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.
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.
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.
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.
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 mole rates so I am biased.
"But global warming is a hoax. And even if it wasn't it's not our fault. People couldn't be the cause. And even if it is our fault there's nothing we could do about it."
We have broken our world for the greed of a few. History will not be kind to us.
I certainly agree that the powerful elites bear a disproportionate share of the guilt for the harm they have caused.
But I also believe that much of what's going on in the world isn't solely their fault and is also in many ways an emergent behavior. We are all like ants in an ant mill. Each of us is doing the things that locally make sense for us (even taking into account our desires to take care of the earth!), but our interactions with the economy and the market build a sort of giant super-organism out of us all whose behavior is to fuck up the climate.
See I could agree with the first part. But then you add We have broken our world for the greed of a few. After that I sort of understand why so many folks reject the former – they're rejecting the empty moralizing.
If you truly believe climate change is real then also admit that "We all have broken the world", except perhaps some uncontacted peoples in the Amazon.
Anyone who has ridden in an automobile, a train, a plane, a powered boat has contributed. Anyone who has used or purchased goods transported with any of the above has as well. Anyone who's eaten crops grown with large amounts of industrial fertilizers has contributed (e.g. most of the world).
The oil companies just produce what everyone in the world wants and wants cheap.
There are only about 1.6 billion cars in the world. Only about 20% of the world population has access to a personal car. Less than that have ever ridden a plane, and less than 10% fly with any regularity.
A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.
Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.
The biggest hope at this point honestly is that fewer people are having kids and we're on track to halve the world population in another couple generations. Greenhouse emissions cut by half.
The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.
Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.
If I cut down my plane flight in half that means I'll take a plane every two years, meaning I'll also see my family half as much. You'd also have to include that, since I travel economy, you'd divide my contribution by ~350.
If Taylor Swift cuts her plane travel by half she'd "only" make 51 trips a year [1] on a plane that carries 12 and would still make more money in a year than what I'll see in my lifetime.
IMO, saying that both of us are contributing equally as much to global warming is just unfair.
I didn't say we're all equally culpable. We're not. Yet en masse we're all guilty to some degree.
There's only what 10's of thousands Taylor Swifts in the world. Yet there's billions of everyone else. The majority of greenhouse gasses likely come from the aggregate of everyone.
A personal example: I don't drive. I use public transit a couple of times a year. I am in private cars maybe once every two year. I haven't flown in about 15 years. Clearly this is a contrived example. My energy use patterns are much more typical when using other metrics. That said, it is also the flip side of being a Taylor Swift of the world. There is a point in the developed world where the millions are using much more energy than the thousands.
I said developed world because there are also parts of the world that simply don't have access to my gratuitous level of energy use. To say that they are guilty of contributing based upon the technicality that they are directly or indirectly using a disproportionately small amount of energy is beyond insulting. It is also a blatant way to paper over our responsibility.
> Globally, the poorest 50% emit roughly 4.4 billion tons to 4.7 billion tons equivalent annually, accounting for about 11% to 12% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
The “less-developed” bottom half of the world population still produces about a tenth of the annual co2 production annually.
That means instead of potential climate catastrophe in 10 years it’d take 100 years if the top half disappeared tomorrow. Obviously an overly simplistic argument but its meant to show that the problem would just be slower but not gone if we got rid of the “wealthy”.
Now I don’t believe they’re equally as culpable. Yet I also firmly believe the vast majority would choose the same as us in developed world have if they could.
Ultimately that’s more of my point. What’s happening isn’t due to some evil plot by the ultra wealthy. It’s the result of human nature.
Some unscrupulous ultra wealthy might hasten it by a few years or a decade, but the core problem is human nature and an abundance of fossil fuels.
The “wealthy” are also the most likely to prevent catastrophe by developing renewables, etc.
You are conflating participation from equality, yes everyone participates in the system, it takes a lot of privileged to be able to disassociate ones self from the system itself. The power dynamic within the system favors the wealthy, whom have decided that this is the path we are going down.
HN loves to nit-pick about what "the wealthy" actually means, but in most contexts, when someone complains "the wealthy" did this or "the wealthy" did that, what they mean are a very, very tiny number of people who are not on HN, not in anyone on HN's family, and not intimately known by anyone on HN.
When someone says "the wealthy" are getting rich to everyone's detriment, they are almost never talking about the doctor who lives three doors down the street from you who drives a nice new 911 or the guy who owns 20 laundromats in your city. I think we all know who we're talking about.
