you're refuting a statement of responsibility by saying the underlying problem won't be solved by feelings. Whether a statement of moral responsibility is _true_ and whether concurrent emotions on their own solve anything are fundamentally different propositions, and denying one implies nothing about the other. If I murder someone by stabbing them, perhaps that reflects part of human nature -- but a jury telling me I'm guilty is _correct_, even though their condemnation will not bring back my victim. It would be absurd for me to say "oh your moralizing emotional condemnation won't solve the issue of murder which has always existed in human societies, and certainly won't bring back the person I killed -- therefore I'm not responsible."
But somehow, if a few generations knowingly trash a whole planet, aware that this would cause chaos which results in a large number of deaths, illness, property damage, etc you want to believe that the fact that morose feeling will not suck carbon out of the atmosphere somehow implies that responsibility cannot be assigned.
One can argue about whether moral statements can meaningfully be "true" (I think they can), but one can't jump from "moral condemnation doesn't on its own solve problems" to "therefore moral responsibility can be denied in any instance".
If anything, I think the reluctance to fully face the problem and acknowledge our role in it, and to recognize the ways in which our own lives will need to be different to stop exacerbating the problem, is part of the foot-dragging.
> The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.
But The Ministry for the Future is basically nothing _but_ constructive suggestions put in a nice palatable narrative container. We're not talking about a moral judgement in the absence of specific ideas about how to address climate change, environmental justice, and even wealth inequality. We're talking about acknowledging responsibility when, though opportunities stare us in the face, we do little or nothing to fix the situation we've created.
A population or corporation should be expected to be moral. Collective behaviors are a function of incentives and penalties, of pure economics.
If your plan to fix the problems in society relies on every member selflessly cooperating and fails if one member defects, if you create a system that is trivially exploited by rich amoral sociopaths behaving like rich amoral sociopaths, then the defector is morally to blame when it fails, but that's still the expected outcome.
Like Termination Shock?
https://www.amazon.com/Termination-Shock-Novel-Neal-Stephens...
> shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better
You might be interested in the Volts' podcast.
The recent interviews with Saul Griffith ("use our sunlight and iron ore and rare minerals to transform Australia into the world's forge"), Tim Latimer (Fervo Energy pioneered advanced geothermal, now scaling up), and Ramez Naam (climate tech investor) were quite uplifting.
Lots of gems in the Volts archive too.
I believe you can find recordings from e.g. his interactive discussion of it, in the archives of "SF in SF" which are typically recorded and available, maybe at SomaFM as Rusty usually runs sound. Strongly recommended and it should give you a frame for understanding why the narrative takes the path that it does.
TL;DR it's overdetermined and the opposite of naivety or wishful thinking; it's strategic.
You may disagree with the strategy, of course.
That is, if we're to successfully address this challenge, with minimal global disruption (and where "minimal disruption" means all aircraft falling from the skies), then something like KSR's path is required.
I've seen your criticism voiced elsewhere (a major publication review that I'm lapsing on presently). This particular critique misses the book's point entirely.
For evidence, look at the deaths in the USA from gives and cars every year. Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
We haven't entirely banned cars, and carbon emissions weren't totally banned after the wet-bulb event in Ministry for the Future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
We will normalize climate related deaths the way we have normalized traffic related deaths.
If cars save me just 10 minutes per day, my life is improved as compared to the just under 7 minutes per day of life lost to the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
We normalize traffic deaths because there is a net benefit. Just like we normalize other negative outcomes from overall positive-utility activities.
What would you call a success? No death, total ban on driving?
What I would do about traffic deaths is irrelevant to my point.
Your original point was:
>Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
This is clearly false. There are many effective regulations and travelling by car continues to get safer.
Yes people still die, yes we already somewhat normalise people dying from e.g. air pollution (not something that will happen, we already do it)
There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
> There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Exactly. Despite that, here we are with 35K traffic deaths a year. Here's what would actually be necessary to "fix" the problem:
- 20 year project to build a tremendous amount of passenger rail - Manhattan project for self-driving cars - 10 year project to upgrade all city and highway signage to be self-driving car friendly - Close roads to human-driven cars when self-driving upgrades are ready
This probably sounds crazy to you. It sounds crazy to me too. And that's why I'm blackpilled on climate change: if we can't and won't do what it takes to fix traffic or gun fatalities on a national level, we definitely won't do it for a problem several orders of magnitude more difficult on a global level.
> Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
There will be an impact. Just most likely not a positive one. It could highly negative (see post-9/11 wars), or completely insufficient (our current response to climate change).
Success could have USA/Canada/[insert other poorly faring nation] looking more like the low casualty numbers of other wealthy nations (eg. Norway) as well.
Honestly no death is a pretty good goal. Cynically one could say it's not achievable but trying is nonetheless worth while. In my jurisdiction in Canada I don't see the government even lifting a finger to implement the lowest hanging fruit of policies that would move the needle in the right direction, such is the status quo and politicization of the traffic safety issue. They're not even trying.
Efforts to implement various traffic safety concepts well used elsewhere in safer jurisdictions would be politically attacked here I'm quite sure.
A heat related mass death event most likely would trigger a response. The real question is would it be organized and tidy response, or civil unrest?
When 4% hunt anymore and no one can grow a carrot? Suddenly logistics are interrupted worse than covid because, what, Phoenix burns down?
Oh, it’ll trigger a response.
Pandemic response was effective at avoiding healthcare system collapse and churning out a vaccine. It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
What else do you want? Too many seem to think the MCU should hop on saving them from themselves.
Say something useful yourself or get over it. You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
Perhaps you missed the analogy in my original between climate deaths and gun+traffic deaths.
> It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
You're so close to getting it. We will be talking about "sensible solutions" that maintain our current lifestyle until the planet turns into Venus.
> What else do you want?
I reluctanty have to admit I'm black pilled at this point. I see no reason to believe that our species is capable of the kind of collective action that's needed. There are no positive examples and so many negative examples.
> You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
You don't have kids do you?
My whole effort here is throwing your low effort back at you; including your misuse of sighted for cited.
Frankly I think I get you a lot better than you get me. You are your own generalization/analogy/metaphor.
You’re doing nothing substantive while complaining about lack of substantive effort in the part of others.
Functional illiteracy in the raw, dog
> Functional illiteracy in the raw, dog
Not your dog, dog
So if a mass death event were to occur, and policy were to change course drastically, the changed climate would continue to pound our biosphere for many decades (if not centuries). Or hit tipping points and get worse & worse no matter what we do.
To put it blunt: at some point, prolonged mass suffering & death is practically guaranteed. Just with a decades-delayed fuse. That fuse is already lit, while we can't see (with any certainty, that is) how big a powder keg it goes into.
Might be different when a lot of people die in a whole region and it's very obvious. But who knows, I made detailed predictions at the onset of COVID and believed it would be handled like SARS and the likes and stopped in about 3 months. Well, I was completely wrong.
It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal when it doesn't fit their worldview. If you travel to 2000 and told people "in 2020 a pandemic will kill over 1 million Americans, and a good portion will brush it off as a 'nothing burger'" people would think you were being ridiculous and would dismiss it as unbelievable fiction.
It's one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses. It let's us keep living, but also allows us to normalize that which shouldn't be accepted.
If the opening of MFTF happened, within 2 weeks people would be posting graphs showing how per capita all cause deaths are actually going down over time.
A million people die a week, worldwide, from all causes.
Last I checked people are quite considered with global HIV death, especially since they can obviously be reduced dramatically.
0. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/stat...
Almost all politicians are also owned by the car and oil industries, so that would explain the lack of action with the high number of RTCs.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
The Trump administration has banned the use of bump stocks, devices that let rifles fire like machine guns, after promising to do so earlier this year.
It's true that our system of government and industry is set up to preserve itself and resist sweeping change. It is further true some incredibly wealthy and influential individuals within the system are aligned with those goals, making change all the more difficult and unlikely (this applies to climate change as it does to gun laws, car culture, throw-away consumerism, etc). It is a mistake to equate trying and failing to change massive and powerful institutions with doing nothing.
