Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
wired.com
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My understanding is that such weather is not survivable long term [1] without air conditioning. A power failure would be disastrous.
[1] https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/humans-cant-endure-t...
I assure you, even 36C/100% is survivable.
An extended period of 36C/100% is going to pose serious danger for most people
Survivable is a pretty low bar.
Also, "survivable but kills babies, the elderly, and the sick in much greater numbers than they die today" doesn't have the same shine as survivable for everybody...
The last to die will be the people who are most harmful to the environment on a per-capita basis. Before then, you’ll have socioeconomic disruption in warm countries, creating masses of people fleeing to cooler climates, creating political openings for xenophobes and unsavory characters throughout the western world who will take it as a key goal to preserve our right to pollute, now return to step 1, cycle repeats and amplifies.
There is no resistance to chemistry. Your proteins stop folding properly above a certain temperature. Others irreversibly change shape, like an egg’s albumen solidifying. Your body expends extraordinary effort to keep its temperature in a narrow range, one far from the outside temperature, for good reason.
When? Why?
Heat kills becauses it unfolds proteins. If that happens in your heart, you get a heart attack--that's the proximate cause of death. The ultimate cause remains, however, unless we're talking about charring or vaporising heat, your proteins misfolding.
The other common way to die from heat is dehydration, which kills by altering your electrolyte imbalance which causes arrythmia. But that can be countered through hydration. (Until the proteins in your gut start misfolding.)
Side note: I didn't say you die because your proteins stop folding. I said you die because your proteins stop folding properly.
> less resistance you have, the earlier you die
The resistance comes in the form of heat-shock proteins [1], which "enable excess heat to be stored temporarily" [2]. Above 40°C, your HSR proteins start misfolding. There is no resistance nor acclimation beyond that limit. Our chemistry doesn't permit it.
Variations exist in the 40 to 45°C regime in terms of tolerance duration, but that's irrelevant when we're talking about climate. Above 40°C / 104° F wet-bulb temperature, everyone without access to cooling will eventually die. You can't build resistance to it because that literally involves evolving proteins which, to my knowledge, don't exist in mammals.
It's one thing in cloudy weather with wind and rain but in sunny clear weather it felt deadly
As long as cold water is running, people can also use tap water to cool themselves down, though it will turn into a swampy mess when none of it evaporates. Perhaps public shaded pools with a cool water source will become critical public infrastructure to help people survive heat waves if the electricity goes out.
If it's above 32 degrees and 100% humidity at all hours though, it would be pretty miserable as you wouldn't have anywhere to sleep (unless you have a car with A/C, and masses running their cars overnight will just contribute that much more to the climate change)
The sea is about 45 minutes away but only rock beaches.
But we have the famous beaches of Sunshine Coast (Noosa) and Gold Coast (Tallebudgera amongst others) around 90 minutes away.
Though I can guarantee on a hot day, 2.5 million people aren't making their way to beaches or water holes to cool off. And Brisbane is a sweaty place in Summer.
Later in the month the days that were 30 C and 90% humidity felt worse when working.
The former makes you feel like the activity ceiling is much lower, and cooling down through natural means is much slower. Sweating just doesn't work that well. That was at a wet bulb temperature of ~28 degrees.
Survival is a consolation, but if we need to start living in caves and windowless insulated boxes, then those are not very reassuring news...
Regions with high humidity and high temperatures also have huge rivers and waterfalls for cooling, irrigation and hydroelectric power plants to run millions of AC Units and build AC factories.
You mean like Siberia and Alaska are "thriving"?
Its hot-dry climates where it gets cool overnight where thermal mass is most important (the thermal mass warms up during the day and radiates heat at night, when outside cools down).
In hot-wet climates, if you want passive comfort, your best bet is to make a big roof and then encourage cross-ventilation so the wind provides some cooling.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
In Texas there was AC failures, and people needed Earth Suits (like a space suit with air conditioning) to survive.
Isn't this whole book about climate change?
And the character experiences a climate 'event', that impacts the direction of the story? Changes their perspective?
"There's a common misconception that a plot point is anything that happens in a story. In this way, people often confuse a plot point for a story beat. Story beats are the smallest units of storytelling, allowing you to break down a story into small parts without looking at individual paragraphs or sentences.
A plot point, on the other hand, marks a major turning point in the plot. So a story beat and a plot point will overlap, but not every story beat is a plot. There are far more story beats than plot points in a given story."
https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/plot/plot-point/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_point https://kindlepreneur.com/plot-point/
> Isn't this whole book about climate change?
