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A wet bulb related crisis in India is used as a plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel Ministry for the Future. The way he describes the wet bulb ev

A wet bulb related crisis in India is used as a plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel Ministry for the Future. The way he describes the wet bulb event is quite scary. (edit: corrected author and title, I confused this with Neal Stephenson's latest Termination Shock). Imagine something like that happening in a slum. It's the combination of humidity, temperature and poverty that is deadly. Think mass casualties (millions of people). No air conditioned environments to escape the heat. Limited access to clean water. Flaky electricity systems that cause what little capacity there is to cool anything to fail. Temperatures at night drop a little but not by enough to provide much relief. Robinson does a great job of making you believe how real this would be and what it would look like. The human body loses the ability to cool it self with 100% humidity. Sweat no longer evaporates. Basically, people start dropping like flies once that gets out of control. It's not survivable for more than a few hours. Any water you'd use for cooling no longer evaporates and would in any case have an ambient temperature that is close to or higher than your body temperature. Instead of cooling your body, it would just heat it up quicker. This is a very near future science fiction novel that describes a very scary reality that we might be dealing with on a regular basis pretty soon. North West US and Canada actually got a sneak preview when temperatures in the US and Canada hit record highs last summer.

germinalphrase 5y ago
He did a talk at the Long Now Foundation recently: https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond-02022/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond...
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  FWIW: he calls himself out in the talk on the lack of clarity between sabotage and murder.
ch4s3 5y ago
I thought the setup for that book was interesting, but it's probably his worst book IMHO (though I haven't read all of them). Normally I'm careful about attributing the actions of characters to novelists, but Robinson seems to be increasingly advocating terrorism in his books and it's getting really off-putting.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  I agree, I did not actually finish the book. The setup was interesting but it was all a bit too moralistic and righteous for my taste. Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock is much more fun in that respect. The terrorism aspect is interesting though. He's not the only one that is predicting conflict as a direct result of global warming. Mass population displacements due to things like wet bulb heat events, droughts, the middle east routinely hitting temperature of over 50/60 degrees Celcius, etc. have the potential to get really ugly.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  There's an internally consistent moral argument that terrorism is warranted in this situation eg Malm's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline." The basic argument is that peaceful protest is effective when it is an alternative to a more militant and disruptive extremist movement with the same goals. You negotiate with the peaceful side so the violent side doesn't tear your shit down. When there is no extremist movement, you really have no powerful incentive to acquiesce to the demands of the peaceful movement. At this point mass peaceful climate protest is decades old but we've seen virtually no meaningful changes addressed. We're tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis and it's only just barely getting started and those with the most agency to change it very obviously have no intent to. Why is ecoterrorism considered a morally abhorrent line that cannot ever be crossed, but their choice is not? The normative answer is "that is bad too they should stop" but by what means can we make them? Our options seem very limited.
  - kevin_morrill 5y ago
    I get what you’re saying but is the track record of terrorism any better at causing constructive change? Really we need to engage a lot of people’s minds, and that just turns out to be really hard in our current culture no matter what angle you come at it from.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      No, what I'm saying is that understanding peaceful movements separate from violent ones is missing the point. For example martin luther king jr's peaceful civil rights movement was effective in part because there was a credible threat of a violent movement on its wing. There was conflict and cooperation between these movements, they can't be cleanly separated. A lot of the reason white people came to the negotiating table at all was because of fear of what would happen instead if they didn't. Whose minds do we need to change? Climate change is a major issue with massive popular support. There are relatively few people actually able to take action on it and they will not under the current circumstances. Specifically because there's no credible non-peaceful consequence they have to confront, they can ignore the demands of everyone else. The actual historical effectiveness of terrorism alone is questionable. It's not a reliable or sustainable way to change the minds of a large mass of people. But that's not actually what we need to do here. Making a powerful few frightened enough to do what they ought may be sufficient. And the effectiveness of the credible threat of violence, combined with a mass peaceful movement, is well attested.
rpozarickij 5y ago
> The human body loses the ability to cool it self with 100% humidity I wonder whether there are practical/efficient ways of decreasing humidity in situations like this in closed spaces? So that you could use a regular fan again to cool yourself by means of evaporation of water off of your skin.
- kldx 5y ago
  An air conditioner already is a cooler and a dehumidifier. In a closed system, using a dehumidifier and then an evaporative cooler makes no difference. Assuming the electrical input to these is dissipated as heat, it ends up heating the room further.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > An air conditioner already is a cooler and a dehumidifier. The cold heat exchanger coil can cause condensation, which dehumidifies, but if the air temperature is 'correct' the AC control thermometer will keep the AC unit off. So you can have have an 'uncomfortable' environment because the temperature is 22C/70F but the humidity is >70%. This is why separate (whole house) dehumidifiers are often recommended: they have a separate hygrometers that cause the unit to start, regardless of what the temperature is.
    - kldx 5y ago
      Thanks for explaining, I didn't know about separate dehumidifiers used in addition to air conditioners.
    - kldx 5y ago
      Does the human body still depend on evaporating sweat to cool down at 22C? I'm trying to understand why one might dehumidify when it's comfortable at 22.