I get it, from a cynical and pessimistic perspective, doing nothing vs trying hard but failing to do something all looks the same in the end (when society is roasting canned spam on it's own embers, as we might imagine). But fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and mostly appeals because it has the "benefit" of requiring no action of the individual. Just a lifetime of depression, apathy, and/or moral bankruptcy.
Even if the fatalist is wrong, it means people made things work out for them in the end and they didn't even have to lift a finger. What a deal! It certainly has its appeal to those parts of our brain that we share with lizards and other creatures that look to avoid personal risk and conserve energy at almost any cost.
As far fetched as any science fiction ever written
I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.
In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future
I think it's going to take more than hundreds of deaths to go beyond a few news stories that get lots of clicks for a week or two and talking points for politicians to bring up when it's convenient and forget when it is not.
What is the benefit of vehicle transportation? Immense! They move goods around the country, provide people with rapid transportation, improve the movement of people of people around the country, etc, etc.
It's like looking at surgical deaths and saying "look at the death toll from surgery! such a tragedy!" all the while completely ignoring it's benefits.
It's probably already too late, but I keep seeing people confusing the concept of "web bulb temperature" (all temperatures have a wet bulb temperature, even ones very pleasant for people) with "the human survivable maximum wet bulb". I frequently see people saying things like "when we reach wet bulb temps..", which feels a bit silly.
This always feels like talking about a "Kelvin event" or "Kelvin temps" referring a temperature reaching absolute zero.
Reminds me of Ex Astris Scientia complaining about bad script writing in Enterprise, specifically "deuterium can burn almost as hot as plasma, when it's ignited": https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/episodes/ent2.htm
Every following chapter- terrible, not worth your time.
What prep did you recommend to your parents? I’m interested for what I can reuse or adapt.
Other commenters criticizing the book for the ending and the positivity turn it takes are missing the point of why the book is valuable, I think.
Like for you maybe, it was the first book that got me serious about climate. The value isn’t in the ending, but in the first half with unpleasantly accurate the early “oh sh*t” disasters were and same for the totally inept societal responses.
Made me realize we were likely procrastinating our way into an emergency, and any magical way out we find IRL will be at a high cost of suffering. We will probably get disasters, we will get climate terrorism, and it will get much worse before we get saved (by magic blockchain carbon fediverse haha?).
Spoiler, I found the ending very unsatisfying. It feels like a cliffhanger into a second book, but there is no second book it just ends without much resolution. The actual climate change/societal terror in the first 75% is great though, it was on pace to become a favorite book of mine.
I sometimes get very dark about the future we're headed into.
https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page:
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.
The US NWS, for example, uses heat index commonly. In the US south I seldom see it go much over 110F, and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat.
This isn't just a case of hitting some threshold where we all drop dead, but as temperatures rise it will slowly cause people to migrate to more temperate climates and/or seek out better cooling structures (either actively through air conditioning or passively where that isn't an option).
In the air-conditioned US. Much of the world gets as hot, if not hotter, without AC to help alleviate the heat.
A cold shower does nothing, it actually makes it worse as it activates your body to warm up. Stripping naked does nothing. Sweat just streams down the entire body as if a tap is open. It's near impossible to keep up with drinking water.
It was short-lived as the weather was extremely variable, but the feeling of being completely unable to cool down despite throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it, is memorable.
The hot dry breeze can cool you off. The hot humid breeze is death.
If you live somewhere where this could happen you should move now.
Stay _comfortable_ there!
A wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.
I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.
All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage.
And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever.
Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions.
However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.
Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing. Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom
I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"
Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner.
"Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"
> "This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at night,"
https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-18...
It wasn't necessarily a wake-up call then. But it may have at least been the crisis that spurred one guy...
Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.
It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.
In 2003, 70,000 people died in the EU from a heat wave [1]. A fact that is never really comes up in talks about climate change.
The death toll could be millions and we'd still see deniers clamoring that we need to burn more coal for grid stability or whatever.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.
I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!
In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.
With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude).
There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone.
If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions.
Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem.
The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.
The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax.
If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.
A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of.
Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power. Anybody without AC would die, unless they found some non-evaporative way to cool themselves.
