5 ms·

Global Risk of Deadly Heat

52 points by tcfhgj 4y ago

gravitate 4y ago
Us humans are very adaptable. Maybe this is our next evolutionary step? (Apart from the obvious other step of symbiosis with technology). Maybe we'll become thermophiles?[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Evolution may not save us though! I think symbiosis with technology is the key: air conditioning is expensive and energy intensive. However there are devices that attach to your arm and can cool you down quickly.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    You're trying to beat evaporative cooling... Good luck with that.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Evaporative cooling ceases to work if water is almost condensing on your body! I imagine a dry ice pack and associated tech to slow release that coolness to exposed veins would work well.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    "technology" put us here, more of it without a dramatic paradigm change won't do any good. See EVs for example, sold as a solution to global warming when it reality it's just ever so slightly displacing the problem and not actually solving anything besides car manufacturers from bankruptcy
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Have you tried to fuel your car with gasoline collected from your rooftop? Electric cars can and are routinely charged from solar panels. Yes, solar panel production consumes a lot of energy; quite some of that energy is electric, and can be provided by solar panels. So yes, solar panels may be energy-positive, not just shifting consumption of fossil fuels to factories.
      - lm28469 4y ago
        In theory it's all clean and nice, in practice half europe is still running on non renewable and the new renewables aren't replacing non-renewable, they're mostly stacking on top thanks the the rebound effect. The sad truth is that we're over consuming energy, and until we consume less we'll just run in the same problems over and over.
        nine_k 4y ago
        As soon as we consume renewable energy, there's no over-consuming it, Sun has a few hundred million years of runtime left. What we are overconsuming is fossil hydrocarbons, and this has to stop.
        lm28469 4y ago
        You still have to solve many issues, mining raw material, recycling, storage are just a few of them. As I said, it's all clean and nice on paper, once you take everything into equation we're faaaar of from that green future. I think people simply don't understand the sheer scale of it all and the cost of externalities, from the mine to the landfill. Slapping a "renewable" sticker on it doesn't solve the root issues, it certainly is perpetuating the myth that energy and growth are unlimited though
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      We need a bit if everything. Hedged bets. There is no world authority that can force every country to change unfortunately. The best bet is technology making it in countries interests to move to greener ways of producing power, and at a consumer level saving people money is usually a winner form changing habits.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Probably not with our current set of enzymes fine-tuned for 37 C degrees. Most probably our metabolism would stop working accurately into a waterfall of malfunctions. Would be more realistic to expect evolving a pair of feathered wings than to reset our blood temperature to several degrees higher.
- wesleywt 4y ago
  This is an emphatic no. Thermophiles are bacteria and archea. We are not that. We evolved during period of mild geological climate. We move out of this period we will cease to exist as a species. Which I am not against.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I'll take on this ... incredibly ... dumb take. It doesn't matter if we are "adaptable". We are directly reliant on a functioning global biosphere. This ain't changing. One of the scariest aspects of the current mass extinction is that other mass extinctions occurred on the timescale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. That can be viewed as a proper timescale for overall evolutionary adaptation to occur in the global biosphere. Our current mass extinction is really on the scale of a couple hundred years. Previous temperature shifts likewise occurred on the scale of 10,000s of years. That provides time for adaptation, migration of entire biomes to shifting locations. See: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ Our current one is ridiculously fast. Even if the biomes / ecosystems could migrate, humanity is industrializing all the possible locations for the biomes to migrate too with farming. Unless you are a colonist from mars with experience in surviving in a world without a functioning biosphere, kindly never repeat this sentiment again.
hirundo 4y ago
To make policy we should measure lethal heat events against lethal cold events. Cold events seem to be more dangerous on the whole. Do they decrease as the globe warms? "Researchers analyzed data on heat- and cold-related injuries that required a hospital visit in [Illinois] between 2011 and 2018. They identified around 24,000 cases each related to the cold and to heat. "Of those, there were 1,935 cold-related deaths and 70 heat-related ones. The cold caused 94% of temperature-related deaths, even though hypothermia (a drop in the body's core temperature) was responsible for only 27% of temperature-related hospital visits." -- https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20200827/what-is-more-deadly-in-the-us-hot-weather-or-cold https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20200827/what-is-mor...
- kbutler 4y ago
  Yes, cold deaths vastly outnumber heat deaths (600k from heat but 4.5m from cold annually worldwide). And yes, increased warmth decreases cold deaths - about 2x (283k avoided cold deaths vs 116k increased heat deaths per year). https://www.lomborg.com/the-heresy-of-heat-and-cold-deaths https://www.lomborg.com/the-heresy-of-heat-and-cold-deaths This effect is probably magnified by the fact that more warming occurs in nighttime temperatures, winter temperatures, and polar areas.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Ever been to a desert? They get very cold at night... So heating might well enhance the cold fatalities, much like ones due to other disasters like floods, dust, droughts, crop failures etc.
- defrost 4y ago
  > Do they decrease as the globe warms? In the near term (next century) they may well increase in ferocity and intensity. The physics is straightforward, "mean temp rising" across the entire Earth surface translates to more free energy trapped at the near earth land and water layers, that's more enery for winds (storm) and driving heat pumps (freezing cells). A relevant overly simplified high physics question is: There is a freezer with its door open in a sealed room .. over time does the room get hotter or colder? AGW is projected to have many knock on effects about the globe, pinning down which of these will happen where and to what degree is harder than the simple conclusion that such things will happen - and they are all disruptive to life as we humans know it.
gmuslera 4y ago
The first chapter of The Ministry for the Future (https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...) should be required reading, even if it is a work of science-fiction. Also, never cross a river that is 4-feet deep on average. Lethal heat for enough time could be the end of it for too many people in a region, whatever the long term trends are. And we already hit nearly 50ºC at latitude 50 in Canada last year, even it being a La Niña year.
- guillem_lefait 4y ago
  I found several interesting ideas in the book: - coloring the sea to increase albedo - pumping the water below ice layer to reduce the ice melt speed - the incentives to reward carbon capture Some actions (terrorism) introduce society changes: - drone attacks on plane/ship using fuel to limit carbon transportation - announcements of the contamination of animals with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to reduce the meat consumption
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    - danger of ultimate destruction of ecosystem that keeps us alive (same problem with algae seeding to enhance CO2 intake) - you mean heating up ice faster? - the main incentive is to fake savings while emitting more, how do you beat that? - better do these with empty ships and do not believe for one moment that more will not be spent to track you down, making it counterproductive - didn't work then, won't work now
    - routerl 4y ago
      > you mean heating up ice faster? No, the idea in the book is to reduce/stop glacial motion (which is what causes friction and increases glacial temperatures) by pumping out the layer of water below glaciers (i.e. remove the cushion that prevents friction from actually stopping the glacier's movement).
  - stevenwoo 4y ago
    The cryptocurrency ideas did not age well if I understood them correctly. Though I did appreciate that he does state the national banking systems only had legal ability to do things that really can’t change anything in the status quo - it’s quite similar to what Piketty talks about in Capital and Ideology.
mgerdts 4y ago
2017. Full text at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Farrah-Powell/publication/318173438_Global_risk_of_deadly_heat/links/59d34762a6fdcc181ad908dd/Global-risk-of-deadly-heat.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Farrah-Powell/publicati...
antisocialist 4y ago
- fnordian_slip 4y ago
  Please refrain from pushing these conspiracy theories on hacker news. There are better uses of one's time than arguing about conspiracies online, so let's not do that. Maybe you might be interested in a comic on the topic instead? If so, please enjoy this: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ Thank you.