Wouldn't that be called the theme of the book? There are several interwoven plots, the main one being the story of the Ministry and of the people working for it.
Just arguing around definitions of words at this point. What is a "plot" versus "theme" versus "just an incident" verses "plot point".
If you want to say there are several 'plots', thus the book's 'plot', is not climate change, because climate change is really an overall 'theme', but not a plot.
I took the previous discussion to mean, that there was an event with a wet-bulb incident, and this one 'incident' could be a 'plot point' in one of the plots. And guess overall theme of the book is around climate, which is on display with the wet-bulb 'plot'?
So guess, if you are saying I was incorrect because there are several 'plots', thus I can't say "the plot of the book is climate change". Ok. I'm ok with using the word "theme" instead.
Edit:
Guess I would say the 'plot' of "World War Z" is a 'realistic interpretation of a zombie outbreak'. But, it was all short stories, so not really a 'plot'. But a theme.
Maybe the word plot is problem. Means one thing in vernacular, but does mean something more detailed to an English major.
The grid is going to have to undergo huge evolution, but increasingly corruption and political gridlock make that unreliable.
Plus home solar empowers you from centralized control and functions as the only free market alternative to the regulatory captured grid infrastructure.
Home storage with sodium ion and hopefully in 2-4 years sodium sulfur will drop costs 50%.
Also, your car an function as a secondary battery storage.
We also need to massively invest in poor countries' ability to survive too. Or else conflicts will spread to us regardless of our own resilience.
Its anecdotal, but my very progressive friends (think: Bernie Sanders type voters) have over time subtly started expressing opinions that are regressive to world assistance.
Namely, an attitude that nations should reap what they sow. They equate ecological devastation in poor countries almost solely to the inability of those countries leaders to do anything effective or sustaining. While they aren't wrong per se, its in ignorance or disregard of other broader factors.
All this is to say, I hold little hope that poor countries will receive much aid from richer ones unless they already have something useful to trade
I know this isn't the point of your reply, which I agree with the point its making, but I often wonder if there is a way to do green sailing both economically and fast enough that taking say, a 3 day sail to other countries becomes the norm rather than flying everywhere, baked into the experience of a vacation as it were.
Even if we could simply limit air travel to critical business only, it'd be a dramatic step in the right direction on multiple fronts (pollution, reducing C02 emissions etc)
At least in northern Europe, you are often confronted with this sentiment of condemning oh-so-bad imported fruits from afar (Checkmate, Avocado!), when really most of the CO2 emissions are due to the first and last few kilometers of travel by fossil-fueled trucks. The thousands of kilometers across the ocean are almost negligible. Eating an apple grown in New Zealand or northern Germany makes almost no difference in regard to CO2.
Really, the downside of ships is not the CO2 emissions at all. Sail, or not. We don't use them as much for personal transportation, because they are slow as fuck in comparison to trains, busses/cars and planes. Most people just don't want to spend a week or two looking at the same endless water, when crossing the Atlantic. (If you want to travel the world like this, maybe reach out to a container line!)
On land, we need more cheap and frequent high speed trains connecting countries! Night trains and busses with beds and all again, too.
Last mile delivery trucks will be the first commercial vehicles to electrify.
The real downside of long haul shipping is the race to the bottom arbitrage of loose environment regulations and enforcement.
I hope not. Individualistic traffic is still much worse than mass transport trains. Do robotaxis for the last mile instead.
> The real downside of long haul shipping is the race to the bottom arbitrage of loose environment regulations and enforcement.
Fun fact, tho, dirty exhausts from ships have been substantially cooling the climate before regulation kicking in.
With the bakken shake and alternate energy vastly decreasing the geopolitical significance of oil shipping, and the possible demographic and totalitarian collapse of China, manufacturing will near shore in the coming decades.
If the human race was capable of proactively mitigating global warming effects on the poor, it would be capable of mitigating global warming itself. Since we cannot, the poor are going to be some object to a simpler, cruel calculus.
We saw this in the Syrian crisis which is about 1/100 the scale of probable displacements to come
We've had days like that in southern Sweden, near the coast with very high humidity.
I'm starting to go crazy over us not having ACs, and windows that are really hard to get working well with a portable ac.
Retirement homes celebrate getting ice cream machines, but still lack AC and the deaths during summer are significantly higher =/
Ice coffee in Europe is not a thing! Ask for it and you will be looked at funny. And even the "cold" drinks from the fridge in a store are just below room temperature.