It’s the most terrifying natural disaster conceivable.
Could you survive in a basement?
Keep in mind that we're now seeing sea surface temperatures above 38°C (100°F).
If the river itself is slow-moving and is in an area of prolonged heat, it will also be warm.
The areas most prone to high temperatures often also have little surface water, or at least, not enough to shelter all persons affected.
Water refuges being too warm for human survival is an early plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.
Note that for a small poorly-ventilated basement, the humidity will rise from respiration, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature. For a well-ventilated basement, the air temperature will approach the outdoor temperature, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature.
If you have a giant, well-shaded, pool of water, the water temperature will usually be below the peak air temperature (water has high thermal mass, so it will take a long time for it to come up to the ambient temperature, even at high humidity, where evaporation effects are negligible) so that's another non-AC method of staying cool.
In any event pools of water and basements don't scale to densely populated areas.
Couldn't you just eat ice to keep cool? Heat from blood transfers to the ice as it melts and warms in the stomach, then it leaves the body completely through urination.
Similarly you could put a giant block of ice in front of a fan and sit there; most people would call this a from of AC though.
A ton of cooling being defined as 12000 BTU/hr, or the rate implied by the latent heat of fusion of 1 ton of ice at 0°C being consumed via melting over 24 hours.
It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable.
Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.
How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.
However there is a limit to how long you can live in the bath.
You also have to worry about power when it comes to having access to sufficient water to cool a person in the first place.
Hence mentioning a bath tub.
Some interesting reading to go along with this topic:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750007244/downloads/19...
Of particular note is the need to remove about 1k BTU/hour when walking/doing light work, and that's only from metabolic heat generation.
And 1 BTU raises 1 pint of water 1 degree, so 1k BTU/hour would raise 5 gallons of water by an unrealistic 25° every hour.
Can you survive wet bulb temperatures given a bucket of water indefinitely? No. Can you survive working hard labor with the water bucket? No. Can you survive wet bulb events significantly higher than the threshold? No.
Can you survive several hours in a typical (current typical) wet bulb event? Yes, definitely. Bucket of water is fine.
I'm going to vote maybe. At best, it'll be close.
Resting metabolic output is about half the active value I provided (per NASA's PDF). That means for a bucket of water that starts at 32°, you have 5 hours before the bucket is also 95° if you discount ambient heating from the air, circulatory constriction, and assuming no prior conditions.
Since you can't discount those (and are unlikely to find barely-not-frozen water for an entire city's population), survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
Does that pass your personal sniff test for reasonability? Have you ever soaked in a 104°F (40°C) hot tub for an hour or more? Was your survival in serious doubt?
Wet bulb temperatures in excess of 35°C need to persist for around 6 hours to represent a serious hyperthermia risk. This is not a "you will die inside of 1-2 hours" scenario.
There's no need for the bath. The shower will probably work better actually since it's constantly disposed down the drain after picking up some heat, and replenished with subterranean-temp fresh water running across your person.
The point to take away is that humidity matters in addition to raw temperatures. Not that there is a specific threshold at which things matter or didn’t matter.
In some countries electricity becomes unavailable quite regularly, so relying on A/C during a crisis like that might fail. And that is assuming that A/Cs are common (they are not, in large parts of the world).
Cooling yourself down by using water from a tap may also fail, if, in such a situation, everyone in a city tries to do that. You are assuming a very high level of infrastructure and no critical failures.
Heatwaves and infrastructure failures can undoubtedly be serious threats. But the vast, vast majority of people survive wet bulb events when they encounter them.
That's maybe 2 hours of cooling per person and it's not at all obvious that during such a heat event that you'll have access to a continued source of 70°F/21°C water. If you only have access to 82°F/28°C water, 5 gallons only lasts you an hour or less.
If this imaginary graph has an inflection point, I can't think of a better one.
Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I know you threw babies in here but it feels like I have to point out that the old and sickly dying have a negligible effect on man years lost.
> Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I don’t really agree that the world is as fragile as you propose. But I feel like need to clarify that I’m not arguing against the threat posed by climate change broadly.