The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#201

Post by giantg2 » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:41 AM UTC

rini17 wrote: post #165

jiggawatts wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with power outages, as happens in the book, everyone living under such a heat wave will likely die. That's an exaggeration. Extreme heat (including heat waves that exceed this threshold) happen semi-regularly, and the death rate when they occur is nowhere near 100%. More like 0.1% or less. Electrically-powered air conditioning is not the only way to cool a human body. Simply escaping to an underground or s…

Many apartments don't have a bathtub, only a shower. And if everyone keeps tap water running, the pressure will drop down to trickle. Cold cellars can be in short supply, underground car parks tend to get hot too. And seems you probably never bathed in 35°C water, it's definitely not refreshing. And there are psychological issues that people just don't know what to do till it's too late. I was living an apartment wit…

"Many apartments don't have a bathtub, only a shower. And if everyone keeps tap water running, the pressure will drop down to trickle."

People don't have trashcans, storage bins, etc?

"And seems you probably never bathed in 35°C water, it's definitely not refreshing."

Where is this 35C water coming from?

Also, if it's a humid heat, there are likely to be natural or artificial bodies of water around. Hopefully the people have been taking care of them and they aren't a cesspool.

Sure, some people may die, but it should be very low.

Edit: why downvote? All the excuses the previous person gave seem petty to me, so I'm wondering how that person came to their conclusion. Especially for where that hot water is coming from.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#202

Post by numpad0 » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:43 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #166

jiggawatts wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with power outages, as happens in the book, everyone living under such a heat wave will likely die. That's an exaggeration. Extreme heat (including heat waves that exceed this threshold) happen semi-regularly, and the death rate when they occur is nowhere near 100%. More like 0.1% or less. Electrically-powered air conditioning is not the only way to cool a human body. Simply escaping to an underground or s…

Karachi, and Sindh at large often goes through periods of +35 wet bulb. People can jump into fountains, or other bodies of water, hide at home, airconned buildings. In the end, people can try to brave it, and wait for the relatively cool evening.

Wet bulb thermometer is the kind that a pair of thermometers are mounted together with one wrapped in wet cotton and the other dry. Typically between the two glass tubes is a little look up table that gives humidity from current dry bulb temperature and delta between the two.

I don't know what exactly environment reaching 35C/95F web bulb means, but considering 1) it indicates temperature of a thermometer cooled by evaporation, and 2) body temperature of a human is ~40C/100F, I think it means evaporative cooling aka sweating is becoming useless. It won't be a huge stretch to consider that unsurvivable.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#203

Post by baybal2 » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:46 AM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #202

baybal2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karachi, and Sindh at large often goes through periods of +35 wet bulb. People can jump into fountains, or other bodies of water, hide at home, airconned buildings. In the end, people can try to brave it, and wait for the relatively cool evening.

Wet bulb thermometer is the kind that a pair of thermometers are mounted together with one wrapped in wet cotton and the other dry. Typically between the two glass tubes is a little look up table that gives humidity from current dry bulb temperature and delta between the two. I don't know what exactly environment reaching 35C/95F web bulb means, but considering 1) it indicates temperature of a thermometer cooled by e…

Yet people did. The heat stroke at 35C° wet bulb if far from instantaneous.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#204

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:47 AM UTC

rini17 wrote: post #165

jiggawatts wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with power outages, as happens in the book, everyone living under such a heat wave will likely die. That's an exaggeration. Extreme heat (including heat waves that exceed this threshold) happen semi-regularly, and the death rate when they occur is nowhere near 100%. More like 0.1% or less. Electrically-powered air conditioning is not the only way to cool a human body. Simply escaping to an underground or s…

Many apartments don't have a bathtub, only a shower. And if everyone keeps tap water running, the pressure will drop down to trickle. Cold cellars can be in short supply, underground car parks tend to get hot too. And seems you probably never bathed in 35°C water, it's definitely not refreshing. And there are psychological issues that people just don't know what to do till it's too late. I was living an apartment wit…

> Cold cellars can be in short supply

If this starts to happen semi-regularly, you can bet my garden will turn into a little hobbit hill/cellar.

That said, I agree that if it happens suddenly to that extend, we would likely be looking at more than 0.1%.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#205

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:50 AM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #201

rini17 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many apartments don't have a bathtub, only a shower. And if everyone keeps tap water running, the pressure will drop down to trickle. Cold cellars can be in short supply, underground car parks tend to get hot too. And seems you probably never bathed in 35°C water, it's definitely not refreshing. And there are psychological issues that people just don't know what to do till it's too late. I was living an apartment wit…

"Many apartments don't have a bathtub, only a shower. And if everyone keeps tap water running, the pressure will drop down to trickle." People don't have trashcans, storage bins, etc? "And seems you probably never bathed in 35°C water, it's definitely not refreshing." Where is this 35C water coming from? Also, if it's a humid heat, there are likely to be natural or artificial bodies of water around. Hopefully the peo…

> WB 35 °C (95 °F) – theoretically equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F), though the heat index does not go that high

I’m inclined to say that this is not very survivable, regardless of your precautions, if your air conditioning has died.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#206

Post by tomrod » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:51 AM UTC

I wonder if people confuse wet bulb and dry bulb here. Wet bulb is related to how well your air conditioner or sweating will cool you. Dry bulb is what we usually say when taking a temperature reading, or listening to the local news' meteorologist.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#207

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:52 AM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #202

baybal2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karachi, and Sindh at large often goes through periods of +35 wet bulb. People can jump into fountains, or other bodies of water, hide at home, airconned buildings. In the end, people can try to brave it, and wait for the relatively cool evening.