I don't get it.
I expect these objections will fall away in future years as summer heat gets more intense. Those who can afford A/C will install what is often seen as a conspicuous luxury and energy-wasting convenience, and those who can't will envy rather than despise them, as the culture continues its shift towards individualism.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/08/europe-franc...
Just like all coffee shops and most supermarkets.
And under EU law fresh food fridges must target 4C and not exceed 8C, only food pantries are allowed go to 18 degrees.
I agree with the ACs, but then again in houses it usually wasn’t necessary until now. Most public spaces do have AC, and public transportation with AC are also quite common, at least in the developed parts of the EU
What?! How long haven't you been here?? I can't remember not having wide varieties of iced coffee, frapuccinos etc. in basically any cafe I've been to in at least 10 years... Europe is not a single place though, so perhaps you mean a certain part of Europe (I am familiar with France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Belarus and a few more surrounding these countries)!?
So, are we talking a nice pint of ICED coffee, with ice cubes jiggling in it?
Wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which air can be cooled by sweating. Evaporative cooling does not work well if the air is nearly saturated with humidity. Humid heat feels a lot hotter because of that.
If the wet bulb temperature is 28 degrees, it means that drenching yourself in water in front of a fan will only cool you down to 28 degrees.
If it exceeds your maximum body temperature, you slowly die from heat stroke, no matter how much you sweat.
Fans and wet rags help some. I used to fill a 2-liter bottle with cold water and hold it against my chest. A lot of sleepless nights. When we got a local second run $2 movie theater, it was a literal godsend.
Do you think this is the case for the billions of people closer to the equator or in poorer countries?
I could imagine that a place where the nighttime temperatures are in the mid 30s (°C) would not have any cooler water available.
The specific heat capacity of water is about 4kJ/kg/°C so a liter of that cold water can absorb 100kJ of energy in the process of warming up. Once it’s warmed up it can’t do any more cooling.
Your body, when not working hard, produces about 200W of heat. That’s 200J per second.
So that liter of water can absorb your body’s heat output from about 500 seconds of being alive. That’s a little over eight minutes.
So that means the cooling needs for one human for one day can be met by about 170 liters of cold, 50°F water. That’s about 44 US Gallons.
If, however, that water can evaporate - well, the latent heat capacity of vaporization of water is over 2 thousand kJ per kg.
That’s why the wet bulb temperature matters. If water can’t evaporate, that cold water can’t absorb body heat except by just warming up.
Minor quibble, 2000 (kilo)calories / 1 day = ~100 Watts.
At least in my area in central Europe, 10°C would be wildly optimistic in summer. I also presume when submerged in cold water, your body will start heating up, at first. So there is probably only a narrow temperature window for effective cooling. Not to mention, you may have to work and be awake to exchange the water, and being constantly wet for a prolonged time may come with it's own set of health problems.
I imagine there could be a situation with a deadly wet-bulb temperature, but below body temperature, where a large body of water may work to cool the body by convection, no?
The big question though is how long will that lake remain cooler than the air in the face of wet bulb temperatures around body temperature. Thermal equilibrium will win in the end.
So, my thinking would be, if the heat transfer from the body to the water and from water to air (through large surface) is sufficient. In a shaded pool, so all heat transfer from the outside is by convection and conduction.
I guess, if it would be sufficient cooling, you could also "just" drink the water and remove hot sweat from the skin, or dispose urine, instead. In theory, never mind electrolytes.
What if I cover myself in alcohol or gasoline some other easily-vaporized substance? Would that still evaporate at a satisfactory rate when the wet bulb temperature is high?
The tap water in Phoenix can exceed 100 degrees, people will fill a bathtub in the morning so their home A/C and evaporation will cool it off by the evening.
Even river water in India or Southeast Asia can exceed 100 degrees. There is no cold water to wet the rag with unless you have a deep well or refrigeration.
Eww! They probably have chlorine in their water, huh? I imagine, otherwise the microbial game would be out of control.
If you live in a place that gets a bit below freezing every winter -20 is not a problem. I recently survived -33C and have rarely experienced less than -20C, life went on as usual, like going to the store and working.
But if the areas in the article suddenly had -20C that would be a better comparison on how bad it would be.
Was it -33C at the store and at the office?
Try living outside at -33C without the opportunity to go inside.
I'll take heat, every time. Cold is a killer.