52 points by tcfhgj 4y ago

Us humans are very adaptable. Maybe this is our next evolutionary step? (Apart from the obvious other step of symbiosis with technology). Maybe we'll become thermophiles?[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile

quickthrower2 4y ago
Evolution may not save us though! I think symbiosis with technology is the key: air conditioning is expensive and energy intensive. However there are devices that attach to your arm and can cool you down quickly.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  You're trying to beat evaporative cooling... Good luck with that.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Evaporative cooling ceases to work if water is almost condensing on your body! I imagine a dry ice pack and associated tech to slow release that coolness to exposed veins would work well.
- lm28469 4y ago
  "technology" put us here, more of it without a dramatic paradigm change won't do any good. See EVs for example, sold as a solution to global warming when it reality it's just ever so slightly displacing the problem and not actually solving anything besides car manufacturers from bankruptcy
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Have you tried to fuel your car with gasoline collected from your rooftop? Electric cars can and are routinely charged from solar panels. Yes, solar panel production consumes a lot of energy; quite some of that energy is electric, and can be provided by solar panels. So yes, solar panels may be energy-positive, not just shifting consumption of fossil fuels to factories.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      In theory it's all clean and nice, in practice half europe is still running on non renewable and the new renewables aren't replacing non-renewable, they're mostly stacking on top thanks the the rebound effect. The sad truth is that we're over consuming energy, and until we consume less we'll just run in the same problems over and over.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        As soon as we consume renewable energy, there's no over-consuming it, Sun has a few hundred million years of runtime left. What we are overconsuming is fossil hydrocarbons, and this has to stop.
        lm28469 4y ago
        You still have to solve many issues, mining raw material, recycling, storage are just a few of them. As I said, it's all clean and nice on paper, once you take everything into equation we're faaaar of from that green future. I think people simply don't understand the sheer scale of it all and the cost of externalities, from the mine to the landfill. Slapping a "renewable" sticker on it doesn't solve the root issues, it certainly is perpetuating the myth that energy and growth are unlimited though
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    We need a bit if everything. Hedged bets. There is no world authority that can force every country to change unfortunately. The best bet is technology making it in countries interests to move to greener ways of producing power, and at a consumer level saving people money is usually a winner form changing habits.
pvaldes 4y ago
Probably not with our current set of enzymes fine-tuned for 37 C degrees. Most probably our metabolism would stop working accurately into a waterfall of malfunctions. Would be more realistic to expect evolving a pair of feathered wings than to reset our blood temperature to several degrees higher.
wesleywt 4y ago
This is an emphatic no. Thermophiles are bacteria and archea. We are not that. We evolved during period of mild geological climate. We move out of this period we will cease to exist as a species. Which I am not against.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I'll take on this ... incredibly ... dumb take. It doesn't matter if we are "adaptable". We are directly reliant on a functioning global biosphere. This ain't changing. One of the scariest aspects of the current mass extinction is that other mass extinctions occurred on the timescale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. That can be viewed as a proper timescale for overall evolutionary adaptation to occur in the global biosphere. Our current mass extinction is really on the scale of a couple hundred years. Previous temperature shifts likewise occurred on the scale of 10,000s of years. That provides time for adaptation, migration of entire biomes to shifting locations. See: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ Our current one is ridiculously fast. Even if the biomes / ecosystems could migrate, humanity is industrializing all the possible locations for the biomes to migrate too with farming. Unless you are a colonist from mars with experience in surviving in a world without a functioning biosphere, kindly never repeat this sentiment again.

