Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the opening to "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In that book, a wet bulb event (high humidity and high temp) in India pushes infrastructure past the breaking point, the grid goes down, AC systems still running on generators are overloaded and overcrowded and fail, the water temp goes over body temp, and millions die.

The positive cultural/societal reaction to the disaster strained my suspension of disbelief pretty hard, as is typical of KSR novels in my experience, but the idea of a heat wave causing a massive catastrophe (and the poignant description of attempting to live through it) stuck with me.

View on HN

I was also going to mention wet bulb temperatures as well. As horrible as the conditions described in the article is, it describes a very dry heat. Which means sweating and water can still help.

The really scary thing will be when the wet bulb temperature goes above 35 degrees, and humans can only survive with AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

For what it's worth they can live under ground [1][2], even build cities but they would have had to start that project some time ago. Before someone says it, yeah not everywhere and its not for everyone but in enough places and for enough people that we can adapt to heat and at least survive as a civilization.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYmw6FtSIA Wyoming Trona mines

Someone wrote a book about this, they called the people who went underground the Morlocks. It was a cautionary tale...

There are cautionary tails about everything humans do. Good leadership and the desire to survive can keep some of us around. If we have to stay down there for thousands of generations, well, it won't affect me or anyone I know. We can jump off the evolutionary bridge when we get to it. Ideally our automatons would be geoengineering the planet to make the surface hospitable once again prior to our becoming Trogs.

> Good leadership and the desire to survive can keep some of us around.

I would posit that good leadership and desire to survive could prevent humanity from retreating to the earth like naked mole rats.

I would posit that good leadership and desire to survive could prevent humanity from retreating to the earth like naked mole rats.

It very well could. I like having contingency plans and not letting my survival and the survival of our civilization solely depend on the promises of congress critters. I also want to learn earth bending from the giant badgermoles so I am biased.

I hadn't considered the badgermole angle..fair enough. Have this webcomic that I spent more trying to find than I should because I get flashbacks whenever I hear people throw out the "we'll live underground" angle

https://badspacecomics.com/rivers-end-copy

Civilizations have made underground cities for quite some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city

You can live underground during extreme heat, you cannot build an underground shelter under extreme heat.

When the day comes do you think there will be room for everyone?

you cannot build an underground shelter under extreme heat.

Yup. That's why I said,

"but they would have had to start that project some time ago"

When the day comes do you think there will be room for everyone?

Depends when the project starts, how much money goes into it based on the nations priority. There are subway systems in some countries designed for this purpose that can hold entire cities. Not entire nations but enough that a nation or civilization could be restarted. It would be a very rough start.

If countries started putting a small percentage of their GDP into building underground cities a few decades ago they could probably save most people. They would have to store up massive amounts of freeze dried food and have water treatment facilities that can hold lakes of drinkable water.

I stayed in a mongoloid home in Tunisia last year. It was lovely. It was a large, central, below-grade courtyard with dugout, underground rooms branching off it. The rooms were cool all day. By being below grade, the courtyard was in shade most of the day and didn't get too hot. Through clever tunneling, the rising heat generated a draft.

I also learned that mongoloid, at least in Tunisia, is not considered a derogatory term.

I believe you mean troglodyte homes. It's literal Greek for "hole-dweller" but become an insult by association.

Hoho, you are right! In what is left of my addled mind, I substituted one questionable word for another. Thank you!

> The really scary thing will be when the wet bulb temperature goes above 35 degrees, and humans can only survive with AC.

That's already an everyday reality in Singapore.

No it isn't. People spend time outdoors perfectly comfortably in Singapore. https://meteologix.com/sg/observations/wet-bulb-temperature....

Depends on the season. "Everyday" was a poor choice of word, but 35+ wet bulb temperatures happen and are to some extent routine and expected.

Singapore is not mentioned in the wiki article on wet bulb temperature.

And given that the maximum ever temperature in Singapore is 35-36 for most months, I doubt that a wet bulb temperature of 35+ is common.

When I visited Singapore most people retreated indoors to the AC from about 2:30-4:30 every afternoon. I don’t recall the exact temps then but the idea that everyone would be just fine in a severe heat wave leading to power grid outages is false.

I don't make any sort of claim of 'just fine'. I am saying there will be places and times where people cannot regulate their body temperature via evaporation, so they will die outside without AC within hours. And in Singapore that point hasn't been reached yet.

The point isn't that it's "just fine" right now, it's that it will get way worse.

The wet bulb temperature went as high as 34.2ºC today, at 2:30pm:

https://api-open.data.gov.sg/v2/real-time/api/weather?api=wb...

(Search for "high".)

WBGT != WBB

I'm sweating as I read this in a non-air-conditioned room.

No, I'm already not comfortable indoors. It's much worse outdoors.

I don't believe I have heard of KSR before, but I have been telling my friends that an incident like this is in our (the world's) future.

It is feeling more and more imminent with each passing year.

And then there will be cries of nobody saw this coming.

I believe the idea of a wet-bulb temperature event has reached just enough people that a "nobody saw it coming" would be very poorly received.

This is a weird premise. India (and Bangladesh) has virtually 100% access to electricity and adequate generation capacity. The concept of temperatures exceeding the wet bulb temperature makes for a scary fiction novel. But I bet even my dad’s village in Bangladesh could afford to put a few cheap Chinese mini splits in the school building and other gathering places. They are extremely efficient in the heat and wouldn’t cause a huge strain on the grid.

As the article notes, people certainly will and do die from such conditions. But it’s in the tens of thousands, not millions. And about 50,000 people a year die from heat waves in europe, too.

Problem with events like this is that they affect tens of thousands of people all at once. The first 1% of people will buy all of the available air conditioners. This happened in Australia in 2019: we had a huge bushfire with smoke affecting ~600K people. The available air filters sold out in hours.

> virtually 100% access to electricity and adequate generation capacity

Tell that to all the brown- and black-outs I experienced while traveling there. Renting a room with AC was double the price, at least, abd then there wasn't enough electricity to power it. There frequently wasn't even enough to fully freeze icecubes in the freezer.

> But I bet even my dad’s village in Bangladesh could afford to put a few cheap Chinese mini splits in the school building and other gathering places. They are extremely efficient in the heat and wouldn’t cause a huge strain on the grid.

Mini-splits have a maximum operating temperature in the 47-50˚C range.

The headline in this article seems to indicate some places have hit that limit, and so the external units (compressors) may not be able push the heat out of the refrigerant any longer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com