-20 with no heating (not carbon friendly in such zones), i will be dead in a few days.
If that temperature exceeds the body's max temperature, the clock starts ticking. If you stay, you die. It's not just very hot.
There are parts of the US where 100f is reached by midday and persists past sunset for over a month, with high humidity.
However, our humidity can get extremely high - basically as bad as it gets in our country. Our record seems to be a dew point of 88, and the highest ever recorded in the US is 90 (in Louisiana).
The corn sweat is the biggest contributor, but all of our lakes don’t help either.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2023/11/05/2023-texas-summer...
It’d be nice if they could genetically modify corn to pump out less water, though I don’t know if that’s feasible.
Those days are over. Now Minnesota is like Atlanta in 1950, and Atlanta in the summer is now dangerous. Phoenix in summer is now deadly. A/C is a life-and-death issue in the southern half of the US (unless you're on top of a high mountain). A long absence of A/C in those places will kill you, and I don't mean figuratively.
I am also a grumpy fart right now because the night time temperature has not dropped below 20degrees since, like, November[1]. If I tried to aircon that like I do most of the day time, I would wake up a sinusy coughing mess...
Sure, 30degrees and 90+ humidity is survivable, but only just.
[1] https://7news.com.au/news/brisbane-set-to-break-record-of-da...
And how could you get any work done? I worked in the oilfields when I was in my early twenty's, if the temp was over 100F, less work got done because we didn't want to die. I knew men who got heat stroke, they were never the same again. I myself got heat exhaustion several times, it took a few days to recover. Our bodies can only take so much, no matter how tough you are, wet rags and frequent breaks don't always work.
Drink (hopefully cold) water and cover up from the sun. I grew up doing manual labor in a climate like this. People adapt, but there are of course limits.
Children die sometimes being pushed too hard in athletics, etc. The majority of people however simply put up with it.
1. I was happing working in 36°C in November, but the temperature dropped to around 30°C after December and the humidity went up to near 100%. I got saturated in my own sweat on 50 meter walk to the work site. I worked outside for 1 hour stints, then retreated to aircon.
2. But not everyone could do that ... and in Brisbane, they died on the job. https://qnt.cfmeu.org/news/workers-walk-cross-river-rail-aft... I'm 64 and never head of seen of such a thing happening locally before. Remember, this is in Australia, a rich first world country, aircon everywhere, with some of the best medical resources on the planet (free).
On the news they were tell us we are seeing higher sustained humidity that Singapore, with higher temperatures. The government weather bureau predicted 20mm of rain over one night, and we got 200mm. Their explanation is while they have over 100 years of data, they had never seen this much moisture in the air before and so their models were untrained.
The Bureau said driver behind this is we get most of our moisture / rain fall from the Coral Sea, which is part of the Pacific. The El Nino on top of global warming has driven sea surface temperatures 1.5°C above normal. 1.5° - it sounds so small. What is terrifying is it is small. At the same time in Newfoundland the sea temperature was 8.5°C above normal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/28/ocean-temp... I guess the only reason people are still alive there in the average temperature is lower.
Right. It condenses on cooler surfaces INSIDE the AC unit and drains outside.
If it's central air, you're just mistaken.
Further more, I think, we also need to consider how non-survivable conditions to humans, may play out for other animals we depend on. The cows, chicken, sheep and goats? All dead. But consider also the impact on ecosystems, when birds and predators may die in large quantities in a short time - these ecosystems may completely collapse. Great impact on food security in affected regions. Not to mention disease dynamics when pathogens experience body-like conditions outside the body, and all the decay and death around. I am not sure all plants would make it either, since they need evaporation of water from their leaves, too, to transport nutrients from the soil upwards - and with halted transport, may not be able to fight fungi and so on.
Now, this threat may not come as a gradual trend, but may introduce itself as single (first) freak heat-wave killing hundred thousands of people all at once. A whole region may get the message their land is not habitable for humans anymore. Imagine the migration pressure as a consequence. I don't think a poor country could ever properly adapt to frequent non-survivable temperatures sustainably...
Photosynthesis doesn't work well at high temperatures, so instead plants switch to respiration, burning their stored sugars for energy while taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. Which, you know, is why plants produce those sugars in the first place, not to magnanimously produce oxygen/scrub CO2 for us.
Heat-waves, with lots of days over 40C/100F, will also wreak havoc on our agriculture.
They were basically relying on the fact that historically above 90F (32C) temperatures were unheard of.
