It's probably impossible to teach the broader public about the time scales involved in this. What we do now affects the world in decades to come (and more). And what we did for decades affects us now.
There have been recent (huge!) advances in renewable energy, chemistry, and climate modeling that open the door to solving this problem.
The path I see in front of us involves temporarily geoengineering our way to a +1C ceiling while massively scaling up carbon capture operations. At the same time, we transition as much industry to renewable energy as possible.
And therein lies the rub. A big chunk of the population thinks climate change is a lie, or there isn't anything reasonable we can do about it, or it's too expensive to try and do something about it. And the opposing side will only accept massive reductions in quality-of-life to fix climate change and absolutely won't support geoengineering.
Maybe the pragmatic middle is bigger than I think, and has the power to push the various wingnuts out into irrelevancy so we can get on with trying to innovate our way out of this mess like we always do.
There's those who don't want to change their way of life and deny the problem, and those who don't want to change their way of life and claim some magical but impossible techno fix will solve the problem.
Then there's those who realize that we won't solve the problem without some adjustment to the way we live.
The next decade we are going to see a lot more heat related deaths. And unfortunately, it will disproportionally affect the poorest/most vulnerable people.
Your comment sounds like you are predicting a mass human extinction, or close to it?
I personally think that's incredibly far off base, but if you are confident in your prediction for mass doom, I recommend throwing some money into prediction markets around it. It could be a great way to calibrate your model of reality (and potentially make money if you are right!).
A few variations in line with that:
If you're betting on near-total collapse, and you are right (and you survive from living in the developed world), you will be around to collect
If you're betting on collapse, and you are wrong, you will be around to pay up
If you bet against collapse, and you are right, you will be around to collect
It should also be said that with prediction markets, you don't have to wait until the event happens before selling your position.
Take a look at what happened earlier in the summer in Portland. Extreme heat events are becoming more common in places where homes often don’t have air conditioning.
Also, I feel like this should go without saying but the climate has changed perceptibly since 1999 and will continue to get warmer for the foreseeable future, so relying on past trend lines like this is a mistake.
I think the go comment is kinda of like the infamous slash dot review of the iPod: “I don’t think heat deaths will be a thing in the next decade” - uh huh
> Take a look at what happened earlier in the summer in Portland. Extreme heat events are becoming more common in places where homes often don’t have air conditioning.
This is true, but even in Portland, which is regarded as having one of the lowest rates of air conditioning in the nation, three out of four homes have it. We experienced around 100 deaths statewide (getting an exact count eludes me, as recently as three days ago NPR put it at 83, though earlier reports put it over 100) due to the heat wave.
As long as we can keep the power going, Portland can probably find practical ways to keep the death toll very low in future heat waves. I'm guessing we will get an opportunity to test that.
My local power utility has ramped up its (thus far) voluntary load shedding campaign this year with rebates for usage reductions during high-demand periods (including today!), and is also pushing "smart" thermostats pretty hard, also in exchange for a minor rebate. They're "smart" in that they allow the utility to remotely shut down your AC for a 75% or 50% duty cycle, which you are not allowed to override.
Don't count on AC saving all that many lives as the decade wears on.
Rooftop solar (if you can) is the future. The cost will (must, really) come down, even if we need a "Solar Corps" (volunteers, Habitat for Humanity style) or similar to get generation on the roofs of the disadvantaged. AC load shedding will become untenable in the hottest of places, and the power grid will become taxed from demand faster than infrastructure upgrades can occur.
In Australia, the cost for rooftop solar is about $1/watt. In the US, we're still higher from soft costs such as permitting, utility review and approval, and similar, putting the cost closer to $2-$3/watt (pre 26% federal tax credit). The NREL recently released an app that automates the permitting process [1], but there are still places to squeeze the fat out to drive the cost down.
Tesla's solar tiles are interesting, but cost prohibitive for anyone but the wealthy.
Rooftop solar is tempting. I'm in the PNW so the economics don't work out favorably (even at $1.5/W installed, which is what I was recently quoted). But there are some non-economic advantages to having solar (as long as you have batteries) so it may still be worthwhile.
