23 ms·

Wet-bulb temperature

137 points by vincent_s 3y ago

studmuffin650 3y ago
in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer. A wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.
- hiatus 3y ago
  What exactly is a "wet bulb event"?
  - irdc 3y ago
    A wet bulb event occurs when the combined temperature and humidity (the so called "wet bulb temperature") exceeds the limits of human physiology, causing humans to overheat and perish even in the absence of any activity beyond basal metabolism. I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.
    - truculent 3y ago
      Earnest question: what makes you doubt the depiction? Trust in infrastructure or institutions?
      - irdc 3y ago
        The widespread availability of air conditioning plus the fact that we've had such events before on rare occasions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_recorded_wet-bulb_temperatures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_r...) and we didn't see bodies piled up in the street back then.
        RetroTechie 3y ago
        True.. so far. All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage. And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever. Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
  - lukevp 3y ago
    Temperature and humidity are high enough that you can’t cool off naturally via sweat. I would suspect most people don’t realize that’s even a thing. I’m from Texas, and everyone thinks they’re heat adapted and tries to act macho. A lot of people would just stay outside and keep working, ignoring any warnings they received.
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      In part, I'm sure culture in this particular instance is partly to blame here. That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions. However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.
      - gaulish 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - wonderwonder 3y ago
      I expect Texas to be the first state to experience a wet bulb event. Its only a matter of time before we get a combination of extreme heat and a massive failure of their power grid. Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing. Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom
      - nocoiner 3y ago
        We had hundreds of deaths in the span of 2-3 days during the winter storm in 2021. It didn’t catalyze any political change then, so unfortunately I think you’re right about the effect the next time it happens. I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    I assume parent means a period of time where the ambient temperature is at or above the wet bulb temperature.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      Ambient temperature is always at or above the wet-bulb temperature, by definition. A wet-bulb temperature measures the temperature that can be achieved after energy loss due to evaporation of water, so as long as evaporation is possible (humidity < 100%), it is lower than the actual temperature.
      - makeitdouble 3y ago
        Thanks for the correction, I need to revisit the subject in full I think.
  - Zaskoda 3y ago
    Basically, it's when the wet-bulb temperature exceeds 35C. From the Wikipedia entry: "It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    The wet-bulb temperature is the minimum temperature a wet body can reach via evaporation--effectively the minimum temperature you can reach via sweating. When the wet-bulb temperature reaches body temperature, you can only maintain body temperature via active A/C. Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner. "Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"
- mrjaeger 3y ago
  That's actually the inciting incident for the cli-fi book "The Ministry for the Future". Overall I really enjoyed the book, was a good mix of interesting economic/policy ideas interwoven through a compelling character based narrative.
- whycome 3y ago
  The 1896 New York heat wave lasted 10 days and killed ~1500 people. And has just 2 short paragraphs in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Eastern_North_America_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Eastern_North_America_hea...) > "This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at night," https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-1896-and-the-rise-of-roosevelt?ft=1&f=1022 https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-18... It wasn't necessarily a wake-up call then. But it may have at least been the crisis that spurred one guy...
  - gaulish 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - truculent 3y ago
      Wouldn’t the rain today spit in the idea of so-called “summer”?
    - __alexs 3y ago
      If a thing that used to be a 1 in 100 year event starts happening every 10 years and all the science says it's because of man made climate change then yeah we can totally do things to make it go back to happening once every 100 years again.
  - calgarymicro 3y ago
    > A majority of the deaths were of working-class men in their twenties who performed manual labor. Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.
- hkpack 3y ago
  > in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer. It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    Hate to agree but yeah. We've already seen a number of deadly heat waves in Europe. In 2003, 70,000 people died in the EU from a heat wave [1]. A fact that is never really comes up in talks about climate change. The death toll could be millions and we'd still see deniers clamoring that we need to burn more coal for grid stability or whatever. [1] https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-are-most-at-risk-of-dying-in-european-heatwaves https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      The short-term patch is to install air conditioning (or go to the mall, or even an air conditioned car). That's what people at risk of this will do.