Now it's so common that there's been a rush to install AC and heatpumps throughout.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/07/19/excessiv...
Isn't that interesting?
"Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Eart...
This seems optimistic to me. With the state of play of current politics across the globe, I think its going to be a ~billion once you tabulate second order effects.
Already under current changing patterns of climate, there are areas of the world that if power simply went out for an extended period of time millions of people could die, and those areas are growing every year
Also, I notice you said "plants have thrived", and not "major staple crops have thrived". Toxic algae bloom has its own sort of natural beauty I guess, but rice and wheat are both temperate crops and won't be able to grow near the equator if it gets much hotter.
Please note that while hotter temps would warm up croplands near the poles, heat is not light and the tropics are so valuable for farming because they receive more light, not because they're hotter.
https://www.ecoclimax.com/2016/08/land-mass-at-each-longitud...
I am very aware some plants can manage and adapt. But for example there is a difference between C3 and C4 plants in regard to heat tolerance and distribution. The question is, can all plants manage in a given region, in a given moment of time, with a shift in competitive advantage for certain organisms around? Geological or evolutionary time scales are irrelevant, here, since we're talking about the years to come - a human life time.
A temporary disturbance of a single factor may kill an ecosystem. For example eutrophication in lakes may lead to algae bloom, killing all other plants, fish and animals around. Or the extermination of the wolf, or another top predator, leads to overgrowth of deer, or another important prey animal, which then will eat all the young trees, which leads to receding forests, leading to increased soil erosion by wind, and leading to decreased rainfall, which ultimately leads to desertification or aridification.
An instant 10% increased fitness for some opportunistic fungi could wreak havoc in a particular ecosystem. 10% decreased fitness for a local tree species, too. A general loss of diversity may lead to bad adaptability for periodic stress events.
But you won't find evidence of these isolated catastrophes in fossils or drill cores. You don't see the farewell messages from all those species who didn't make it.
No doubt, if I assume everything reported on Wikipedia is accurate, humanity has never had to sustain itself in the face of a greenhouse period, given we only existed approximately 2.8 million years ago, and in "modern" form for only ~300,000 years.
That should give more pause than it does to society writ large, but alas, because humans are generally poor at long term planning and thinking, it appears we are dooming ourselves to be ill prepared.
It sucks for me in those conditions but a lot of locals say they're used to it. The general strategy without AC is to minimize activity during the hottest part of the day and keep a fan on you.
If they don't have access to AC they run fans all the time, and they stay indoors or in the shade.
In fact in the cold months where it dips under 30 the local news always runs a story or two about the (small) wave of cold deaths. (I think usually in parts of the country where it gets down to 15-20 at night)
Today it was 35 in the afternoon and about 70% humidity. I went outside for a swim. There were probably over a million people in my city who were sitting outside all day because their jobs required it. It was a somewhat hot but otherwise completely ordinary day. If you said they're on the brink of heat death they'd say you're crazy.
It may be that people who sit in air conditioned offices in cold countries are translating that one study into some hysteria. It may be they will have the "opportunity" to learn to live in a hot climate like the rest of us, rather than die by the millions.
35° at 70% (your peak today) is wet-bulb 29.8°.
45° at 20% (desert) is wet-bulb 24.3°.
32° at 100% is wet-bulb 31.8°.
At 100% sweating is useless. You can't lose heat through evaporation.
Patna India typically has weather like this for two months a year and probably a million people live there without A/C (just fine): https://weatherspark.com/y/111069/Average-Weather-in-Patna-I...
Incidentally, pro tennis players descend in Melbourne during the peak of Australian summer and play best of 5 sets (men) in the heat where temperatures reach high forties (deg C) and even fifties.
That works by contact with something colder than you. It does not rely on evaporation and so is not affected by high humidity.
I seriously doubt it. I grew up in an area that frequently hit 35C with close to 100% humidity, and I didn't even have an electronic fan before 9 years old. And multiple cities with 10s of millions people had the similar condition too. It was not pleasant but let me assure you, more people died of cold than heat, orders of magnitude more. In a poor country, or an Asian country more than 100 years ago, 10s of thousands of people in a single city would die in a snowy winter. Not having air conditioner? Seriously, that's a first-world problem.
The sun does a great job at making sure humidity is at least always below 80%.
Also, those temperatures are very tolerable for most people, in most of Australia. It's just that they're uncomfortable.
> is not survivable long term
32C is only 89F, which isn't hot at all.