I’m in Portland, OR. I’m not sure what you mean by the economics not working out. We got a loan to pay for the solar panels. The loan payment each month is about $35 under our previous monthly electric bill. Any excess electricity our system generates is fed back into the system and we get a credit for it. So far (4 years) it has been enough that even in the cloudiest months we don’t pay anything to PGE above the base charge ($12) to be hooked into the system.
Once the loan is paid off (in about 15 years), the panels are guaranteed to still be at 80% efficiency and our electric bill should be minuscule. Either way, the money we are paying is less than what we paid for our electric bill before panels.
The short answer is that I found that roof life expectancy was the real factor in determining whether the system was a good investment. The math is far more favorable if you install a 25 year roof at the same time you install the solar panels (and assuming that you needed to replace the roof anyway, or it was a new install on a freshly built house).
Roughly, the math for my situation worked out like this.
$20K out of pocket for a 13.5kW system, installed. This should, over a year's time, cover close to 100% of my average consumption.
Break-even time was something just over 11 years.
Existing roof is 10 years old. Reasonable life expectancy of the roof is 15 more years. Value of panels in 15 years is likely to be dwarfed by uninstall/reinstall costs when roof is replaced, so I call that EOL for the system.
The most optimistic scenario I can come up with, assuming PGE raises their rates 2.5% a year, is an ROI of 56K, which works out to about 10% annually. Not bad. But this only happens if nothing breaks, the roof really does last 15 years, the installed cost is only $1.5/W, and I invest $20K out of pocket (i.e. no loans).
So the way I see it, this is something to do for the non-economic benefits, e.g. installing battery so it will work when the grid is down.
There is quite a bit of room between what most people set their AC, what’s actually uncomfortable, and an even larger gap to what’s unhealthy. That delta is what allows load shedding in a heat wave. They don’t turn off the AC for days it simply goes on a longer cycle so the building might hit say 80f with low humidity.
In rich countries like the US throwing money at the problem works, but for the much of the world the extra infrastructure simply isn’t worth the extra comfort.
I'm in California where we have tons of solar generation. For much of the state, solar generation slopes off sharply starting at 4PM and it's still hot. That's when we tend to have the grid emergencies now. Houses with average insulation and pre-heated framing/attics can rise in temperature pretty quickly even if you've aggressively precooled the indoors.
Does your utility have a battery install incentive (Powerwall, LG Chem, etc) [1]? That’s typically what’s attempting to solve for the evening duck curve ramp in CA [2], enough storage to carry through from sunset to evening demand drop off.
Yah, but it's not worth it even with incentive. It's cool for geek factor / having a major UPS and I may go for it for that reason.
I think batteries-- distributed or as part of utility-scale deployments-- can help a bit but are not economical enough to use to solve this problem.
It's going to take more of everything-- more solar overprovisioning, a lot more wind power, a fair bit of battery, more load shedding and demand pricing, more DC interconnect allowing power to be shipped large distances... and other stuff, like gas-to-power-to-gas and/or more nuclear baseload... to really let us move to an overwhelmingly renewable grid and have stable power.
The issue, IMO, is that there's many different timescales/types of shortfall (very cloudy couple weeks in winter with no wind vs. daily duck curve)... and then there's the 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 events, too (heat wave in summer + overcast rolls in at 2:00PM trapping heat in all night with less insolation and little wind). Chemical storage can't blunt the longer timescale shortfalls much.
Makes me wonder how hard it would be to either just snip the control circuit from the utility provided thermostat to your AC unit and run your own in its place while retaining the discount, or setup an rPi or such as a MITM and intercept the control commands.
Alternatively: just don't overthink things and install a mini-split/window unit/small portable that doesn't get connected to the house thermostat in the first place.
These programs are optional. Google's Nest (among others) integrates with utility signaling to perform this shedding, and it's typically allowable for you to enable cooling and override the load shedding activated during peak demand (in the programs I'm familiar with).
I get that, I was just pondering the fraudulent possibilities of netting the discount while subverting any control the utility would take over your HVAC equipment.
The smart thermostats BGE offers allow only two overrides per day, iirc 30 or 60 min each. Not sure on that part, but the specific period isn't so much at issue as that somebody else has the privilege of deciding when I am allowed not to swelter.