Are they guiding policy and making decisions at corporations or just living within the existing framework? He's talking about the people shaping the world and future.
Not all people have equal culpability. It's absurd to be like, well you havent successfully waged an eco-terroristic war to overturn the system so you're just as bad as someone actively leading a lobby group to cast doubt on the science, or bribing politicians not to act on it, or even just as someone who votes in favor of people who resist action. In fact it's just another tactic of denialism to say "if you can't personally solve this problem just give up and caring is ineffective so you shouldn't care"
I worked at a warehouse last year. Managers always breathing down my neck to work faster. Constant stress for 9 hours straight. (Okay, we got a lunch break at least. There are worse jobs!)
It got me wondering. Alright, what's his problem. Well, his manager is breathing down his neck too. It's literally his job to make my day as stressful as possible. Okay, why? You trace that chain and where does it end up? Fat capitalist?
But what else? Well, where's that pressure coming from? It's the customer. If the company stopped whipping us, and let us work at a normal pace, they'd need 40% more employees to cover the work. Delivery costs would increase proportionally, and suddenly grandma would stop buying from us. She'd go to the company that whips their employees. The whole place would go under.
If it weren't for oil companies going out of their way to sabotage alternative fuels through politicians, misinformation, and a myriad of other abuses I'd be more inclined to believe you. Not everyone is equally culpable in this, there are many who have been trying to get rid of oil as the main fuel source for a long time.
two things can be true at the same time. oil and coal before it pulled billions of people out of extreme poverty, but the debt taken on in terms of CO2 will come due. if the gulf stream stops, we're all in for a ride - or worse, our grandchildren.
I'm personally in the 'drill and burn as fast as possible in a mad rush to fusion power' camp so we get a way to fix this shit rather than the 'stop civilization from doing its thing overnight' camp. alas, neither is happening.
We know that cutting down trees increases heat and intensifies drought but we continue to do it, how bad do things need to get before we reverse course?
Human land use is incredibly inefficient. As a simple example, in the US the vast majority of corn production is ethanol or animal feed (which is incredibly inneficient on a calorie basis). Then when you take into account low density residential and their endless lawns (turf grass has by far the most acres of any crop in the US) and a million other poor uses of land and there's a lot we can do, even at 8 billion people, without destroying every forest.
The issue isn't that the problem isn't solvable, there are tons of things that have huge environmental benefits. The problem is that these generally require some sacrifice (e.g. denser housing with much smaller lawns, eating more resource efficient foods like lentils, moving away from fossil fuels) but there's not sufficient collective will for actually doing these things.
I think such problem are unsolvable. In America, people can't live without meat and they will always justify it by bringing pasture raised cattle farm :/
If you are reading this in your climate controlled northern hemisphere room, be reminded that the people suffering this are not just going to disappear, and they will need to live somewhere, somehow, and they will be more motivated than you will ever be. If you love your "western comfort" so much, the best thing you can do is to make sure other people than yourselves can also have a bare minimum of living conditions.
The physical footprint of a data center is far smaller than a city, so that would limit heat island effects that arise from things like surface albedo (which are only material over large areas). In terms of raw heat dissipation though, an exceptionally large data center could compete with a small city.
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.
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 mole rates so I am biased.
"But global warming is a hoax. And even if it wasn't it's not our fault. People couldn't be the cause. And even if it is our fault there's nothing we could do about it."
We have broken our world for the greed of a few. History will not be kind to us.
Humanity is a blip in Earth's history. We'll be a historical curiosity to whatever comes next just like the dinosaurs are to us.
I certainly agree that the powerful elites bear a disproportionate share of the guilt for the harm they have caused.
But I also believe that much of what's going on in the world isn't solely their fault and is also in many ways an emergent behavior. We are all like ants in an ant mill. Each of us is doing the things that locally make sense for us (even taking into account our desires to take care of the earth!), but our interactions with the economy and the market build a sort of giant super-organism out of us all whose behavior is to fuck up the climate.
What are you quoting?
I assume, a tailored version of the narcissists' prayer, echoed across online forums as long as they have been around.
https://www.thelifedoctor.org/the-narcissist-s-prayer
See I could agree with the first part. But then you add We have broken our world for the greed of a few. After that I sort of understand why so many folks reject the former – they're rejecting the empty moralizing.
If you truly believe climate change is real then also admit that "We all have broken the world", except perhaps some uncontacted peoples in the Amazon.