Coming from the tropics where 90s(F) with very high humidity is common, I can't see how that is not survivable. I walked to school and back home in that weather every day and it wasn't a big deal. We never had air conditioning, too poor for that.
Ah, not the ones I had in mind, but these will do:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/16/two-new-s...
https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/308Readings/Anderson2001...
citation needed please
"The incidence of crimes reported to three police stations in different towns (one rural, one urban, one industrial) was studied to see if it varied with the day of the lunar cycle. The period of the study covered 1978-82. The incidence of crimes committed on full moon days was much higher than on all other days, new moon days, and seventh days after the full moon and new moon".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1444800/
And here's a different take from Finland:
"Conclusions Contrary to current scientific opinion, an association exists between moon phases and homicides, and contrary to what has been previously assumed, homicides declined during the full moon, especially in earlier decades. However, the causality of the association remains elusive"
People don't want to spend 0.1% of GDP to help survive people in Ukraine and you think they care how hot is there for the people of Australia?
If so. Shouldn't we prioritize sending weapons to the people of Gaza first, since their casualty numbers are much higher?
If sending more weapons results in lives saved, then this would be an excellent argument for arming Gaza with modern weapons. In terms of children saved the effect could be sizeable.
Sending long range weapons together with F-16 can help to destroy missiles and other long range weapons Russian terrorists use daily on Ukrainian cities.
By sending enough 155cm shells Russian advance could be stopped, which mean less cities will be grounded. Because that is the only way Russian occupational army could advance: by total destruction of everything.
I would be a bit worried about accidental side effects; atmospheric alteration on a large scale seems like a dangerous game.
And Not for global warming, but in The Matrix, humans darkened the skies to fight the machines.
Were already doing that...
We humans consume an insane amount of natural resources. We have built many of our societies around global interdependence. We produce a constant flood of stuff that is consumed quickly and discarded.
We could make a big impact simply shifting to more local economies. For example, a recent lead poisoning issue in the US was tracked back to apple sauce pouches sold at the dollar store. Little could be done legally because of how complex the supply chain was. I don't remember all the details, but multiple countries were involved from growing the apples, processing the apple sauces, packaging, etc.
We don't need such insane systems all powered by energy consumption. We just need local sources of damn apples for our kids to snack on.
How do we intervene in the entire planet with multiple modes of change without making things worse?
I reach for the solution of removing impact as much as possible mainly because it feels much safer. We can reduce our current level of impact and we're really just getting out of the planets way. There's plenty of risk with regards to human cost as we remove and simplify systems, but at least that's the impact falling more directly in the species that caused the problem in the first place.
The simple fact is that removing all of our impact in terms of just stopping release of C02 and methane (as impossible that would be to achieve with our entire society built on energy dense fuels and entrenched interest in keeping it that way) would not be enough at this point. We are cumulatively increasing atmospheric energy retention while also reducing reflectivity and both of those are more or less permanent for a while. Safe or not we'll need to add more reflectivity to give the ecosystem time to recover. Carbon capture won't help in the short term either, the oceans have absorbed too much already and will start releasing it if atmospheric ppm falls below the absorbed density.
To continue your medical analogy, you've got a smoker with lung cancer and having him quit smoking and moving to the country isn't going to be enough to save him, the damage is done. He needs some goddamn chemotherapy or he'll end up like Steve Jobs.
Where we may be talking past each other a bit (sorry if I am) is the risk and reward of untested, theoretical solution that impact the entire planet.
> To continue your medical analogy, you've got a smoker with lung cancer and having him quit smoking and moving to the country isn't going to be enough to save him, the damage is done. He needs some goddamn chemotherapy or he'll end up like Steve Jobs.
While I agree here in theory, we know the general side effects and efficacy of chemotherapy. We also know the scale of impact when it doesn't work.
We aren't so lucky with global interventions like releasing chemicals into the atmosphere. We only have theories of what may happen, but we're talking about the entire planet and everything on it. We don't know what the real effects will be, or as they say - we don't know what we don't know.
As for Steve Jobs, I never really understood the idea of him as a cautionary tale. He knew what his diagnosis was, what treatments were available, and what would likely be the outcome. He exercised the ability to decide what to do with his own life and body. I hope everyone is that lucky.