hirundo 4y ago

To make policy we should measure lethal heat events against lethal cold events. Cold events seem to be more dangerous on the whole. Do they decrease as the globe warms? "Researchers analyzed data on heat- and cold-related injuries that required a hospital visit in [Illinois] between 2011 and 2018. They identified around 24,000 cases each related to the cold and to heat. "Of those, there were 1,935 cold-related deaths and 70 heat-related ones. The cold caused 94% of temperature-related deaths, even though hypothermia (a drop in the body's core temperature) was responsible for only 27% of temperature-related hospital visits." -- https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20200827/what-is-more-deadly-in-the-us-hot-weather-or-cold https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20200827/what-is-mor...

kbutler 4y ago
Yes, cold deaths vastly outnumber heat deaths (600k from heat but 4.5m from cold annually worldwide). And yes, increased warmth decreases cold deaths - about 2x (283k avoided cold deaths vs 116k increased heat deaths per year). https://www.lomborg.com/the-heresy-of-heat-and-cold-deaths https://www.lomborg.com/the-heresy-of-heat-and-cold-deaths This effect is probably magnified by the fact that more warming occurs in nighttime temperatures, winter temperatures, and polar areas.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Ever been to a desert? They get very cold at night... So heating might well enhance the cold fatalities, much like ones due to other disasters like floods, dust, droughts, crop failures etc.
defrost 4y ago
> Do they decrease as the globe warms? In the near term (next century) they may well increase in ferocity and intensity. The physics is straightforward, "mean temp rising" across the entire Earth surface translates to more free energy trapped at the near earth land and water layers, that's more enery for winds (storm) and driving heat pumps (freezing cells). A relevant overly simplified high physics question is: There is a freezer with its door open in a sealed room .. over time does the room get hotter or colder? AGW is projected to have many knock on effects about the globe, pinning down which of these will happen where and to what degree is harder than the simple conclusion that such things will happen - and they are all disruptive to life as we humans know it.

gmuslera 4y ago

The first chapter of The Ministry for the Future (https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...) should be required reading, even if it is a work of science-fiction. Also, never cross a river that is 4-feet deep on average. Lethal heat for enough time could be the end of it for too many people in a region, whatever the long term trends are. And we already hit nearly 50ºC at latitude 50 in Canada last year, even it being a La Niña year.

guillem_lefait 4y ago
I found several interesting ideas in the book: - coloring the sea to increase albedo - pumping the water below ice layer to reduce the ice melt speed - the incentives to reward carbon capture Some actions (terrorism) introduce society changes: - drone attacks on plane/ship using fuel to limit carbon transportation - announcements of the contamination of animals with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to reduce the meat consumption
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  - danger of ultimate destruction of ecosystem that keeps us alive (same problem with algae seeding to enhance CO2 intake) - you mean heating up ice faster? - the main incentive is to fake savings while emitting more, how do you beat that? - better do these with empty ships and do not believe for one moment that more will not be spent to track you down, making it counterproductive - didn't work then, won't work now
  - routerl 4y ago
    > you mean heating up ice faster? No, the idea in the book is to reduce/stop glacial motion (which is what causes friction and increases glacial temperatures) by pumping out the layer of water below glaciers (i.e. remove the cushion that prevents friction from actually stopping the glacier's movement).
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  The cryptocurrency ideas did not age well if I understood them correctly. Though I did appreciate that he does state the national banking systems only had legal ability to do things that really can’t change anything in the status quo - it’s quite similar to what Piketty talks about in Capital and Ideology.

mgerdts 4y ago

2017. Full text at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Farrah-Powell/publication/318173438_Global_risk_of_deadly_heat/links/59d34762a6fdcc181ad908dd/Global-risk-of-deadly-heat.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Farrah-Powell/publicati...

antisocialist 4y ago

fnordian_slip 4y ago
Please refrain from pushing these conspiracy theories on hacker news. There are better uses of one's time than arguing about conspiracies online, so let's not do that. Maybe you might be interested in a comic on the topic instead? If so, please enjoy this: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ Thank you.