Anyone who has ridden in an automobile, a train, a plane, a powered boat has contributed. Anyone who has used or purchased goods transported with any of the above has as well. Anyone who's eaten crops grown with large amounts of industrial fertilizers has contributed (e.g. most of the world).
The oil companies just produce what everyone in the world wants and wants cheap.
There are only about 1.6 billion cars in the world. Only about 20% of the world population has access to a personal car. Less than that have ever ridden a plane, and less than 10% fly with any regularity.
A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.
Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.
The biggest hope at this point honestly is that fewer people are having kids and we're on track to halve the world population in another couple generations. Greenhouse emissions cut by half.
The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.
Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.
Not everyone's footprint is the same, though.
If I cut down my plane flight in half that means I'll take a plane every two years, meaning I'll also see my family half as much. You'd also have to include that, since I travel economy, you'd divide my contribution by ~350.
If Taylor Swift cuts her plane travel by half she'd "only" make 51 trips a year [1] on a plane that carries 12 and would still make more money in a year than what I'll see in my lifetime.
IMO, saying that both of us are contributing equally as much to global warming is just unfair.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-spent-160-hours...
I didn't say we're all equally culpable. We're not. Yet en masse we're all guilty to some degree.
There's only what 10's of thousands Taylor Swifts in the world. Yet there's billions of everyone else. The majority of greenhouse gasses likely come from the aggregate of everyone.
It doesn't always work that way.
A personal example: I don't drive. I use public transit a couple of times a year. I am in private cars maybe once every two year. I haven't flown in about 15 years. Clearly this is a contrived example. My energy use patterns are much more typical when using other metrics. That said, it is also the flip side of being a Taylor Swift of the world. There is a point in the developed world where the millions are using much more energy than the thousands.
I said developed world because there are also parts of the world that simply don't have access to my gratuitous level of energy use. To say that they are guilty of contributing based upon the technicality that they are directly or indirectly using a disproportionately small amount of energy is beyond insulting. It is also a blatant way to paper over our responsibility.
> Globally, the poorest 50% emit roughly 4.4 billion tons to 4.7 billion tons equivalent annually, accounting for about 11% to 12% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
The “less-developed” bottom half of the world population still produces about a tenth of the annual co2 production annually.
That means instead of potential climate catastrophe in 10 years it’d take 100 years if the top half disappeared tomorrow. Obviously an overly simplistic argument but its meant to show that the problem would just be slower but not gone if we got rid of the “wealthy”.
Now I don’t believe they’re equally as culpable. Yet I also firmly believe the vast majority would choose the same as us in developed world have if they could.
Ultimately that’s more of my point. What’s happening isn’t due to some evil plot by the ultra wealthy. It’s the result of human nature.
Some unscrupulous ultra wealthy might hasten it by a few years or a decade, but the core problem is human nature and an abundance of fossil fuels.
The “wealthy” are also the most likely to prevent catastrophe by developing renewables, etc.
But OP said exactly that: "We (meaning all of us) have broken our world for the greed of a few."
There’s a popular comic for this take - https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Not all participants are equal.
You are conflating participation from equality, yes everyone participates in the system, it takes a lot of privileged to be able to disassociate ones self from the system itself. The power dynamic within the system favors the wealthy, whom have decided that this is the path we are going down.
Writing about "the wealthy" on a site like HN is always interesting.
Who do you mean?
The vast majority of HN commenters are 10%ers and very many are 1%ers.
But there's always someone richer to complain about.
HN loves to nit-pick about what "the wealthy" actually means, but in most contexts, when someone complains "the wealthy" did this or "the wealthy" did that, what they mean are a very, very tiny number of people who are not on HN, not in anyone on HN's family, and not intimately known by anyone on HN.
When someone says "the wealthy" are getting rich to everyone's detriment, they are almost never talking about the doctor who lives three doors down the street from you who drives a nice new 911 or the guy who owns 20 laundromats in your city. I think we all know who we're talking about.
Are they guiding policy and making decisions at corporations or just living within the existing framework? He's talking about the people shaping the world and future.
Not all people have equal culpability. It's absurd to be like, well you havent successfully waged an eco-terroristic war to overturn the system so you're just as bad as someone actively leading a lobby group to cast doubt on the science, or bribing politicians not to act on it, or even just as someone who votes in favor of people who resist action. In fact it's just another tactic of denialism to say "if you can't personally solve this problem just give up and caring is ineffective so you shouldn't care"
I worked at a warehouse last year. Managers always breathing down my neck to work faster. Constant stress for 9 hours straight. (Okay, we got a lunch break at least. There are worse jobs!)