The way I see it, we can either act and run the risk of getting it wrong and making a bad situation worse, or doing nothing and guaranteeing a bad situation. On a very basic level any risk is worth it if we know that the alternative must be avoided at all costs (e.g. guaranteed death). I don't think the end result will be extinction if we do nothing but reduce emissions, but there it be a major enough calamity to justify the risk of doing some things we can't fully test.
> He exercised the ability to decide what to do with his own life and body.
And later regretted it before he died. I just hope we don't regret our inaction as well.
> And later regretted it before he died. I just hope we don't regret our inaction as well.
Yep that's very true, I also hope people don't regret their decisions (I wouldn't necessarily classify it as inaction, that sounds like the default should be to act).
The fact is we have a massive amount of waste in the system that we just aren't willing to give up. How much could be saved if we didn't expect that every McDonalds in the country could provide the exact same menu anytime, anywhere? Or if we stopping buying new cloths just to kill time? Or if we no longer had holiday traditions based entirely on consumerism of gifts that almost certainly weren't built to last and we didn't need in the first place?
None of this has to be all or nothing, but it does require societies to tilt the scales on how highly we prioritize modern economics and convenience. We don't have to get rid of all use of oil, cars, gift giving, etc. We just need to decide that reducing our use as much as possible is worth the effort.
> Given this reality, how do you expect to achieve your goals in a reasonable time-frame?
In the context of this thread, there's a bit of a false dichotomy here. You're asking why I should expect that people can choose to make a meaningful reduction in consumption as an alternative to filling the atmosphere with theoretical solutions that have never been tested before and who's impacts are unknown.
Are you proposing that because people don't care enough to reduce consumption we should just let the authorities in charge spray a bunch of chemicals into the atmosphere and hope it works?
One interesting example from very recent research. In just the last couple of years we began enforcing reduced sulfur emissions from diesel motors in international waters. The expectation was that would help with climate change, how couldn't it? Well it turns out that ocean temperatures actually rose in the open ocean where almost all traffic is diesel. The research I suggesting that the sulfur was actually helping to block out some of the sun's energy and was acting as a cooling agent. The well thought out and well reasoned approach to diesel emissions back fired and made things worse.
Nice story, but the drive to reduce SOx and other particulate emissions is not because of climate chance but because of localized health concerns: because of the respiratory impact of SOx and soot to the lungs of people on coastlines and in port cities.
By the way, Dieselgate is a similar story - the illegally-increased SOx, NOx and particulate emissions of those diesel engines were created in order to decrease fuel consumption and thus climate change impact. Cracking down on Dieselgate helped people living near the car exhausts but hurt the climate as a secondary effect...
Dieselgate was a very different problem to solve. VW was caught lying on emissions tests to avoid regulations meant to reduce emissions in populated areas like large cities.
"It's ok I'll get a liver and lungs transplant :)"
We'll really do everything before we consider stopping the root cause lol. And heat isn't even the only issue we're facing
Mnemonic: IN=IMmigrate, EXIT=Emigrate
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/fatal-heat-humi...
The medium-term problem for these hot countries is that extreme heat negatively impacts education and economic productivity. Whenever there's a heatwave (which will become more frequent) they have to keep their kids home. Worker producitivity is negatively impacted. It's terrible for their economic development. The US and Australia and Canada continuing to pump more fossil fuels instead of simply building renewables does nothing help the average person in Sri Lanka living under 30+ degree heat. It is actively physically harming them in a very real way. It's an indirect, diffuse form of physical assault.
The long-term problem for these hot countries is that wet bulb temperatures will make it literally uninhabitable unless you have electricity and aircon, which many don't. This is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. If we keep emitting, temperatures will keep rising, until the point that this becomes true. It is causality.
I want conservatives to think about this latter point because the consequences are mass immigration to colder countries, primarily the US and in Europe. Then the side-effect of that will probably be a rise in authoritarianism in these colder countries as a reaction to the mass immigration. None of this benefits anyone.
> and subsidize the same for poor countries who haven't historically emitted much and don't have the wealth to transition themselves.
Yes! With a fraction of the money sloshing around various "charities" and NGOs, mostly spent on salaries, you could build solar with storage for millions of people. Of course in practice it would be really complicated, you have to make sure the right people run the systems and there will be bad cases of corruption. But it really is the least we could do.
> The US and Australia and Canada continuing to pump more fossil fuels
The funny thing is that the market is turning even Australia and Texas into solar superpowers. Ever since solar became the cheapest form of generation both have seen an incredible boom in solar, with almost no policy incentives. This is a huge win for the planet, if people want to build solar because the incentives align they will just do it without costing larger society any (political) capital.
