Sleep underground during the day, crawl out at sunset and work through the night
Do you think everyone already has basements?
Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
231–240 of 296 posts
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
While you're correct, I suppose that people who live in already warm areas with high humidity to tend to build more resistance, and would be the "last to die" compared to people from, say, Europe.
> people who live in already warm areas with high humidity to tend to build more resistance 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.
That's ridiculous. People don't die when "proteins stop folding". They die much, much earlier. The less resistance you have, the earlier you die.
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it a plot? It's an event that happens in chapter 1 and paints a "this is what will happen" scenario. The whole chapter is available here: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
Kind of being pedantic about definition of "plot" or "plot point". 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 st…
> Kind of being pedantic about definition of "plot" or "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.
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#234Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a large number of actionable plans that happen to reduce profits for very rich organizations that hence spend a lot of money to prevent their implementation.
Your "actionable" makes assumptions about the true nature of several things, one of them being democracy. I can make a semi -actionable plan to fly, but if I am not able to achieve flight via the plan, in fact, my plan is not fully actionable, so this fully part is a pretty big deal. What if you people are wrong? Like, what is it about certain topics that cause having backup plans to be a bad idea? Why are there cert…
By your definition plans can only be determined to be actionable post hoc after they are completed?
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#236A friend of mine who lives in Queensland (Sunshine Coast) was talking about a recent spell of 32° and 100% humidity and how oppressive it was. 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...
I grew up poor and without AC in Minnesota where we regularly get spells of 100°F+ (37.7°C) at VERY high humidity thanks to all the lakes. It’s survivable, it’s absolutely not pleasant though and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. 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 li…
For what it’s worth, it turns out a most of our humidity is from corn fields, not our lakes. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/07/22/feeling-sweaty-minn...
It’d be nice if they could genetically modify corn to pump out less water, though I don’t know if that’s feasible.
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up poor and without AC in Minnesota where we regularly get spells of 100°F+ (37.7°C) at VERY high humidity thanks to all the lakes. It’s survivable, it’s absolutely not pleasant though and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. 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 li…
I don’t think of Minnesota as a place where 100f+ occurs with regularity or for sustained periods. A brief search confirms my assumptions, but I’m happy to be proven otherwise. There are parts of the US where 100f is reached by midday and persists past sunset for over a month, with high humidity.
Actually getting over 100f is decently rare in Minnesota. I’d guess most summers we do, but not for extended periods. We often get a few weeks where the high is in the upper 90s.
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.
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand why even Bernie Sanders type voters start "victim blaming".. all humans are selfish creatures, and we sure don't want to give up our comforts more than we'd like. Recycling, switching to EVs and LEDs, well, most people are comfortable with that. Never fly to Rome or Thailand again? "But I need to..!", some will say. And sooner or later we'll start justifying their selfishness by saying it's not our f…
>Never fly to Rome or Thailand again 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 busine…
Generally, ships are incredibly effective means of transportation. "Green", or not.
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.
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do not understand the issue at hand. Whatever you experienced was way less severe, because evaporative cooling obviously was still possible. There is a point where you simply cannot cool yourself passively. That's the point where survival is at risk regardless of health. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
Heat is far more easily managed than -20 deg C. Cold deaths being far more than heat deaths proves that point as well.
Guessing here but doesn't most people die to cold due to an accident, emergency of some sort or drunkenness? Ie a problem for you, not for the society at large.
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.
Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of being pedantic about definition of "plot" or "plot point". 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 st…
> Kind of being pedantic about definition of "plot" or "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.
Guess that is why I used "Pedantic".
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.