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For a harrowing depiction of what sustained wet-bulb temperatures could look like, check out the opening of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.

jwhiles 5y ago
presumably you mean sustained high wet-bulb temperatures? If I understand the concept correctly you can perform a wet-bulb measurement at any temperature, and a wet-bulb temperature of 10 Celsius is presumably not an issue.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
It is kind of terrifying to realize that large portions of the third world are soon going to become so hot that it will be impossible to do any sort of physical exertion outside for large parts of the day without putting yourself at risk for heat stroke. That's at lower warming scenarios. At even higher temps it becomes damned near impossible to live without AC (which many in the third world don't have)
twright 5y ago
Found an excerpt of the first chapter for anyone interested: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
pjerem 5y ago
This opening is truly frightening.
asterizer 5y ago
The entire book is super important. Plausible and scary predictions for the next 40 years with many positive solutions.(Pumping the water from underneath the major glaciers to keep them from sliding into the ocean.) It's heartening to see the world come together over Ukraine, a template for how we could come together over climate change.
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  > It's heartening to see the world come together over Ukraine NATO is coming together over the Ukraine to ensure that they control the NG and potential oil reserves there and not Russia. I live in a NATO country and hope my team wins because, ultimately, it will be better for me. All of the rest of the narratives are propaganda to get the public feeling morally good about another conflict over fossil fuels. There's nothing heartening about this. The end result of this will ultimately be more burning of fossil fuels, we're just fighting to see who pays what to burn them.
- native_samples 5y ago
  God no. That would be a disaster. Back here in the real world, not the modelled world, we have to ask is the temperature even rising at all? This shouldn't even be a legitimate question to ask but it turns out it is. In recent years temperature "rises" have sometimes turned out to be the result of data modification and not really existing. See how NOAA has announced that July 2021 broke the previous temperature record set in 2016, and how they also announced that July 2019 was a record breaking year. This happens because climatologists are constantly rewriting the historical record to create new warming trends where none were previously seen. They admit to this in obscure papers but reason, correctly, that the media/political set will not call them on it, so they can get away with making their predictions about the future come true by simply altering the past. In many cases temperature graphs for massive regions that were flat in the past have become sloped in the present. Consider this front page New York Times article from 1989: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/26/us/us-data-since-1895-fail-to-show-warming-trend.html?src=pm https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/26/us/us-data-since-1895-fai... "US data since 1895 fail to show warming trend" Look at the graph in the lower left hand corner for long term US temperatures and notice that it's flat. The US should certainly have warmed between 1895 and 1989 given GHG emissions in this time frame but it didn't. Now go look up a temperature history of the USA from modern sources like the NOAA website. Observe that it's sloped upwards for the same time frame. The past has been changed. In the first part of the century there was a notorious so-called pause in global warming. Temperatures were once again not going up. Scientists fixed this by rewriting the past once again: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 If there was actually runaway global warming, they would not need to do this sort of thing. But they do, because otherwise, warming does not appear in the data. Given that the temperature record is not trustworthy by climatologists own admission it would be incredibly destructive and unwise to do geo-engineering on the basis of such flimsy data. It could easily make things far worse. In fact we just finished up with a global crisis; one that appears to have started in a lab that was tampering with viruses in an attempt to pre-solve a future disease crisis that existed primarily in the heads of the scientists researching it. The scale of it was then exaggerated by modellers who didn't understand what they were modelling and who have utterly refused to accept evidence that their suggested interventions had no effect. Academia is just not reliable enough to take drastic action on the basis of their predictions and people who keep denying this are, in my view, the real deniers.
roughly 5y ago
Coincidentally, Robinson is speaking today at the Long Now Foundation: https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond-02022 https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond...
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Just want to say that the Long Now speaker series has a bunch of interesting talks in their back catalogue.
  - roughly 5y ago
    They really, really do. They do a spectacular job of bringing in people who are at the vanguard without slipping over the edge, so to speak. Two favorites from the last couple years: Mary Lou Jepsen talking about new modes of cheap, easy medical imaging and their potential impacts: https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-t... Michael Frachetti on the role of nomadic pastoralists in both generating and spreading knowledge along the historic silk roads: https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/feb/26/open-source-civilization-unexpected-origins-silk-road/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/feb/26/open-source-civili... They’re really such a diverse group of speakers and subjects, and all of them have been really high quality and high value.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      Agreed. They also do a great job of nerding out on a topic without getting so into the technical weeds that a mass audience can’t follow.