It got me wondering. Alright, what's his problem. Well, his manager is breathing down his neck too. It's literally his job to make my day as stressful as possible. Okay, why? You trace that chain and where does it end up? Fat capitalist?
Well, something something mutual funds. Okay, that's beyond me.
But what else? Well, where's that pressure coming from? It's the customer. If the company stopped whipping us, and let us work at a normal pace, they'd need 40% more employees to cover the work. Delivery costs would increase proportionally, and suddenly grandma would stop buying from us. She'd go to the company that whips their employees. The whole place would go under.
Something something, Moloch is my nan?
No profit margins or shareholders at all of course...
If it weren't for oil companies going out of their way to sabotage alternative fuels through politicians, misinformation, and a myriad of other abuses I'd be more inclined to believe you. Not everyone is equally culpable in this, there are many who have been trying to get rid of oil as the main fuel source for a long time.
Hell, even Greenpeace had a huge campaign against nuclear, ensuring we burn coal for decades more than we should have.
two things can be true at the same time. oil and coal before it pulled billions of people out of extreme poverty, but the debt taken on in terms of CO2 will come due. if the gulf stream stops, we're all in for a ride - or worse, our grandchildren.
I'm personally in the 'drill and burn as fast as possible in a mad rush to fusion power' camp so we get a way to fix this shit rather than the 'stop civilization from doing its thing overnight' camp. alas, neither is happening.
But then why not "mad rush to build battery banks everywhere" instead of "mad rush to fusion power"?
It can't very well be any more expensive.
Batteries give returns right now, fusion only in the future. Maybe.
Oh shut the fuck up
We know that cutting down trees increases heat and intensifies drought but we continue to do it, how bad do things need to get before we reverse course?
"We"? I haven't even been to India let alone cut down trees there.
... when we find that it also affects us - sat on our fat backsides in our air conditioned gold plated ballrooms.
What’s the alternative aside from forced sterilization and starvation to decrease the human footprint?
Human land use is incredibly inefficient. As a simple example, in the US the vast majority of corn production is ethanol or animal feed (which is incredibly inneficient on a calorie basis). Then when you take into account low density residential and their endless lawns (turf grass has by far the most acres of any crop in the US) and a million other poor uses of land and there's a lot we can do, even at 8 billion people, without destroying every forest.
The issue isn't that the problem isn't solvable, there are tons of things that have huge environmental benefits. The problem is that these generally require some sacrifice (e.g. denser housing with much smaller lawns, eating more resource efficient foods like lentils, moving away from fossil fuels) but there's not sufficient collective will for actually doing these things.
I think such problem are unsolvable. In America, people can't live without meat and they will always justify it by bringing pasture raised cattle farm :/
Pretty sure there’s a middle ground between “forced sterilisation” and “boil humans to death in 50°C heat,” don’t you?
Sterilize half of humans, and boil the other half?
Hint: The birth rate of a population is inversely correlated with wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Educate women? Isn’t that broadly considered to reduce birth rate?
Cutoff petroleum-derived fertilizer except for those who can afford carbon credits.
> Poor people don't have the luxury of worrying about the heat
Just.. damn man
> For eight or nine days, temperatures of 47-48C continued without a break
Wasn't sure if the night time temps stayed that hot due to some factor but it appears that's the daytime high.
> Overnight temperatures remain around 30C.
In India even middle class people can't afford AC. However, Indian government and musk is worried about falling birth rate.
[delayed]
47 celsius is 116.6 fahrenheit.
47 degrees Celsius is also 27,5 meV
If you are reading this in your climate controlled northern hemisphere room, be reminded that the people suffering this are not just going to disappear, and they will need to live somewhere, somehow, and they will be more motivated than you will ever be. If you love your "western comfort" so much, the best thing you can do is to make sure other people than yourselves can also have a bare minimum of living conditions.
I wonder if data centres are as bad as cities for urban heat island effect
The physical footprint of a data center is far smaller than a city, so that would limit heat island effects that arise from things like surface albedo (which are only material over large areas). In terms of raw heat dissipation though, an exceptionally large data center could compete with a small city.
Not when a datacenter is the size of manhattan
Yeah, but I’m wondering if they are hotter or more consistently hotter than a city which while hotter than a forest still has trees and parks etc.
Maybe? https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/sustainablebuildings/...
Welcome to the future! What a lovely world we've created for ourselves!