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...
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.
[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
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.
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...
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.
That works by contact with something colder than you. It does not rely on evaporation and so is not affected by high humidity.
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.
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.
It's one thing in cloudy weather with wind and rain but in sunny clear weather it felt deadly
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.