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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t believe it’s possible to avoid anything anymore, Merely the scale will be determined at best. It’s not just going to be 800 million refugees. I suspect it’s going to be actual deaths in that range. And with no real intervention as is the case now, likely in the billions. Given how the whole world handled the pandemic I have no confidence it’ll unfurl any other way. A sobering thought that keeps me awake for a bit every night.

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Looks like you were getting some down votes for talking about the almost worst case scenario. No rebuttals unfortunately

I think some time in the next decade there will be a “perfect storm” heat wave combined with a power failure, and millions will die in days. This will jerk the Overton window and popular sentiment in an unpredictable direction, and no one knows what the world will look like on the other side of that.

Yeah it might be wise to invest into some backup solar and an inverter to run off-grid in a pickle, after all max heat will also typically mean max solar output at the same time.

Where in the world would this event take place? In the hottest parts of the US the temperature gets to 46ºC regularly during the summer and people have lived there for hundreds of years. Do people die of heat stoke? Sure, at a rate of hundreds per year. Elsewhere in the world there are places where people love in the same heat with less means of cooking and less access to water.

Millions of people may have to adapt. Fortunately, people are good at that.

Where would this take place? In places where the wet bulb temperature is already getting close to the limits of human endurance:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...

People can survive amazingly hot temperatures, as long as they can sweat - once the wet bulb temp gets far above 31c people are in trouble - the theoretical maximum is 35c.

We won't hit these wet bulb temps in places like the US or even much of Europe, but built up China, India etc are at risk of approaching these in our lifetimes, potentially far sooner.

Thank you! It is really important to emphasize that heat and humidity have both to be taken into account. To quote a relevant passage from the article you linked:

> Concern often centres on the “threshold” or “critical” WBT for humans, the point at which a healthy person could survive for only six hours. This is usually considered to be 35C, approximately equivalent to an air temperature of 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. (At the UK’s 19 July peak temperature, relative humidity was approximately 25% and the wet-bulb temperature about 25C.)

(WBT is Wet Bulb Temperature)

KSR's novel "The Ministry For the Future" starts with a graphic account of a 35C wet bulb event in India. The heat initially raises the demand for air conditioning, the demand for air conditioning over-stresses the electrical grid, the electrical grid fails so no one has air conditioning, millions die. I don't remember exactly when it's set; in the 2030s?

The others have pointed out the humidity, dry heat doesn’t just kill hundreds. The 2003 heat wave likely killed 70000 people in Europe. You know, a developed country. https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...

Texas, maybe? If the power grid goes down because of excess AC usage?

Yes, I read that people have been living for 100s of years (pre-AC) through temps regularly hitting 46 degrees, but see also the response on wet-bulb temps and survivability. 46 degrees for 5 days straight without AC (as in, backup power is gone...) and I think we'll see some losses.

Europe regularly sees large deaths due to heat during summers already today, true mostly in elderly.

A billion people in India could die and US elections would still be determined by gas prices.

But what would India do? It might be something hard to ignore.

India will attempt to geoengineer the sky way before that happens, international pleading or possible other dire consequences be damned.

Millions died in the pandemic - didn’t do much to affect any opinion really. Just see in the replies to my comment here. Deniers out to prove desperately that this is all going just fine.

I'll bet you a thousand dollars there will be not even 10 million deaths over current level directly linked to climate change, like drought, heat stroke, etc.

You are delusional. That could happen in a single event, let alone "ever" as your comment is implying.

In fact, I would go even further and predict that all cause mortality will be under baseline for countries most affected by climate change in the next 10 years vs 10 years prior, and life expectancy will go up. I absolutely believe that climate change is happening, I think tech and other improvements will outpace the damage it does. I'm very serious about betting on this.

You know, I'm semi interested in firming up this bet, only because I'll be fucking THRILLED to lose.

Make it a hundred, though, so I can defend it to my dependants better and you're on.

(I realize that even if I win, I lose, but whatever, I'm more interested in talking with someone who has significant hope, enough to put money on the line.)

It's a good bet, because either you're right or it won't matter.

The World Meteorological Organization estimates that in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019, deaths from climate dropped to one-third[0]. That's not one-third the rate; that's one-third of the absolute number of deaths, even as the world population more than doubled in that time period and atmospheric CO2 went from ~325ppm to ~410ppm.

In my opinion, this reduction in deaths is mostly due to the increasing ability of the developing world to better master their environment, enabled by technological advances powered largely by cheap energy from fossil fuels. If you have alternative explanations, I'm happy to hear it. But as the evidence stands, it would be more delusional to think climate change will cause rampant mass deaths.

[0]: https://library.wmo.int/viewer/57564/download?file=1267_Atla...

All it takes is one wet bulb event in a city near the equator. The deaths will be among those that can’t access climate control powered by cheap fossil fuels.

And I'd happily bet that even with extra wet bulb events, death rate will be lower and life expectancy higher at the equator. And I would assign a .0001% chance of a single wet bulb event killing millions of people.

I’ll take that bet, at 1000:1 odds; that should still be profitable for you. How do you want to handle it?

Not worth my time at those odds to set it up

It is fully possible that we have accumulated better technology while still pushing the climate to exponentially more dangerous states.

Yeah, we got a Pinker Thinker here. Dangerous temperature and humidity combined with failing infrastructure will kill millions rapidly, while two simultaneous crop failures in different parts of the world will throw the global food supply into shambles and kill even more people, slowly.

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