    - aeternum 3y ago
      More people die of cold than heat, a fact that never comes up in talks about climate change. Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.
      - ironlake 3y ago
        And think of all the money we'll save on jackets
  - dahwolf 3y ago
    As is the case with the new social media meme where "Europoors" don't have ACs and should be ridiculed for it.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  But think about the solution. It's making A/C very accessible and reliable. That requires cheap energy with a high-uptime grid. There are many ways to solve this problem but adding difficult to meet constraints to energy companies that risk price and availability is not one of them.
  - NoraCodes 3y ago
    The short term solution is making A/C very accessible and reliable. The long term solution is no longer putting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is imperative to do both, no matter the (e: monetary) expense.
    - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
      [dead]
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    I too see nationalizing our power grid as inevitable.
- losvedir 3y ago
  People will need to start thinking of the summer months in some places like the winter months in others: during certain periods you need shelter with working HVAC systems, and when you go outside you need suitable gear and emergency arrangements. I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!
  - btbuildem 3y ago
    The one key difference is, in cold climates we heat our spaces and any heat that "leaks out" or is otherwise incidental is absorbed by the cold outside. In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.
- thworp 3y ago
  In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The real issue is what to do about it, how to do it and in what timeframe. With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude). There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone. If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions. Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem. The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.
  - jmcqk6 3y ago
    > In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax. If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Anecdote: None of my conservative-leaning acquaintances believe that Climate Change is even a top-20 problem, let alone something that requires urgent nationwide or worldwide action. I believe the filter bubble is real.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  I don't even think that would change people's minds. They'll just call it fake news and blame it on someone's laptop.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Some people have fantasies about these heatwaves that just decimate all living things. It’s not that simple. It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable. Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    > It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.
    - sjducb 3y ago
      Fill a bath and get in it. The groundwater is usually much colder than the air. However there is a limit to how long you can live in the bath.
      - falcolas 3y ago
        And how many bath tubs there are per-capita. Many newer homes are built with only showers. You also have to worry about power when it comes to having access to sufficient water to cool a person in the first place.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        You do not need to submerge yourself underwater if that’s what you are suggesting. A bucket of water for your feet will do lots. A shower is good too.
dmans0n 3y ago
This excerpt from the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future depicts a mass casualty wet-bulb event in Uttar Pradesh: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
samcheng 3y ago
If you haven’t read it yet, the first section of Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson describes a wet-bulb event in striking detail. The horror of this climate-change catastrophe is what finally triggers a significant global cultural shift around climate change. The passage was vivid enough for me to suggest preparatory measures to my retired parents. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in near-term climate impact!
- skyfaller 3y ago
  I hate speaking negatively about Ministry for the Future, because I admire KSR, and we need fiction that confronts the climate crisis and shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better. Still, I sadly cannot recommend this book. To quote from my spoileriffic review, "This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways." https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compelling-descriptions-of-problems-ludicrous-solutions https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compe...
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    > Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways. Honestly, that just makes the book better in my eyes and I haven't even read it.
  - allemagne 3y ago
    Can't agree more. The wet bulb event chapter is definitely worth a read, though. The sad reality is that the world's actual response to something like that happening will probably be about as disappointing and anticlimactic as the rest of the book was to read.
    - mikeyouse 3y ago
gorbypark 3y ago
I worked as a snowmaker at ski resorts for most my my adult life before getting into tech. We always use wet bulb temperatures because it’s a representation of temperature and humidity. With extremely low humidity, you can actually make manmade snow at about +3 degrees Celsius. That was always fun but scary, because a small change in humidity can turn snowguns into water guns in the blink of an eye.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I’ve occasionally wanted to try snowmaking at home on brutally cold days. Any tips for someone wanting to try this at home? Let’s assume that I have access to tap water at 60psi dynamic pressure and air at 90psi and 10 SCFM continuous (more for short bursts if needed).