jwhiles 5y ago

presumably you mean sustained high wet-bulb temperatures? If I understand the concept correctly you can perform a wet-bulb measurement at any temperature, and a wet-bulb temperature of 10 Celsius is presumably not an issue.

wing-_-nuts 5y ago

It is kind of terrifying to realize that large portions of the third world are soon going to become so hot that it will be impossible to do any sort of physical exertion outside for large parts of the day without putting yourself at risk for heat stroke. That's at lower warming scenarios. At even higher temps it becomes damned near impossible to live without AC (which many in the third world don't have)

twright 5y ago

Found an excerpt of the first chapter for anyone interested: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...

pjerem 5y ago

This opening is truly frightening.

asterizer 5y ago

The entire book is super important. Plausible and scary predictions for the next 40 years with many positive solutions.(Pumping the water from underneath the major glaciers to keep them from sliding into the ocean.) It's heartening to see the world come together over Ukraine, a template for how we could come together over climate change.

time_to_smile 5y ago
> It's heartening to see the world come together over Ukraine NATO is coming together over the Ukraine to ensure that they control the NG and potential oil reserves there and not Russia. I live in a NATO country and hope my team wins because, ultimately, it will be better for me. All of the rest of the narratives are propaganda to get the public feeling morally good about another conflict over fossil fuels. There's nothing heartening about this. The end result of this will ultimately be more burning of fossil fuels, we're just fighting to see who pays what to burn them.
native_samples 5y ago
God no. That would be a disaster. Back here in the real world, not the modelled world, we have to ask is the temperature even rising at all? This shouldn't even be a legitimate question to ask but it turns out it is. In recent years temperature "rises" have sometimes turned out to be the result of data modification and not really existing. See how NOAA has announced that July 2021 broke the previous temperature record set in 2016, and how they also announced that July 2019 was a record breaking year. This happens because climatologists are constantly rewriting the historical record to create new warming trends where none were previously seen. They admit to this in obscure papers but reason, correctly, that the media/political set will not call them on it, so they can get away with making their predictions about the future come true by simply altering the past. In many cases temperature graphs for massive regions that were flat in the past have become sloped in the present. Consider this front page New York Times article from 1989: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/26/us/us-data-since-1895-fail-to-show-warming-trend.html?src=pm https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/26/us/us-data-since-1895-fai... "US data since 1895 fail to show warming trend" Look at the graph in the lower left hand corner for long term US temperatures and notice that it's flat. The US should certainly have warmed between 1895 and 1989 given GHG emissions in this time frame but it didn't. Now go look up a temperature history of the USA from modern sources like the NOAA website. Observe that it's sloped upwards for the same time frame. The past has been changed. In the first part of the century there was a notorious so-called pause in global warming. Temperatures were once again not going up. Scientists fixed this by rewriting the past once again: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 If there was actually runaway global warming, they would not need to do this sort of thing. But they do, because otherwise, warming does not appear in the data. Given that the temperature record is not trustworthy by climatologists own admission it would be incredibly destructive and unwise to do geo-engineering on the basis of such flimsy data. It could easily make things far worse. In fact we just finished up with a global crisis; one that appears to have started in a lab that was tampering with viruses in an attempt to pre-solve a future disease crisis that existed primarily in the heads of the scientists researching it. The scale of it was then exaggerated by modellers who didn't understand what they were modelling and who have utterly refused to accept evidence that their suggested interventions had no effect. Academia is just not reliable enough to take drastic action on the basis of their predictions and people who keep denying this are, in my view, the real deniers.

roughly 5y ago

Coincidentally, Robinson is speaking today at the Long Now Foundation: https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond-02022 https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond...

germinalphrase 5y ago
Just want to say that the Long Now speaker series has a bunch of interesting talks in their back catalogue.
- roughly 5y ago
  They really, really do. They do a spectacular job of bringing in people who are at the vanguard without slipping over the edge, so to speak. Two favorites from the last couple years: Mary Lou Jepsen talking about new modes of cheap, easy medical imaging and their potential impacts: https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-t... Michael Frachetti on the role of nomadic pastoralists in both generating and spreading knowledge along the historic silk roads: https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/feb/26/open-source-civilization-unexpected-origins-silk-road/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/feb/26/open-source-civili... They’re really such a diverse group of speakers and subjects, and all of them have been really high quality and high value.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Agreed. They also do a great job of nerding out on a topic without getting so into the technical weeds that a mass audience can’t follow.