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53° C (127.4° F) is extreme, even for Death Valley. We're rapidly approaching the point where larger and larger areas will be uninhabitable for humans, not just
by ttfkam 3y ago
53° C (127.4° F) is extreme, even for Death Valley. We're rapidly approaching the point where larger and larger areas will be uninhabitable for humans, not just uncomfortable.
- falcolas 3y ago> 53° C (127.4° F) is extreme, even for Death Valley. This. And we're not even in the hottest part of the year yet. I'd like to see the wet bulb temperatures too, but I'm guessing they're in the low 70's because of their low humidity. So it's technically possible for humans to survive that level of heat there given enough water and shade, though we'd probably see deaths in the eldest and youngest populations regardless. But should you move the location much in any direction, and you'd have conditions which would require artificial cooling for any human to survive.
- baggy_trough 3y agoDo you consider an area uninhabitable if it requires artificial measures to survive there?
- hotpotamus 3y agoI think that's all of Earth when it comes to a population of give or take 10 billion people. It really feels like all the stuff that people said wasn't sustainable when I was a kid wasn't sustainable and it's all starting to come apart.
- baggy_trough 3y agoI don't know what you mean by "sustainable". I look around and I see people are fatter and richer than ever before.
- AlexandrB 3y agoI guess it depends where you live. I see record numbers of unhoused people and young adults living with their parents into their 30s.
- titzer 3y agoSustainable means "we could keep doing it this way indefinitely" and the answer...no, we absolutely cannot keep doing it (i.e. producing energy) this way indefinitely. It never was sustainable, we just live in a system with a huge amount of inertia and big reservoirs that allows us to imagine things are sustainable when they aren't.
- baggy_trough 3y agoSince the Earth is finite every use of raw materials is unsustainable eventually. That's not something I worry about because costs will shift around and new ways to meet needs will be found.
- titzer 3y agoAnd yet life on Earth has managed to carry on for 3.7 billion years. How? Recycling. The answer is recycling. > That's not something I worry about Oh, we know. There are plenty of people thoughtlessly devouring irreplaceable things, consuming the habitat of life's creatures, and farting up a literal shit storm of carbon waste. Such people make lousy neighbors and their unsustainable habits are going away, one way or another. "Yeah I don't care about that" isn't nearly the burn you might think it is.
- baggy_trough 3y agoWhat a rude statement.
- southernplaces7 3y agoAnd I suppose you devour nothing irreplaceable, consume no part of nature's habitat and create minimal carbon waste? Anyone can criticize others for their supposedly evil habits, but then somehow be utterly blind to how their own are similar or the same in substance, if not in superficial form. At the very least, you own and use a laptop or mobile device, since you're commenting here. Any idea how much colossal mining is needed to manufacture both?
- jtriangle 3y agoNot really a great measure. If you remove the artificial from the world entirely, most people would be dead inside of a month.
- falcolas 3y agoIf it's hot and humid (a wet-bulb temperature above body temperature) and you lose power, you're dead within hours, not months. You can't hydrate or shade to cool yourself sufficiently in those conditions.
- jtriangle 3y agoSure, there are places that would kill people quicker than others, but that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about the benchmark of survivability without artificial means. Truthfully, as a species, most of us require artificial augmentation in order to survive, which makes that artificial augmentation a poor benchmark for survivability.
- falcolas 3y agoOur ancestors' survival in Africa, Siberia, and pretty much every place in between gives lie to the notion that "most of us require artificial augmentation in order to survive". And to be clear, no, I do not consider the use of fire, animal skins, etc. to be artificial augmentation. I do consider electricity and inter-continental supply lines to be artificial augmentation.
- jtriangle 3y agoRight, so, do you know how to hunt? Can you start a fire without matches? Ever skin an animal? I can do 1/3 there, only because of years in boyscouts, and there's no way in hell I'd survive without artificial augmentation, regardless of where you put me, I'm simply not prepared for it, same as almost everyone else. If you're not basically the primative technology guy from youtube, very slim odds you'd figure it out quickly enough.
- falcolas 3y agoYou have to consider what would happen if power went out. If everyone for whom power went out dies within a few hours, then yes, I would consider it uninhabitable without extraordinary means of ensuring that the power can't go out (see, for example, the measures taken at south pole bases to ensure power continuity). Power outages are inevitable, and above a certain wet bulb temperature you can't hydrate or shade yourself out of overheating. It's a when you'll die, not if.
- baggy_trough 3y agoWhat would be an example of a large area that will be uninhabitable for humans soon?