  - josiahpeters 3y ago
    I did this exact thing this past winter. I spent about $100 on pipe fittings and purchased an external mixer DIY nozzle set from here: https://www.snowathome.com/our_products/SG3_e-type_nozzle_kit.php https://www.snowathome.com/our_products/SG3_e-type_nozzle_ki... I made snow in my front yard a few times. I also completely covered my tree and car in a blanket of ice a few times too. It was a fun little project to hack on.
    - gorbypark 3y ago
      That's pretty cool that they are selling "external mix" plans/kits. Snowmaking (at scale) is incredibly energy intensive and over the last few years many resorts have been moving towards various "low-energy" gun designs, which basically means external mix. They definitely don't make as good snow at marginal temperatures but it's impressive what they can do given a lot use 1/20th of the compressed air compared to a tradition air/water snowgun. A tradition air/water gun is just an 1.5" air inlet, a 1.5" water inlet, a mixing chamber and a nozzle. At higher temperatures, they take an incredible amount of air. We had a few guns that could take 300 horsepower worth of an air compressor, each, to run at -2.5 celsius wet bulb. As is gets colder it gets a little more efficient. There are some designs that are basically the same but incorporate a "baffle" that attempts to cut down the size of the mixing chamber when there's a high air/water mixture to make them more efficient, but those baffles would often get stuck open, making them useless. A fangun is the style of snowgun that uses a giant electric fan to project the snow out from the gun. There is an onboard electric air compressor hooked up to a few nozzles that spray out a mixture of air and water. The tiny droplets freeze into the "nucleus" (a tiny ice particle), which other droplets from water-only nozzles bind onto and freeze, creating a "snowflake". An external mix gun is basically a fangun, minus the big electric fan, and suspended 30+ feet in the air on a pole. A small number of nozzles spray out an air/water mix, creating the nucleus, and then water only nozzles spray out droplets that then bind to the nucleus. It works but needs to be a bit colder, and they are much more susceptible to winds (especially cross winds). If winds don't allow the two types of sprays to mix, you get a nice skating rink instead of snow!
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
More discussion just over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527168
olliecornelia 3y ago
[flagged]
weinzierl 3y ago
I find it interesting that in the US the weather report seems include the related dew point but in Europe it usually isn't.
bradford 3y ago
Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I'm annoyed with the use of the term 'wet bulb event' here and elsewhere. Wouldn't it put less burden on the reader to just say "wet bulb 35C"? (That is the temperature that most people seem to be referring to when they say 'wet bulb event'.) Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page: "It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  I feel like the terms in use around this are quite abstract and hard to reason about. I like that the wikipedia article converts this to something more useful to intuit for most of us: > Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure. The US NWS, for example, uses heat index commonly. In the US south I seldom see it go much over 110F, and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat. This isn't just a case of hitting some threshold where we all drop dead, but as temperatures rise it will slowly cause people to migrate to more temperate climates and/or seek out better cooling structures (either actively through air conditioning or passively where that isn't an option).
  - herbstein 3y ago
    > and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat. In the air-conditioned US. Much of the world gets as hot, if not hotter, without AC to help alleviate the heat.
carapace 3y ago
I recently spent some time camping in a place that hit daytime temperatures of over 100°F. When it's that hot all you can do is wet your clothing and spray mist and fan yourself to get evaporative cooling. Thinking about wet-bulb temperature in that context was terrifying. The hot dry breeze can cool you off. The hot humid breeze is death. If you live somewhere where this could happen you should move now.
drbig 3y ago
Temperature without humidity is like voltage without current, or per-capita GDP without the Gini coefficient. Many measures alone are of little practical value. Stay _comfortable_ there!
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Sounds like we will be needing lots of reliable carbon-free energy, excellent electricity infrastructure, and lots and lots of air conditioning.
dahwolf 3y ago
I personally believe that I've been in a short-lived "wet bulb" situation twice in my life. In both cases, in the Amazon, pretty much at the equator, at some of the hottest days of the year. 40-45C, humidity near a 100. A cold shower does nothing, it actually makes it worse as it activates your body to warm up. Stripping naked does nothing. Sweat just streams down the entire body as if a tap is open. It's near impossible to keep up with drinking water. It was short-lived as the weather was extremely variable, but the feeling of being completely unable to cool down despite throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it, is memorable.
- rexer 3y ago
  Surely a cold shower helps? If it causes your body to trigger self-heating process, surely that’s proof your body has been cooled to less than dangerously high levels and the shower has provided at least temporary relief.

