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What if a deadly heatwave hit India?
- everdrive 5y ago>Though the world is on track to reach net-zero carbon emissions around 2062, I did not realize this. Does anyone know where this statement came from?
- SamBorick 5y agoI don't have access to this article so I'm not 100% sure, but at a guess they mean "many nations have made public claims that they plan to target reaching net-zero by around <some date>" To my knowledge, carbon emissions are still increasing every year, and increasing in their rate of increase every year. I would love to be wrong. This site doesn't include pandemic data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
- scrooched_moose 5y agoDoesn't the plot on that page directly contradict that? It was effectively flat from 2012-2017, then small upticks in 2018 and 2019? The second derivative of CO2 seems to show a huge decrease in the last few years.
- sgt101 5y agoThere were similar "flattenings" in the early 80's If you had a plateau with twice the number of points (years) than any previous plateau then I would buy that something was going on. But sadly - we don't.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI would also assume that there are still billions of people around the world aspiring to live lifestyles like people in the US/Western Europe, so absent the development of an energy source comparable to the convenience and low price of fossil fuels, any slack in demand from US/Western Europe will be picked up by the poorer billions.
- scrooched_moose 5y agoI'm at least hopefully because this one appears longer (~9 years; if you count 2012-2019; most of the other drops were shorter and seem to be tied to major economic events - the 73 and 79 oil crises, fall of the Soviet Union in 91 and subsequent recession in Eastern Europe, and the great recession in 2009. Seeing an apparent flattening in a period of major economic growth is really encouraging.
- loopz 5y agoAtmospheric CO2 growth rate over time https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html Year-by-year is alot of noise, but over decades we see mostly steady accelleration.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThat sounds insane to me. You'd need a large carbon sequestration program running, which means you'd need to be producing enough clean energy to supply all human needs and sequester the carbon. And no, trees will not cut it.
- throwaway1777 5y agoSounds pessimistic to me. I think we can make it there earlier. Don’t underestimate technology, the solutions to carbon sequestration and clean energy are getting exponentially better each year.
- jfk13 5y ago> exponentially better each year I'd love to see sources supporting that; it sounds a lot more optimistic than I would expect.
- epistasis 5y agoRamenz Naam has been showing this for years: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c... There are identical stories to write about onshore wind, offshore wind, and lithium ion batteries. This summer has seen a huge number of new storage chemistries announced from startups with skin in the game and experienced management that will close the gap for longer term storage. The most optimistic prediction for renewables were too pessimistic. It's likely that we are still in the same situation today, and not nearly enough people are predicting the future accurately by short-changing new tech. There probably aren't too many people on HN these days that remember computer tech in the 80s and 90s, but it had far fewer doubters, and didn't have an industry dedicated to creating a propaganda cloud about how awful computers are. And still, the internet and computers are far more advanced and penetrant into everyday life in ways almost nobody anticipated. The renewables revolution will likely be as big. We will have more cheaper energy accessible to us than ever before. This may be enough to jump to a new stage of technological development.
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- the8472 5y agoIt is a piece of speculative fiction after all.
- ant6n 5y agoThe article is a what-if senario for the year 2041. The carbon neutral by 2062 statement is part of the what-if Szenario.
- shoe1 5y agoThis piece is written as if it's covering the event in 2041 as it unfolds, so I read that as just a fictional projection based on what this writer thinks could be in the cards. This tracks with the general tone I get from the Economist's (excellent) climate coverage: unconvinced we'll get where we need to be quickly enough to achieve the best case climate scenarios, but optimistic that we will eventually hit more of a medium-case scenario, and therefore may need some interim solutions (they often allude to geo-engineering) to bridge that gap.
- gmuslera 5y agoMost countries had pledged to reach net zero by 2050, China at least said to reach net zero by 2060, with few exceptions. Of course, it must be achieved. But net-zero carbon emissions means that till that year, the GHG will keep accumulating, the carbon cycle is slow enough to not significantly reduce the amount that you have in the atmosphere for decades. So the problem won't be solved that year, nor 10 years after that goal is achieved, but when GHG are finally below of pre-industrial levels (I don't know, near half of what is it now) so we lose more heat than what we keep. All the way till that point, the global yearly average temperature should be rising. And extreme weather events will continue to pile up. And, of course, net zero doesn't take into account the positive feedback loops that either emit more GHG or rise global temperature. I feel a bit overoptimistic that article. Or that they try to push that solution tried by Hyderabad as a magic wand (or a cash cow).