Wet bulb thermometer is the kind that a pair of thermometers are mounted together with one wrapped in wet cotton and the other dry. Typically between the two glass tubes is a little look up table that gives humidity from current dry bulb temperature and delta between the two. I don't know what exactly environment reaching 35C/95F web bulb means, but considering 1) it indicates temperature of a thermometer cooled by e…

[deleted]

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#208

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:56 AM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #198

The gloom and doom posts on HN seem to be increasing lately. I can go to CNN if I want this kind of content. That being said I would be ok with posts talking about fixing climate change especially if it preserves human rights and dignity.

Strangely enough, there seems to be a correlation between governments and people ignoring the effects of their actions on the climate, and the doom and gloom posts.

I wonder why.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#209

Post by jillesvangurp » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

sershe wrote: post #136

There are 4 broad scenarios according to which (or a combination thereof) the climate emergency will develop: 1) In a giant case of prisoners' dilemma, the humanity will coordinate worldwide and rise to the occasion, massively cut emissions, tax carbon, build out renewables, etc. 2) There will be massive technological breakthru-s in carbon capture and/or energy production and/or geo-engineering (and I am not talking…

Whether it's 2050, 2060, or 2070 for going carbon neutral does not actually matter that much. It's one of the main points people are haggling about right now (e.g. in Glasgow at the climate change conference in a few months). Which will feature a lot of #1 enabled by #2. How good or bad our models are right now is going to be of interest to historians only (i.e. #3). We'll dodge extinction but will likely deal with the aftermath of our past actions for centuries regardless. But getting to carbon neutral seems to get us to a stage where we might manage.

The point is that we can call a date for this at all at this point because things are happening that are going to make that a reality. That's because of technical breakthroughs (i.e. scenario #2) that mostly already happened. And more is on the way. So any conservative date policicans call, might end up moving to an earlier date when that happens.

Whether you consider nuclear/fusion part of this progress is a bit of a political topic. My point is that we'll be fine with or without that happening. The "we're doomed unless we bet everything on technology X" scenario is basically just a variant of #4.

Actually, we're just dealing with the logistical aftermath of the results of these technical breakthroughs not being ubiquitous yet. But technically there's no other reason to keep burning stuff (coal, wood, gas, peat, etc.) other than that we are dependent on burning lots of it with our existing and increasingly more expensive to operate infrastructure. It's cheaper to not do that already but it just takes time to get ourselves there. 30-40 years sounds about right for getting that done.

Fixing our infrastructure is much less dependent on new technical breakthroughs (e.g. fusion or nuclear) than it is on simply doing more of the (already profitable) things that are being done anyway. Whether it is building gigafactories for batteries, building off shore wind farms, or deploying solar; it all seems to have decent ROI and popular with investors. Unlocking more capital for this is actually becoming easy and uncontroversial. If you separate the moralism and rhetoric from the economics, even the most conservative climate change deniers would not mind some cheap solar on their roof, lower electricity bills, or a ridiculous electrical ford truck with low cost and operational expenses. Paying less for more is a great way to drive progress and incentivize the masses. That's not to say that further breakthroughs aren't needed. They are, and they will happen as well. And IMHO speed up the agenda here.

Re: The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (2020)

#210

Post by trashtester » Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #199

fighterpilot wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ratio is 10:1, then even if you have increasing variance (which is bad), an increase in the mean may offset that badness. I can't comment beyond that, I'm just talking generally about distributions with two fixed cutoffs at both extremes (beyond which = death or high likelihood of death).

I'm going to quibble. This is all unfounded, you're probably right and I'm a fool. the statistic, adding 1 degree to the temperature isn't that bad. That statistic nicely glosses over the huge amount of energy added to the system. 1 degree isn't going to melt the icecaps. 1 degree is a huge amount of energy. I think, that energy is going to make things hotter and colder and less predictable. Moving the mean is, well…

It makes sense that adding energy to the system can lead to higher temperatures and more extreme cases of winds and precipitation.

It makes less sense that it should lead to extreme cold.

Indeed, the Lancet study did say that the number of deaths from cold were on the way down.

Also, if examining the data further, most deaths are NOT in extremely cold countries, but rather in South East Asia and Africa.

I remember spending some time in a tropical country about 10 years ago, and when I was there, there was a few nights of "extreme" weather, where nighttime temperatures fell all the way to +14C (plus!). The government declared a state of emergency, and distributed blankets to the poorest people, to prevent oo many deaths.

Clearly, the main problem is poverty, not extreme weather.