137 points by vincent_s 3y ago

in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer. A wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.

hiatus 3y ago
What exactly is a "wet bulb event"?
- irdc 3y ago
  A wet bulb event occurs when the combined temperature and humidity (the so called "wet bulb temperature") exceeds the limits of human physiology, causing humans to overheat and perish even in the absence of any activity beyond basal metabolism. I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.
  - truculent 3y ago
    Earnest question: what makes you doubt the depiction? Trust in infrastructure or institutions?
    - irdc 3y ago
      The widespread availability of air conditioning plus the fact that we've had such events before on rare occasions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_recorded_wet-bulb_temperatures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_r...) and we didn't see bodies piled up in the street back then.
      - RetroTechie 3y ago
        True.. so far. All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage. And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever. Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
- lukevp 3y ago
  Temperature and humidity are high enough that you can’t cool off naturally via sweat. I would suspect most people don’t realize that’s even a thing. I’m from Texas, and everyone thinks they’re heat adapted and tries to act macho. A lot of people would just stay outside and keep working, ignoring any warnings they received.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    In part, I'm sure culture in this particular instance is partly to blame here. That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions. However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.
    - gaulish 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - wonderwonder 3y ago
    I expect Texas to be the first state to experience a wet bulb event. Its only a matter of time before we get a combination of extreme heat and a massive failure of their power grid. Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing. Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom
    - nocoiner 3y ago
      We had hundreds of deaths in the span of 2-3 days during the winter storm in 2021. It didn’t catalyze any political change then, so unfortunately I think you’re right about the effect the next time it happens. I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I assume parent means a period of time where the ambient temperature is at or above the wet bulb temperature.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    Ambient temperature is always at or above the wet-bulb temperature, by definition. A wet-bulb temperature measures the temperature that can be achieved after energy loss due to evaporation of water, so as long as evaporation is possible (humidity < 100%), it is lower than the actual temperature.
    - makeitdouble 3y ago
      Thanks for the correction, I need to revisit the subject in full I think.
- Zaskoda 3y ago
  Basically, it's when the wet-bulb temperature exceeds 35C. From the Wikipedia entry: "It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"
- jcranmer 3y ago
  The wet-bulb temperature is the minimum temperature a wet body can reach via evaporation--effectively the minimum temperature you can reach via sweating. When the wet-bulb temperature reaches body temperature, you can only maintain body temperature via active A/C. Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner. "Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"
mrjaeger 3y ago
That's actually the inciting incident for the cli-fi book "The Ministry for the Future". Overall I really enjoyed the book, was a good mix of interesting economic/policy ideas interwoven through a compelling character based narrative.
whycome 3y ago
The 1896 New York heat wave lasted 10 days and killed ~1500 people. And has just 2 short paragraphs in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Eastern_North_America_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Eastern_North_America_hea...) > "This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at night," https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-1896-and-the-rise-of-roosevelt?ft=1&f=1022 https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-18... It wasn't necessarily a wake-up call then. But it may have at least been the crisis that spurred one guy...
- gaulish 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - truculent 3y ago
    Wouldn’t the rain today spit in the idea of so-called “summer”?
  - __alexs 3y ago
    If a thing that used to be a 1 in 100 year event starts happening every 10 years and all the science says it's because of man made climate change then yeah we can totally do things to make it go back to happening once every 100 years again.
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  > A majority of the deaths were of working-class men in their twenties who performed manual labor. Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.
hkpack 3y ago
> in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer. It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Hate to agree but yeah. We've already seen a number of deadly heat waves in Europe. In 2003, 70,000 people died in the EU from a heat wave [1]. A fact that is never really comes up in talks about climate change. The death toll could be millions and we'd still see deniers clamoring that we need to burn more coal for grid stability or whatever. [1] https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-are-most-at-risk-of-dying-in-european-heatwaves https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    The short-term patch is to install air conditioning (or go to the mall, or even an air conditioned car). That's what people at risk of this will do.
  - aeternum 3y ago
    More people die of cold than heat, a fact that never comes up in talks about climate change. Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.
    - ironlake 3y ago
      And think of all the money we'll save on jackets
- dahwolf 3y ago
  As is the case with the new social media meme where "Europoors" don't have ACs and should be ridiculed for it.
nonethewiser 3y ago
But think about the solution. It's making A/C very accessible and reliable. That requires cheap energy with a high-uptime grid. There are many ways to solve this problem but adding difficult to meet constraints to energy companies that risk price and availability is not one of them.
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  The short term solution is making A/C very accessible and reliable. The long term solution is no longer putting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is imperative to do both, no matter the (e: monetary) expense.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    [dead]
- gopher_space 3y ago
  I too see nationalizing our power grid as inevitable.
losvedir 3y ago
People will need to start thinking of the summer months in some places like the winter months in others: during certain periods you need shelter with working HVAC systems, and when you go outside you need suitable gear and emergency arrangements. I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!
- btbuildem 3y ago
  The one key difference is, in cold climates we heat our spaces and any heat that "leaks out" or is otherwise incidental is absorbed by the cold outside. In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.
thworp 3y ago
In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The real issue is what to do about it, how to do it and in what timeframe. With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude). There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone. If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions. Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem. The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.
- jmcqk6 3y ago
  > In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax. If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Anecdote: None of my conservative-leaning acquaintances believe that Climate Change is even a top-20 problem, let alone something that requires urgent nationwide or worldwide action. I believe the filter bubble is real.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
I don't even think that would change people's minds. They'll just call it fake news and blame it on someone's laptop.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Some people have fantasies about these heatwaves that just decimate all living things. It’s not that simple. It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable. Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.
- falcolas 3y ago
  > It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.
  - sjducb 3y ago
    Fill a bath and get in it. The groundwater is usually much colder than the air. However there is a limit to how long you can live in the bath.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      And how many bath tubs there are per-capita. Many newer homes are built with only showers. You also have to worry about power when it comes to having access to sufficient water to cool a person in the first place.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        You do not need to submerge yourself underwater if that’s what you are suggesting. A bucket of water for your feet will do lots. A shower is good too.