- orwin 5y agoSo, the effect of all excess CO2 put in the atmosphere in 2050 will have an impact between 2065 and 2070 (roughly). The atmospheric CO2 "half life" is more than a 100 year. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-handle-on-carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...
- zarzavat 5y agoPledges for things that will happen after a politician dies are even more meaningless than pledges made before an election. Zero value should be attached to them. The only thing that matters are actions that are happening now which is... not very much.
- gmuslera 5y agoIt is what we have. A president could discard all pledges as Trump demonstrated during his mandate. Maybe different kinds of governments, with less variation of ruling parties (China, Russia) or broad agreements in their political systems (EU?) may keep their promises in this topic.
- SamBorick 5y agoThis is the inciting incident for the author of the Mars Trilogy's recent book "The Ministry for the Future". I highly recommend it if this stuff scares you, and you need a little climate hope.
- TrueGeek 5y agoDoes the book end on a hopeful note?
- eckmLJE 5y agoYes. It felt a little unrealistic IMO but it does describe throughout the story many different solutions that are more and less effective / politically attainable.
- sudopluto 5y agokim stanely robinson? i remember aurora completely shattering my views on what it might mean to send humans to try and live on other planets. will try to get this one from the library
- AlexCoventry 5y agoIt's a bit preachy, and he really needed an editor to trim the fat, but the story's pretty good.
- mike1o1 5y agoI just read this opening two days ago, and it's frightening how well he paints the picture and how plausible it is to actually happen.
- thestu 5y agoI'm halfway through the book. That opening bit is so great, and the rest has been a big letdown so far. Really feels like that opening was written as a short story and then the rest of the book was just tacked on. Maybe the second half will be better.
- natch 5y agoStopped reading when it imagined for a southern India heat wave in 2041 a temperature lower than has already been hit this year for three consecutive days in Canada.
- scrooched_moose 5y agoIf you'd actually bothered to read it, this paragraph explains the difference: The real killer in Chennai is the humidity. The combined measure of heat and humidity in air is the “wet-bulb temperature”—the lowest temperature to which something can be cooled through evaporation from its surface. In dry air, even at temperatures well above 37°C—human body temperature—people can sweat to cool down. But at wet-bulb temperatures of 32°C and higher, “it becomes unsafe to perform most physical labour,” says Moetasim Ashfaq, an atmospheric physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Few people can survive a wet-bulb temperature above 35°C. In the past decade, wet-bulb temperatures in Chennai have regularly risen above 32°C. But for much of the past week, wet-bulb temperatures have repeatedly crossed 36°C—a fatal level.
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- natch 5y agoAverage humidity in British Columbia is 70% which means sometimes it is significantly higher than that.
- natch 5y ago230 people died of heat related causes in British Columbia recently. 230. In 2021. So for an article about India, leading off with lower temperatures (including effective temperatures taking humidity into account) all the way out in 2041 and only 11 deaths (versus the 230 in one week alone already this year in British Columbia for god’s sake) is just plain silly and does not show how serious the problem really is. They really think it’s going to take until 2041 to get serious?? We are already there now, today, this year. And the death counts are way higher, even for a northerly temperate region.
- pwm 5y agohttps://archive.ph/vqdmC https://archive.ph/vqdmC
- suyash 5y agoscary future, hope this doesn't happen. Lets do our best to build more green environment.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoHow would You or I do that?
- burkaman 5y ago"What can I do?" Anything. - https://heated.world/p/what-can-i-do-anything https://heated.world/p/what-can-i-do-anything
- angelzen 5y agoA roundtrip flight from LA to NY releases 1.1 CO2 tons. A sustainable carbon budget is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 CO2 tons / year / capita. [edit]Among many other creature comforts[/edit], mass aviation simply has to go. No more vacations in Thailand. No more Thanksgiving family visits. No more business trips. No more tech conventions. No more scientific conferences. Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata. Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before. The average individual view of the world must stop 100 miles from the place he/she was born. As a New Yorker, seeing an image filled with beaches and palm trees advertising Cabo vacations should raise the same level of revulsion as an image filled with vast open spaces and wild horses advertising for Marlboro cigarettes. https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3 https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
- 908B64B197 5y ago> Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before. Ouch. Lots of one way tickets for anyone who isn't white in Europe or America.
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- villgax 5y agoHow are half of the voting Americans Bible-thumping extremists with banal logic towards science & basic human rights?
