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If you haven’t read it yet, the first section of Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson describes a wet-bulb event in striking detail. The horror of this climate-change catastrophe is what finally triggers a significant global cultural shift around climate change. The passage was vivid enough for me to suggest preparatory measures to my retired parents. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone intereste…
I hate speaking negatively about Ministry for the Future, because I admire KSR, and we need fiction that confronts the climate crisis and shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better. Still, I sadly cannot recommend this book. To quote from my spoileriffic review, "This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we fac…
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You do not need to submerge yourself underwater if that’s what you are suggesting. A bucket of water for your feet will do lots. A shower is good too.
I'm not sure a bucket would be enough to cool a person down if they have no other form of heat dissipation available to them - specifically I'm not sure feet alone could dissipate heat fast enough. If the water is too cold (around 70°F IIRC), your body would constrict the blood vessels to your hands and feet, limiting how much heat could be moved to those extremities from your core. Hence mentioning a bath tub. Some…
Can you survive wet bulb temperatures given a bucket of water indefinitely? No. Can you survive working hard labor with the water bucket? No. Can you survive wet bulb events significantly higher than the threshold? No.
Can you survive several hours in a typical (current typical) wet bulb event? Yes, definitely. Bucket of water is fine.
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A “wet bulb event” is not just a heatwave. A heatwave is a sustained period of high temperatures. You can protect yourself from a heatwave by staying indoors, using a fan, drinking water, etc. A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of. Anyone who is…
> Anybody without AC would die Couldn't you just eat ice to keep cool? Heat from blood transfers to the ice as it melts and warms in the stomach, then it leaves the body completely through urination.
Similarly you could put a giant block of ice in front of a fan and sit there; most people would call this a from of AC though.
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A “wet bulb event” is not just a heatwave. A heatwave is a sustained period of high temperatures. You can protect yourself from a heatwave by staying indoors, using a fan, drinking water, etc. A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of. Anyone who is…
> Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power. Could you survive in a basement?
Note that for a small poorly-ventilated basement, the humidity will rise from respiration, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature. For a well-ventilated basement, the air temperature will approach the outdoor temperature, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature.
If you have a giant, well-shaded, pool of water, the water temperature will usually be below the peak air temperature (water has high thermal mass, so it will take a long time for it to come up to the ambient temperature, even at high humidity, where evaporation effects are negligible) so that's another non-AC method of staying cool.
In any event pools of water and basements don't scale to densely populated areas.
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Heat waves are dangerous. My point is that wet bulb events are not a magical inflection point. The point to take away is that humidity matters in addition to raw temperatures. Not that there is a specific threshold at which things matter or didn’t matter.
I think that point was well understood, by falcolas, to whom I was replying. But your assumption that it is not that hard to cool down seems a bit strong to me. In some countries electricity becomes unavailable quite regularly, so relying on A/C during a crisis like that might fail. And that is assuming that A/Cs are common (they are not, in large parts of the world). Cooling yourself down by using water from a tap m…
Heatwaves and infrastructure failures can undoubtedly be serious threats. But the vast, vast majority of people survive wet bulb events when they encounter them.
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Some people have fantasies about these heatwaves that just decimate all living things. It’s not that simple. It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses…
True but you should also recognize the world has more than humans. most other species will not be able to survive such even. Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from human…
I know you threw babies in here but it feels like I have to point out that the old and sickly dying have a negligible effect on man years lost.
> Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I don’t really agree that the world is as fragile as you propose. But I feel like need to clarify that I’m not arguing against the threat posed by climate change broadly.
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Earnest question: what makes you doubt the depiction? Trust in infrastructure or institutions?
The widespread availability of air conditioning plus the fact that we've had such events before on rare occasions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_r... ) and we didn't see bodies piled up in the street back then.
All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage.
And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever.
Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
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I'm not sure a bucket would be enough to cool a person down if they have no other form of heat dissipation available to them - specifically I'm not sure feet alone could dissipate heat fast enough. If the water is too cold (around 70°F IIRC), your body would constrict the blood vessels to your hands and feet, limiting how much heat could be moved to those extremities from your core. Hence mentioning a bath tub. Some…
You’re going to need to set some practical constraints here. Can you survive wet bulb temperatures given a bucket of water indefinitely? No. Can you survive working hard labor with the water bucket? No. Can you survive wet bulb events significantly higher than the threshold? No. Can you survive several hours in a typical (current typical) wet bulb event? Yes, definitely. Bucket of water is fine.
I'm going to vote maybe. At best, it'll be close.
Resting metabolic output is about half the active value I provided (per NASA's PDF). That means for a bucket of water that starts at 32°, you have 5 hours before the bucket is also 95° if you discount ambient heating from the air, circulatory constriction, and assuming no prior conditions.
Since you can't discount those (and are unlikely to find barely-not-frozen water for an entire city's population), survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
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The idea in the book was this was a new event that never occurred previously that finally did and was able to demonstrate that climate change is doing some new and not survivable. In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
> people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future