dmans0n 3y ago

This excerpt from the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future depicts a mass casualty wet-bulb event in Uttar Pradesh: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-the-future/ https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...

samcheng 3y ago

If you haven’t read it yet, the first section of Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson describes a wet-bulb event in striking detail. The horror of this climate-change catastrophe is what finally triggers a significant global cultural shift around climate change. The passage was vivid enough for me to suggest preparatory measures to my retired parents. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in near-term climate impact!

skyfaller 3y ago
I hate speaking negatively about Ministry for the Future, because I admire KSR, and we need fiction that confronts the climate crisis and shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better. Still, I sadly cannot recommend this book. To quote from my spoileriffic review, "This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways." https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compelling-descriptions-of-problems-ludicrous-solutions https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compe...
- aaomidi 3y ago
  > Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways. Honestly, that just makes the book better in my eyes and I haven't even read it.
- allemagne 3y ago
  Can't agree more. The wet bulb event chapter is definitely worth a read, though. The sad reality is that the world's actual response to something like that happening will probably be about as disappointing and anticlimactic as the rest of the book was to read.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago

gorbypark 3y ago

I worked as a snowmaker at ski resorts for most my my adult life before getting into tech. We always use wet bulb temperatures because it’s a representation of temperature and humidity. With extremely low humidity, you can actually make manmade snow at about +3 degrees Celsius. That was always fun but scary, because a small change in humidity can turn snowguns into water guns in the blink of an eye.