- istorical 5y agoPeople have been incredibly more ignorant in the past, it's the power brokers and influencers (wealth, media, political class, etc) that guided the unwashed masses to at least somewhat expedient futures previously, but who now seem to have either vacated their responsibility / succumbed to greed or short-term thinking or alternatively some breakdown of systems of power and democracy because of technology or legal changes and their effect on media, fragmentation of public knowledge, erosion of institutions, etc. On a very real level, we have better technology, more people learning greater chunks of knowledge, higher literacy rates, etc. than we did in the 1700s or 1800s or 1900s, so you can't blame widespread ignorance alone.
- manojlds 5y agoAs a Chennaiite reading it at midnight, thanks. Now I can't sleep peacefully.
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- dheera 5y ago> An imagined scenario from 2041 Why is this an imagined scenario? It happened in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pa... One of the things the article horribly fails to even mention is that when resources are scarce, people don't just sit there patiently and go into a physiological breakdown. Not at all. People get up and fight. When the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy isn't met, all civility goes out the window and violence breaks out, as people fight for what resources are left. From the Wikipedia article about what ACTUALLY happened in 2019: "Conflicts over access to water have also occurred throughout India. On 7 June, six people were stabbed in Jharkhand during a fight near a water tanker, and one man was killed in a similar fight in Tamil Nadu. In Madhya Pradesh on 5 June, a fight over water led to two men being "seriously injured", while in a separate fight a day earlier, a water tanker driver was "beaten up"." I'm sure there were numerous other instances not in the news.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago> One of the things the article horribly fails to even mention is that when resources are scarce, people don't just sit there patiently and go into a physiological breakdown. Not at all. People get up and fight. When the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy isn't met, all civility goes out the window and violence breaks out, as people fight for what resources are left. Sometimes. And sometimes they don't. Groups that don't are often far more successful. Fiction betrays us into thinking most humans are evil when facing adversity. It's not really true.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoNot sure I understand the "what if" part of that title?
- tus89 5y agoNot sure I understand the point of the article.
- goatlover 5y agoWhitley Strieber wrote a similar kind of fictional warning about Denver’s air quality in the opening chapter of Nature’s End back in the 80s. Thousands of people in 2019 die over a few days from a black smog event. It’s part of a story where humans are headed for extinction because they have killed off most of the forests and badly polluted the air and ground. It’s an apocalyptic story from the the late 80s worry over deforestation, acid rain and over population. But it does predict serious wildfires rather well.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoIt doesn't. It pontificated, not predict. Predictions say "this, and only this, can and will happen". Fictional pontification says "this is one of the millions of things that might happen, let's have a look at how one of another million ways it can play out, plays out." The difference between the two couldn't be bigger.
- blueblisters 5y agoReflective roofs combined with radiative cooling/night sky cooling is one of the most cost effective way to reduce heat indoors. Along with that, India needs to start mandating energy efficiency standards for new construction. Insulation is extremely poor for most houses, leading to very energy intensive cooling requirements in the summer months. Ancient Indian architects already knew how to passively cool buildings - pools of water or stepwells at the base of the building (https://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/ancient-air-conditioning-architecture/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/ancient-air-co...). It was used in Jaipur, Rajasthan but may not be that effective in humid Chennai, however.
- aussiegreenie 5y agoIndia will a bigger problem much sooner, there is less snow melt from the mountains. The great rivers have less water and it is occuring now. Add a bad heatwave and C19 will look a normal flu season.
- teslaberry 5y agogrowing up in new york and living in manhattan skyrises, the level of inefficiency and wasteful airconditioning borders on near deliberate recklessness , both in design and maintanance of structures. skyrises were litterally built to bake in the sun and then have people use airconditioning to shoot up hot air outside the faces of the building, further heating up the interior. to boot, many skyscrapers were built to trap air inside so as to ensure apartments don't get smells and stale air from other apartments or hallways, and thus, the pathway of air going through a labrynth of ductwork is completely inadequate. oh yea, but you can air-condition your small box in a tooth pick tower with brick heat mass on the outside that radiates all day and then all night inwards into the structure. this won't last because it cannot. timing is everything. people in india are doing just fine. the real tragedy for them will occur if they copy the western style without dramatically improving over it.
- dirtyid 5y agoWhat is the status of abiltity to predict these heat waves? YoY extrapolation that can be managed via policy, a few weeks of heads up from meteorlogic predictions, or sudden onset like a natural disaster that leads to mass casualty event with no warning?