> It is actively physically harming them in a very real way. It's an indirect, diffuse form of physical assault.
I follow the logic and agree about the causality chain, but this is a road it's best not to go down. It quickly turns into personally blaming people for things they had no control over. That has never been a good way to persuade people. Imo it's also a lazy deflection, since humanity has never really paid any attention to its resource usage. The only difference is that Industrial societies gained the capability to affect the planet on such a large scale.
I think the market is too slow by itself. There's a technical reason for this. Externalities are mispriced, causing market failure. Markets may get there by themselves eventually, but not as quickly as they should.
Australia is set to become a solar superpower partly because the center-left government got into power. The center-right is hostile to renewables even though Australia is perfectly situated. This wasn't always the case, the center-right used to be somewhat favorable to renewables until they got radicalized by the usual stuff.
Likewise with the US, the IRA's renewables provisions only got passed because the center-left is in power. Renewables will still grow with Trump in power due to state-level subsidies, but far slower than what would otherwise happen.
My primary concern with all this is this human, political side. Solving this problem is as much a persuasion exercise as a technology exercise. We need to somehow get the political right to drop their defenses. They are blinded by their dislike of lefties and Greta Thunberg and so on, that they are not thinking rationally about the objective market failure that needs to be corrected.
Further on this, we need to present a new narrative to the degrowthers. The degrowth left sees a mutually exclusive trade between growth and climate change. Which is sort of true if conservatives get in power and don't change their belief system.
What's needed is a sustainable growth narrative where you give conservatives their growth and you give the left their lower emissions. It is not that hard to implement if people could just stop being so politically radicalized.
Demand for air conditioning is expected to more than triple by 2050 (consuming as much electricity as all of China and India today). [2]
[1] https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/hot-cold-and-deadl... [2] https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/hotter-climat...
Which further exacerbates the problem. Another unfortunate feedback loop for us.
I suspect you’re comparing an airconditioner against a resistive heating unit.
Maintaining a fixed temperature difference across a wall with a fixed thermal conductivity takes the same amount of energy no matter which side of the wall you want to keep the heat.
On the other hand, any inefficiencies in your heat transfer capability, any incoming solar radiation, and any other activity going on inside a space (like lighting, cooking or refrigeration, or just people metabolizing their breakfast) tend to add heat to it.
So maintaining a cooler temperature on the side where you’re trying to do stuff seems likely to be more inefficient than heating it.
This sentence basically says "we don't need to make less disasters, just better handle them".
Hurricanes aren't getting stronger, because there are less deaths.
But ignores we are getting better at predicting land falls and evacuating.
Responding to disasters 'better', doesn't mean disasters are not getting worse.
And there is some diminishing return, eventually the disasters will overwhelm the ability to respond.
What can/do they stock up on to prepare for extended heat waves? Ground water reserves? Generators and fuel? Underground shelters?
(At least in my part of America, HVAC equipment failures under season-maximum loads are extremely common. And if failure = death...)
And maybe keep kinda quiet about it, too. If your nice & friendly neighbors are facing death by heat stroke, they could grow considerably less nice & friendly.
Power.
Most of the billions didn't choose it. A good chunk of the billions aren't even aware.
Shame on you Wired for diluting the accountability and giving those who should be blamed a free pass.
Sheeshhhhhh. Humanity? My arse.
In short, we can't solve a problem, when we can't even have The Problem properly described, scooped, attributed to, etc. To blame "Humanity" *is* a step in the wrong direction. It is naive, at best.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/08/florida-bill...
The twin hills that humanity may die on if something doesn't happen to wake people up to their foolishness.
I can make a semi-actionable plan to fly, but if I am not able to achieve flight via the plan, in fact, my plan is not fully actionable, so this fully part is a pretty big deal.
What if you people are wrong? Like, what is it about certain topics that cause having backup plans to be a bad idea? Why are there certain topics that people are determined to not contemplate, even if they are literally existential threats?
If we can't talk about the topics themselves, could we at least talk about the second order mass psychological phenomenon, or is that off limits too? I pose this as a question to humans in general, sorry if I'm taking it out on you individually.
> If only everyone voted for parties who don't deny science...
So here we have a prediction of risk, that itself contains non-disclosed/perceived risk.
We are welcome to behave however we'd like of course, and we will be rewarded accordingly. Some people like to put their/our faith (which is what it is) in one basket, others like to have a multi-prong, layered approach.