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India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

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Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#191
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; This is scary, what's a good way to survive for someone that doesn't have access to a bunker or AC? Immersing oneself in water in a bathtub?

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.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#192
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically summer doesn't start until June 21.

Where? May-early June is peak summer in India. Schools actually start early to mid June.

We consider April May as peak summer down south. School starts on May end June beginning.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#193
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…

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.

That's a deeply upsetting mental image. Thousands of people shelter in a building during a heatwave, the electrical grid is overloaded and the AC shuts down.

This makes me want to go live in a deep cave somewhere :(

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Couldn't care less one way or the other about how many brown people there are in Europe, I'm curious if western culture will be significantly altered one way or the other though - there are elements of it I like and would hope would promulgate into the future is all. It's interesting that you can't really broach it as a question though without it been implied that racism is involved, if you can't debate a subject wit…

>I'm seeing more and more of that kind of balkanization in the UK and it's worrying

I am keeping a close eye on the proposed 'Free Ports'.

>"Can "free ports" spark a post-Brexit manufacturing boom? Jonty Bloom reports from Teesside, which plans to become the UK's newest free port, offering customs-free imports and hoping to bring back manufacturing jobs."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46349717

>"For each Free Zone, the area covered and the defined entry and exit points shall be determined by the Member State. The perimeter and the entry and exit points must be under customs supervision. Member State must communicate to the commission details of the Free Zones in operation.

>All Free Zones shall be enclosed. Persons, goods and means of transport entering or leaving Free Zones may be subject to customs controls."

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/notice-3001-speci...

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#195

A slightly redacted version of my earlier post. Dear HN crowd, it might not feel like it but we are quite influential. We are rich and therefore have a non-negligible command over economy. Silicon Valley is cool and people look up to us (do they? I don't really know, but wasn't Steve Jobs a national hero?) and may follow our example. Please, take the lead. Here are a few things an hornorable member of the HN communit…

India has population of over 1.2 billion people. And major part of this population is vegetarian (at least in the sense that they don't eat meat on daily basis twice a day).

What if India were meat consuming nation just like US?

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#196
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; This is scary, what's a good way to survive for someone that doesn't have access to a bunker or AC? Immersing oneself in water in a bathtub?

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…

> 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.

The states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh lag the rest of the nation in economic development. This statement is very much not true in those places, and even elsewhere in India. Air-conditioning is still a luxury outside of relatively well-off people's houses, corporate buildings, and malls.

> Cooling ourselves down in a heat wave, in the modern world, is a solved problem at least as far as keeping ourselves alive goes.

People there can't afford to not work. Sitting in an air-conditioned space for half the working day 4 months a year is not viable for them. A lot of the work is manual or farm labor that must necessarily be done outdoors.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#197
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offices and shopping malls are upper-middle class things in India. They would not come close to holding the entire population. There would be millions of people dying if temperatures got that high.

I'd want to see cites for that, honestly. Obviously India's commerce centers can't come close to handling a billion shoppers , but there's enough floor space in the urban core of Bangalore to house the at-risk population for a 72 hour heat wave. The point is emergency management here. And I'd bet anything that somewhere there's a workable plan drawn up for exactly this kind of occurrence.

> there's enough floor space in the urban core of Bangalore

There's vastly more to India than a few metro cities. A quick google search reveals that around 65+ % of Indian population lives in rural areas.

India is in for some very dark times if the climate situation gets worse. The positive lining in the cloud is that we have some measure of political stability for the next 5 years.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#198

This has been the case almost every year this decade in India. Also, it is quite common for the government departments to fudge data and report temperatures > 50 Celsius as 49.x to avoid halting work / paying extra to those working under the Sun because there are regulations concerning this. Edit: I got to know about this practice being rampant through an activist in the South who is well versed with the labour laws.

I am not sure if this is true. This is from my state (which is in South India) this year (March-April) when the temperature was in the 35-40 degrees range. Highest recorded was 42 degrees I think in a border district. I don't think South India crosses 40 most of the time. One place reached 47 in 2016 [3]. >With mercury levels in Kerala rising this summer, the state’s Labour Department has issued an order allowing man…

There are many places in South India where the temperature crosses 40 and above during months of Apr-May. For example see temperatures at these places in Karnataka, and AP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raichur (avg. temperature of 45.0 C in May) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurnool (avg. temperature of 46.5 C in May)

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#199
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will turn into refugees. That's part of why we expect hundreds of millions of climate refugees in the coming decades.

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.

Re: India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius

#200
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…

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.

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