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India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

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Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#201

Post by TaylorAlexander »

blensor wrote: post #191
ajross wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tub will work, sure, as long as it's pulled from a large body of water that hasn't warmed up with the air. Hopping in the local lake is an obvious choice. But in a detached demographic sense: effectively everyone lives in a city in the modern world, and while their housing might not be air conditioned most of the major buildings are. In an emergency like this everyone would just crowd into office buildings and shop…

Is this really a long term solution. An A/C does not "produce" cold air it just reduces the temperature at one spot by increasing the temperature in another place making the temperature around those buildings even warmer. At some point A/C units will be battling for that little temperature difference that allows them to perform their function with increasingly higher energy demand.

Yeah and how much CO2 emissions will that A/C emit?

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#202

Post by jey »

jackfraser wrote: post #148
gonzo41 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting this. It's something that's really hard to communicate about climate change to people. It's also super depressing. I went down with heat stroke once and I get know what this is like. I was in hospital for 4 days after a close brush with kidney failure. So many people just think it'll be just a bit hotter in the future.

Tell me again how buying a Tesla will save this village

It's actually a really interesting question, but also very hard to answer in practice. The positive answer would involve the ability of competitive markets[1] to serve as efficient mechanisms that coordinate the activities of people across the globe to collectively increase wealth/output[2]. With greater total surplus, it becomes relatively "cheaper" [on a societal level] to solve problems like saving the village. (Of course, this leaves out the public goods problem of actually provisioning the village-saving in the case that the villagers don't get lifted up directly by economic growth and buy it for themselves.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_equilibrium

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfar...

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#203

Post by jogjayr »

albertzeyer wrote: post #22
factorialboy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

If this is normal, then you imply that the article linked by inflatableDodo is wrong? Btw, I was kind of impressed, when visiting India and speaking to a few locals, that they don't see climate change to be a real thing, or at least to be such a big problem, and much overrated. The claim was basically that it was always very warm, and it is just normal that way, and they don't expect it to become much warmer. I'm not…

> Btw, I was kind of impressed, when visiting India and speaking to a few locals, that they don't see climate change to be a real thing, or at least to be such a big problem, and much overrated. The claim was basically that it was always very warm, and it is just normal that way, and they don't expect it to become much warmer.

That's very much not my experience. And regardless of beliefs, actual government policy and individual action are largely emissions-reducing. See a comment I posted some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164816

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#204

Post by newnewpdro »

hedora wrote: post #93
jessriedel wrote: post #38

The 50 C number was observed in a desert. Death Valley, California, also a desert, spend 5 consecutive days above 54 C in 1913, the year it set the temperature record of 56.7 C.

For people that don’t know, Death Valley’s name is no exaggeration, even in modern times. Going outside there even for short periods of time is extremely dangerous for some fraction of each year. They shut the park down when this happens. A few years ago, some tourists that didn’t heed the warning ended up dead after rental van overheated. I don’t see how the populated areas already hitting comparable temperatures wi…

> I don’t see how the populated areas already hitting comparable temperatures will be habitable at all in ten years.

California desert dwellers simply spend time indoors when it's too hot outside. They use energy-efficient swamp coolers currently in otherwise conventional above-grade homes. If those cease working because the desert air becomes persistently humid even when scorching hot (this strikes me as unlikely) I expect deep basements and underground earthdomes will become more common.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#205

Post by aq3cn »

enitihas wrote: post #109

I think humidity is a big problem in a lot of places in India with high temperature. In my village in easter UP in India, summer was intolerable because of high humidity and shortage of electricity. (We used to have 8hours electricity per day, but sometimes outages would happen and would go unrepaired for week to month). It was impossible to do anything but take a hand fan and use it to cool yourself. A lot of the ti…

Now days, you can get 24x7 electricity in tier 1, 2 & 3 cities. I am not sure about villages. Our country is almost power surplus nation now.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#206

Post by the8472 »

newnewpdro wrote: post #200
wongarsu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every human is effectively a 100W space heater just from being alive. That means you need at least 30W of air conditioning capacity per human to keep the temperature constant (on top of what you need to counter heat from outside). Unless these buildings are designed as emergency shelters for heat waves their air conditioning systems won't be able to cope with all the people.

I don't think it's that simple at all. The principal human-appreciated effect of AC is the dehumidifying of the air when it's cooled. The dry interior air allows human perspiration to regulate temperature effectively. The AC doesn't have to cool all the bodies, it just has to keep the air dry enough.

Don't ACs dehumidify by condensing the water? If so then it means they need to get rid of the heat of vaporization, the same amount of energy the humans shed by evaporative cooling.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#207

Post by [deleted] »

stevezsa8 wrote: post #160
noir_lord wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but it is referred to colloquially as "The Syrian Crisis" here, in any case I don't what the solution is, I deeply admire the Germans for what they did though. Taking 1.5 million migrants with a population of 82 million, if the UK (my country) had done the same ratio that would have been 1.2 million, best figure I can find for UK is One thing I do wonder is what western culture will look like in a hundred…

Culture evolves/changes over time. So it's a valid question as long as it's not a veiled "will there be too many brown people".

[deleted]

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#208

Post by wongarsu »

noir_lord wrote: post #179
wongarsu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It even comes with full automation, the operator can get up and fetch coffee without worrying about anyone slipping through. How convenient. I just hope nobody tells Trump these exist.

Oh I'm sure he already knows. ...and really how hard would it be to build one of these, the level of CV required is already solved off the shelf, the rest is sensors, servos, a gun to strap to it and programming. I'd expect a none-trivial percentage of the HN could build one with the resources available.

It would be quite a fun project. You could even use machine learning to predict the motion of the target to be most effective even when you reach 1-4 seconds bullet travel time (1 second at the range of the effective range, 4 seconds at maximum range).

Reliably detecting humans sounds hard though. This is a highly adversarial scenario, they will do anything from carrying cardboard in front of them to disguising as wildlife and vegetation. I'm not sure this is even solvable without shooting down anything that moves and is unidentified.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#209

Post by wongarsu »

wtdata wrote: post #199
inflatableDodo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been telling people for a while, if we think the amount of refugees from our wars is bad, just wait till you see the number arriving due to the fuel we burn. Though given our reaction to the current wave of refugees, we will blame the refugees for their own predicament and probably George Soros, as is tradition, long before we accept any blame ourselves.

> just wait till you see the number arriving due to the fuel we burn. But in the case is the fuel they burn, right? India is projected to become the 2nd biggest producer of CO2 (behind China) this decade. Also, I go around here and gasoline is so cheap that people don't care about waste. Drivers let their cars with the motor on while they go to buy some small thing to eat or drink.

Per capita India is still pretty good, they just have a lot of people. Also their emissions wouldn't be a problem yet without the last 100 years of emissions from Europe and North America. They are slowly becoming part of the problem, but I don't think it's fair to blame yet.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#210

Post by enitihas »

aq3cn wrote: post #205
enitihas wrote: post #109

I think humidity is a big problem in a lot of places in India with high temperature. In my village in easter UP in India, summer was intolerable because of high humidity and shortage of electricity. (We used to have 8hours electricity per day, but sometimes outages would happen and would go unrepaired for week to month). It was impossible to do anything but take a hand fan and use it to cool yourself. A lot of the ti…

Now days, you can get 24x7 electricity in tier 1, 2 & 3 cities. I am not sure about villages. Our country is almost power surplus nation now.

The amount of people living in tier 1,2,3 cities should still be less than people living in villages I think. Anyways my village still continues to get abysmal electricity.
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