- zardo 3y agoFor the right definitions of "soon" and "uninhabitable" most of the Indian subcontinent and south east Asia.
- baggy_trough 3y agoI would like to know what the right definitions you have in mind are.
- goerz 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
- falcolas 3y agoWith only a little bit of snark: if you listen to insurers that would be Florida.
- solardev 3y ago(Not the OP) "Uninhabitable" is a vague word, but I found it useful to think about this in terms of global stability. The US Dept. of Defense (not a traditionally environmentalist group, though perhaps traditionally alarmist) did a series of studies on this. Here's a recent summary: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/21/2002877353/-1/-1/0/DOD-CLIMATE-RISK-ANALYSIS-FINAL.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/21/2002877353/-1/-1/0/DOD... Basically habitability and stability isn't just a matter of "will this land burn you alive" but also access to cropland and rangeland, clean water, or avoiding negatives like increased hurricanes and wildfires, or simply floods and droughts. Migration out of increasingly harsh areas is expected to fuel global instability, across large regions of the world at a time, often in some of the most populous or contentious areas. While the DoD's regional analyses aren't released to the public, there are similar studies in academia... https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10297292&hl=en&ei=PYG1ZL_QL_GB6rQPj--j4AI&scisig=ABFrs3yfL46tXFKZjq7rG-3iQXr6&oi=scholarr https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://par.nsf.g... (that one does go into detailed definitions of habitability). Basically the hot and humid areas of the world, like Southeast Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, are expected to spawn a lot of climate refugees. I believe more detailed models are out there, but I haven't looked too deep.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> We're rapidly approaching the point where larger and larger areas will be uninhabitable for humans, not just uncomfortable This is hyperbole. Unaided? Sure. But few in the developed world bear these conditions without access to air conditioning.
- solardev 3y agoThere's a lot of people living without air conditioning, in the developed world or otherwise. They also tend to be in many of the hotter and poorer areas around the equator. It's not a good combo :/
- ttfkam 3y agoThis is not hyperbole. We are already seeing heat indexes above 160 degrees. Even if everyone in these areas had air conditioning or heat pumps—which they don't—it's far more likely a power grid failure will rear its ugly head with all of them turned on to the max. There's also livestock and crops to consider. Do they have air conditioning too? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/07/30/iran-city-hits-suffocating-heat-index-of-154-degrees-near-world-record/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/... Remember, solar can't keep up with that due to the solar constant and cell efficiency dropping with extreme heat. Even fossil fuels can't track as well because they're governed by Carnot efficiency where the cold sink is largely affected by ambient temperatures. The world is heating up, and there only needs to be a few days at 160 to kill all the cows, goats, chickens, start fires, and overwhelm the power grid. In the past few years we've seen the old and vulnerable die in European summers. As it gets hotter, the threshold for "vulnerable" expands to include larger and larger portions of the population. Pretending the problem doesn't exist or is not going to be serious will not help anyone.
- carlosjobim 3y agoA large part of the inhabited world is absolutely uninhabitable for humans without the aid of technology, due to the cold. I'm no fan of extreme heat, but people come up with solutions for any environment.
- goerz 3y agoIt’s much easier to heat something than to cool it. You can build a fire without any technology at all, but you can’t do anything about unsurvivable heat without a working power grid.
- solardev 3y agoNot dismissing your overall point (it's certainly easier to just combust something for heat) but it's not strictly true that you can't cool without electricity. There are techniques both modern and ancient that can help, though sadly most structures aren't built this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling?wprov=sfla1 Where it gets really problematic is places that used to have a moderate climate (vs always having been hot) so the people and structures have no adaptations for the sudden extreme heat.
- goerz 3y agoYes, you can absolutely (and we will have to) mitigate hot temperatures with building design, but only up to the point where you have wet bulb temperatures >35C over several days. There are heavily populated areas that are in real danger of having something like that happening, and this is what that would look like: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
- wongarsu 3y agoHeating is much easier, but in the right conditions you can still do a lot without power. - The simplest is just having thermal mass to average day and night temperature. As long as the night is cold enough you can just stay in a brick or clay building with thick walls, preferably painted white. - If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use evaporative cooling, like Persian Yakhchāls [1]. - If you go high-tech, certain paints can cool surfaces down by a couple degrees (by radiating heat at frequencies that don't get absorbed by the atmosphere, thus breaking the equilibrium between heat absorption and heat emission). Of course there is a point where those fail. Evaporative cooling is dependent on a low wet-bulb temperature and fails quickly in humid climate. Thermal mass needs temperature differences. Paints only buy you a couple degrees. In contrast an AC can be scaled to much higher temperatures. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l