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Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

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Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#271

Post by AtlasBarfed »

jijijijij wrote: post #238
no_wizard wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Eat…

Self driving EV semis will do the job of night trains with low zero carbon. Self driving on highways should be very achievable with route specific AI, convergent infrastructure like sensors and more wildlife fences and networked status reporting.

Last mile delivery trucks will be the first commercial vehicles to electrify.

The real downside of long haul shipping is the race to the bottom arbitrage of loose environment regulations and enforcement.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#272

Post by Jensson »

btbuildem wrote: post #261
Qwertious wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Over those billions of years, the sun has gotten ~40% hotter, which counteracted the reduced atmospheric greenhouse effect. We can't directly compare our current climate to billions of years ago with just atmospheric conditions. Also, I notice you said "plants have thrived", and not "major staple crops have thrived". Toxic algae bloom has its own sort of natural beauty I guess, but…

Also, there's far less area of land near the poles, despite of what Mercator would have us believe.

That is a lie, there is much more land to the north than at the equator. Not as much as Mercator might make you believe, but it is still way more since it is mostly water around the equator.

https://www.ecoclimax.com/2016/08/land-mass-at-each-longitud...

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#273

Post by AmalgatedAmoeba »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #177
bongodongobob wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending aid to Ukraine isn't just a thing we do for fun. It's the tradeoff for them giving up their nuclear arsenal. We said we'd have their backs. Money is probably better than sending people's kids.

Perhaps. I'm just curious about the casualty projections. Casualties with weapons, and casualties without. If sending more weapons results in lives saved, then this would be an excellent argument for arming Gaza with modern weapons. In terms of children saved the effect could be sizeable.

I don’t know how much this is bias on my part, but sending weapons to Gaza feels more equivalent to arming anti-russian partisans in the alternate reality where the march on Kyiv wasn’t a failure and the Ukrainian government collapsed.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#274

Post by jjav »

cromulent wrote: post #2

A 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...

> 32° and 100% humidity

> is not survivable long term

32C is only 89F, which isn't hot at all.

Coming from the tropics where 90s(F) with very high humidity is common, I can't see how that is not survivable. I walked to school and back home in that weather every day and it wasn't a big deal. We never had air conditioning, too poor for that.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#275

Post by jjav »

Hikikomori wrote: post #239
richrichie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I recently survived -33C and have rarely experienced less than -20C, life went on as usual, like going to the store and working.

Was it -33C at the store and at the office?

Try living outside at -33C without the opportunity to go inside.

I'll take heat, every time. Cold is a killer.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#276

Post by hackerlight »

thworp wrote: post #241
hackerlight wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to continue growing, just replace fossil fuels with renewables or nuclear in all developed countries, and subsidize the same for poor countries who haven't historically emitted much and don't have the wealth to transition themselves. There isn't this false dichotomy of degrowth vs growth. We can grow our economy without growing emissions. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/fatal-heat-humi... The medi…

Thank you for the response and sorry if my comment was excessively snarky. I think we share the same concerns and have the same goals and even mostly agree on practical steps to get there. I've just seen and heard too many degrowth advocates (that really want to return to 19th century economy with 21st century populations) recently and it's really worrying me. > and subsidize the same for poor countries who haven't h…

> The funny thing is that the market is turning even Australia and Texas into solar superpowers.

I think the market is too slow by itself. There's a technical reason for this. Externalities are mispriced, causing market failure. Markets may get there by themselves eventually, but not as quickly as they should.

Australia is set to become a solar superpower partly because the center-left government got into power. The center-right is hostile to renewables even though Australia is perfectly situated. This wasn't always the case, the center-right used to be somewhat favorable to renewables until they got radicalized by the usual stuff.

Likewise with the US, the IRA's renewables provisions only got passed because the center-left is in power. Renewables will still grow with Trump in power due to state-level subsidies, but far slower than what would otherwise happen.

My primary concern with all this is this human, political side. Solving this problem is as much a persuasion exercise as a technology exercise. We need to somehow get the political right to drop their defenses. They are blinded by their dislike of lefties and Greta Thunberg and so on, that they are not thinking rationally about the objective market failure that needs to be corrected.

Further on this, we need to present a new narrative to the degrowthers. The degrowth left sees a mutually exclusive trade between growth and climate change. Which is sort of true if conservatives get in power and don't change their belief system.

What's needed is a sustainable growth narrative where you give conservatives their growth and you give the left their lower emissions. It is not that hard to implement if people could just stop being so politically radicalized.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#277

Post by netsharc »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #240
netsharc wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incide…

Some times there are intelligent discussions on HN... This isn't one of those times.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#278

Post by ImHereToVote »

ponector wrote: post #256
ImHereToVote wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence to support the case that sending more weapons to Ukraine will spare lives? If so. Shouldn't we prioritize sending weapons to the people of Gaza first, since their casualty numbers are much higher?

It depends on do you want to send weapons to terrorists or not. Sending long range weapons together with F-16 can help to destroy missiles and other long range weapons Russian terrorists use daily on Ukrainian cities. By sending enough 155cm shells Russian advance could be stopped, which mean less cities will be grounded. Because that is the only way Russian occupational army could advance: by total destruction of ev…

This scenario seems similar to the Gaza situation. Perhaps if the Gazans had patriots lives could be saved.

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#279

Post by Hikikomori »

jjav wrote: post #275
Hikikomori wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I recently survived -33C and have rarely experienced less than -20C, life went on as usual, like going to the store and working. Was it -33C at the store and at the office? Try living outside at -33C without the opportunity to go inside. I'll take heat, every time. Cold is a killer.

You think people living in those regions in the article can just go inside to solve their problem?

Re: Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat

#280

Post by richrichie »

Hikikomori wrote: post #279
jjav wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recently survived -33C and have rarely experienced less than -20C, life went on as usual, like going to the store and working. Was it -33C at the store and at the office? Try living outside at -33C without the opportunity to go inside. I'll take heat, every time. Cold is a killer.

You think people living in those regions in the article can just go inside to solve their problem?

With shirt off, drinking plenty of water, a mechanical fan (or even a manual handheld Japanese style) I can easily live “outdoors” in mid forties for days. No problem.

-20 with no heating (not carbon friendly in such zones), i will be dead in a few days.

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