sokoloff 3y ago
I’ve occasionally wanted to try snowmaking at home on brutally cold days. Any tips for someone wanting to try this at home? Let’s assume that I have access to tap water at 60psi dynamic pressure and air at 90psi and 10 SCFM continuous (more for short bursts if needed).
- josiahpeters 3y ago
  I did this exact thing this past winter. I spent about $100 on pipe fittings and purchased an external mixer DIY nozzle set from here: https://www.snowathome.com/our_products/SG3_e-type_nozzle_kit.php https://www.snowathome.com/our_products/SG3_e-type_nozzle_ki... I made snow in my front yard a few times. I also completely covered my tree and car in a blanket of ice a few times too. It was a fun little project to hack on.
  - gorbypark 3y ago
    That's pretty cool that they are selling "external mix" plans/kits. Snowmaking (at scale) is incredibly energy intensive and over the last few years many resorts have been moving towards various "low-energy" gun designs, which basically means external mix. They definitely don't make as good snow at marginal temperatures but it's impressive what they can do given a lot use 1/20th of the compressed air compared to a tradition air/water snowgun. A tradition air/water gun is just an 1.5" air inlet, a 1.5" water inlet, a mixing chamber and a nozzle. At higher temperatures, they take an incredible amount of air. We had a few guns that could take 300 horsepower worth of an air compressor, each, to run at -2.5 celsius wet bulb. As is gets colder it gets a little more efficient. There are some designs that are basically the same but incorporate a "baffle" that attempts to cut down the size of the mixing chamber when there's a high air/water mixture to make them more efficient, but those baffles would often get stuck open, making them useless. A fangun is the style of snowgun that uses a giant electric fan to project the snow out from the gun. There is an onboard electric air compressor hooked up to a few nozzles that spray out a mixture of air and water. The tiny droplets freeze into the "nucleus" (a tiny ice particle), which other droplets from water-only nozzles bind onto and freeze, creating a "snowflake". An external mix gun is basically a fangun, minus the big electric fan, and suspended 30+ feet in the air on a pole. A small number of nozzles spray out an air/water mix, creating the nucleus, and then water only nozzles spray out droplets that then bind to the nucleus. It works but needs to be a bit colder, and they are much more susceptible to winds (especially cross winds). If winds don't allow the two types of sprays to mix, you get a nice skating rink instead of snow!

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

More discussion just over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527168

olliecornelia 3y ago

[flagged]

weinzierl 3y ago

I find it interesting that in the US the weather report seems include the related dew point but in Europe it usually isn't.

bradford 3y ago

Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I'm annoyed with the use of the term 'wet bulb event' here and elsewhere. Wouldn't it put less burden on the reader to just say "wet bulb 35C"? (That is the temperature that most people seem to be referring to when they say 'wet bulb event'.) Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page: "It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"

JeremyNT 3y ago
I feel like the terms in use around this are quite abstract and hard to reason about. I like that the wikipedia article converts this to something more useful to intuit for most of us: > Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure. The US NWS, for example, uses heat index commonly. In the US south I seldom see it go much over 110F, and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat. This isn't just a case of hitting some threshold where we all drop dead, but as temperatures rise it will slowly cause people to migrate to more temperate climates and/or seek out better cooling structures (either actively through air conditioning or passively where that isn't an option).
- herbstein 3y ago
  > and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat. In the air-conditioned US. Much of the world gets as hot, if not hotter, without AC to help alleviate the heat.

carapace 3y ago

I recently spent some time camping in a place that hit daytime temperatures of over 100°F. When it's that hot all you can do is wet your clothing and spray mist and fan yourself to get evaporative cooling. Thinking about wet-bulb temperature in that context was terrifying. The hot dry breeze can cool you off. The hot humid breeze is death. If you live somewhere where this could happen you should move now.

drbig 3y ago

Temperature without humidity is like voltage without current, or per-capita GDP without the Gini coefficient. Many measures alone are of little practical value. Stay _comfortable_ there!

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

Sounds like we will be needing lots of reliable carbon-free energy, excellent electricity infrastructure, and lots and lots of air conditioning.

dahwolf 3y ago

I personally believe that I've been in a short-lived "wet bulb" situation twice in my life. In both cases, in the Amazon, pretty much at the equator, at some of the hottest days of the year. 40-45C, humidity near a 100. A cold shower does nothing, it actually makes it worse as it activates your body to warm up. Stripping naked does nothing. Sweat just streams down the entire body as if a tap is open. It's near impossible to keep up with drinking water. It was short-lived as the weather was extremely variable, but the feeling of being completely unable to cool down despite throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it, is memorable.

rexer 3y ago
Surely a cold shower helps? If it causes your body to trigger self-heating process, surely that’s proof your body has been cooled to less than dangerously high levels and the shower has provided at least temporary relief.