germinalphrase 5y ago

He did a talk at the Long Now Foundation recently: https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond-02022/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02021/11/10/climate-futures-beyond...

germinalphrase 5y ago
FWIW: he calls himself out in the talk on the lack of clarity between sabotage and murder.

ch4s3 5y ago

I thought the setup for that book was interesting, but it's probably his worst book IMHO (though I haven't read all of them). Normally I'm careful about attributing the actions of characters to novelists, but Robinson seems to be increasingly advocating terrorism in his books and it's getting really off-putting.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
I agree, I did not actually finish the book. The setup was interesting but it was all a bit too moralistic and righteous for my taste. Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock is much more fun in that respect. The terrorism aspect is interesting though. He's not the only one that is predicting conflict as a direct result of global warming. Mass population displacements due to things like wet bulb heat events, droughts, the middle east routinely hitting temperature of over 50/60 degrees Celcius, etc. have the potential to get really ugly.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
There's an internally consistent moral argument that terrorism is warranted in this situation eg Malm's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline." The basic argument is that peaceful protest is effective when it is an alternative to a more militant and disruptive extremist movement with the same goals. You negotiate with the peaceful side so the violent side doesn't tear your shit down. When there is no extremist movement, you really have no powerful incentive to acquiesce to the demands of the peaceful movement. At this point mass peaceful climate protest is decades old but we've seen virtually no meaningful changes addressed. We're tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis and it's only just barely getting started and those with the most agency to change it very obviously have no intent to. Why is ecoterrorism considered a morally abhorrent line that cannot ever be crossed, but their choice is not? The normative answer is "that is bad too they should stop" but by what means can we make them? Our options seem very limited.
- kevin_morrill 5y ago
  I get what you’re saying but is the track record of terrorism any better at causing constructive change? Really we need to engage a lot of people’s minds, and that just turns out to be really hard in our current culture no matter what angle you come at it from.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    No, what I'm saying is that understanding peaceful movements separate from violent ones is missing the point. For example martin luther king jr's peaceful civil rights movement was effective in part because there was a credible threat of a violent movement on its wing. There was conflict and cooperation between these movements, they can't be cleanly separated. A lot of the reason white people came to the negotiating table at all was because of fear of what would happen instead if they didn't. Whose minds do we need to change? Climate change is a major issue with massive popular support. There are relatively few people actually able to take action on it and they will not under the current circumstances. Specifically because there's no credible non-peaceful consequence they have to confront, they can ignore the demands of everyone else. The actual historical effectiveness of terrorism alone is questionable. It's not a reliable or sustainable way to change the minds of a large mass of people. But that's not actually what we need to do here. Making a powerful few frightened enough to do what they ought may be sufficient. And the effectiveness of the credible threat of violence, combined with a mass peaceful movement, is well attested.

rpozarickij 5y ago

> The human body loses the ability to cool it self with 100% humidity I wonder whether there are practical/efficient ways of decreasing humidity in situations like this in closed spaces? So that you could use a regular fan again to cool yourself by means of evaporation of water off of your skin.

kldx 5y ago
An air conditioner already is a cooler and a dehumidifier. In a closed system, using a dehumidifier and then an evaporative cooler makes no difference. Assuming the electrical input to these is dissipated as heat, it ends up heating the room further.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > An air conditioner already is a cooler and a dehumidifier. The cold heat exchanger coil can cause condensation, which dehumidifies, but if the air temperature is 'correct' the AC control thermometer will keep the AC unit off. So you can have have an 'uncomfortable' environment because the temperature is 22C/70F but the humidity is >70%. This is why separate (whole house) dehumidifiers are often recommended: they have a separate hygrometers that cause the unit to start, regardless of what the temperature is.
  - kldx 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining, I didn't know about separate dehumidifiers used in addition to air conditioners.
  - kldx 5y ago
    Does the human body still depend on evaporating sweat to cool down at 22C? I'm trying to understand why one might dehumidify when it's comfortable at 22.