(I saw some mention of a "smart switch" also installed under this program, which I assume is there to prevent "overriding" the meter by just yanking it off the wall and shorting the contacts.)
> Not sure on that part, but the specific period isn't so much at issue as that somebody else has the privilege of deciding when I am allowed not to swelter.
You signed up for a discount for them to have permission to adjust your AC condensing demand run time when necessary, correct? I have never heard of a mandatory residential load shedding program in the US, but that doesn't mean they might be out there.
> BGE‘s PeakRewards Air Conditioning program helps prevent the need for additional power plants, keep down the overall cost of electricity and ease the burden on Maryland’s electricity delivery system as the state’s population continues to grow. Plus, participants receive up to $100 in BGE bill credits each summer (June – September).
> The PeakRewards program is completely voluntary and is open to all BGE residential customers with central air conditioning or an electric heat pump in good working order, regardless of their choice of electricity supplier.
> You signed up for a discount for them to have permission to adjust your AC condensing demand run time when necessary, correct?
No. You're right that the program is (currently) voluntary; I haven't volunteered, not least because I run the AC at 76°, I have and know how to use ceiling fans, and most months the bill barely breaks $150 if that - my house is 140 years old, and while that's not enough especially in Baltimore to say that its survival proves it is well designed, it is well designed.
This is targeted at two groups of people: fools who paid far too much for far too little and ended up house-poor in a place built last year that doesn't know how to stay cool, and folks for whom $100 a month makes a huge difference. One of those groups has my sympathy, especially because I expect they'll be first and hardest hit when these programs cease being voluntary because the state isn't investing enough in generation capacity and the city isn't investing enough in grid maintenance.
If you're sweltering then maybe something is wrong with your setup. I've been on Rocky Mountain Power's version of this program for seven years and have only noticed that it's one or two degrees hotter than it should be maaaybe three times. In seven years.
Why don't you just unenroll from the program? I only get a $30 rebate per year. You make it sound like someone's holding a gun to your head and making you live in hell.
If this became enough of a problem, it would be easy enough for them to start auditing your hourly power usage. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already doing so to see the impact of such programs, and also because bypassing a thermostat or installing a window AC unit is within the reach of most people.
Oh, it's trivial to take any thermostat off the wall and bridge the same contacts its relay would. That's not what concerns me, so much as that I think I see the thin end of a wedge.
I lost power for about 45min last year during one of the highest load days in California. No AC though so it didn't really do much except people went outside and talked about not having power.
If you have a west coast home it’s probably worth at least half a mil in any Major metro close to 1 for anything decent sized.
People who pay subsidized rates will be throttled but will still be colder than 10 years ago before ac was widely available, they will have to suffer at 80-85f while you crank it down to 68 and pay market rate for the privilege . That’s just how capitalism works and it’s not a bad thing
50% duty cycle is more than enough to keep the temperature at a survivable level. If the utilities use the load shedding program to reduce AC usage to the point of killing people, the situation would already be so bad that the alternative load shedding approach of black outs would kill far more people.
It also helps to insulate the house and block the sunlight from the outside of the window. If you only use curtains, all the heat still get inside the house.
Norwegian company buildings are not allowed to install AC if you don’t have outside sunscreening. This is to save energy used by AC.
> I doubt heat related deaths will be a large factor in the next decade. More people than ever have access to AC and clean water.
Won't air conditioners stop working altogether above certain temperatures? If the ambient air outside is too hot, then the heat exchanger in your AC will start absorbing heat from the outside air rather than dissipating it. On top of that, air conditioners are most efficient when the temperature differential between the outside air and the heat exchanger is large, meaning that ACs become increasingly less efficient as the temperature rises, disproportionately increasing energy usage, which exacerbates fossil fuel consumption and the risk of brownouts (at the worst possible time, no less).
Most manufacturers give ratings up to 120 degrees, that doesn’t mean they totally stop working at that point, but the start to become less effective.
Projections for the next century range from a 2-10 degree increase in temp. Even on the aggressive side of 10 most places on earth never see 110 today. This also assumes 0 innovation in AC technology over the next century.
The issue for heat deaths like the current situation is not just the average increase, it's the _extreme_ temperatures that are killing and they're increasing much faster than the average and occurring much more often. Take a look at any of the analyses of the last big PNW heat dome versus climate change or just skim through this piece from a subject expert:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/heat-dome-climate...
"Heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s — on average at least six times a year in the United States in the 2010s. Record-breaking hot months are occurring five times more often than would be expected without global warming. And heat waves have become larger, affecting 25 percent more land area in the Northern Hemisphere than they did in 1980; including ocean areas, heat waves grew 50 percent."
> Won't air conditioners stop working altogether above certain temperatures?
Anecdotally, my central air didn't start to give up ground in the battle with the heat until the ambient temperature was about 115. Even then, the house only gained about 3 degrees F before coming back down a couple hours later when the ambient was back below 115.
IIRC, current residential air conditioner technology is engineered with the condenser expected to run at 120F. So it makes sense that this is the threshold where it stops being effective.
God forbid we ever get heat waves over 120 in Oregon, dang. I mean, we got close this last time, so never say never, but ... damn. I'll be moving if that happens.
Turn up their second AC system, pay a different AC technician more to travel further, go into their furnished basement, hang out in their running car, travel to a friend's spacious house, pay someone else to keep up their daily necessities while they fix the system themselves, or it won't have broken due to having better maintenance to begin with.
No doubt there will be some schadenfreude. But there is a reason these things affect the poor harder.
People generally operate on relative (social) position rather than absolute condition. If the world is going down, it's better to remain ahead of the herd while it does so. I'm not saying this is in any way right, but rather it's what will happen just like Covid.
There's also a coordination problem - if an individual rich person decides to slow down climate collapse (and many of them are, albeit possibly ineffectually), they're making their current life worse while not appreciably heading off the disaster.
Why is it that one conspiracy breeds another with you guys? I just skimmed your history and not only are you a climate science denier, you are also a covid denier, and you believe that the "mainstream media" is conspiring to depress GameStop's stock price! Surely you at least recognize how unlikely it is that all of these are true and you just happen to be one of the special few who figured it out? Cmon...
I deny most of the lies mainstream media pushes. I'm sorry that having your spoonfed worldview challenged is so hard for you. Wish you all the best! Hundreds of millions if not billions share my views. Not too special. Hurry up and get off the computer! You're missing Anderson Cooper 360!
I wonder if the reason the US elites are moving to NZ is these heat waves: perhaps modeling revealed that most of the US will become uncomfortably hot and humid in the next decade or so, while NZ will stay cool.
Air conditioning is a lot easier than moving to New Zealand.
The whole NZ citizenship for the rich is a mix of preppers nonsense and elite club FOMO. If it gets bad enough that NZ is the easiest answer, then NZ won’t be the answer.
Remember these are the same people doing young blood transfusions to stave off death. Hey, maybe history will prove me wrong, but it’s not impossible they’re flawed humans with fears and insecurities like everyone else.
My hypothesis about why rich people moving to NZ is that it's a mix of hype, NZ climate and the relative isolation. The latter is one of the most important. It's pretty hard to get to NZ. The distance itself will basically guarantee you won't get overrun by climate change refugees. Unlike the mainland US or Europe.
Which makes the idea of "moving to New Zealand" kind of ridiculous.
The world's a big place. There's much, much better spots to be at than the middle of nowhere, especially if you have money and/or the ability to create large structures around where you live.
If we don’t respond to climate change now and aggressively, like we are fighting a war, humanity is toast. Climate change will quickly wipe out most life on earth. The IPCC “code red” report doesn’t even take into account several enormous feedback effects such as methane off gassing from rock formations.
Climate change will probably help increase life on earth, given it will likely remove the most invasive and bio-suppressant species on earth today, humans
At 6°C (the very upper end of the IPCC report), the planet loses its ability to create clouds. Which itself means another 7°C due to the lowering of the albedo. Certainly a civilization-ending event, and perhaps a life-ending one.
> Climate change will quickly wipe out most life on earth.
I think the resource shortages, water wars and refugee crises that precede the actual climate-driven apocalypse will get us there a lot faster than we imagine.
I’m in Oregon. After that lingering week of 110+ temperatures in June the temperature gauge at my house said it got to 119 one afternoon), these three days of about 100 degree temperatures seems downright cool in comparison.
Also in Oregon (Portland area) and though it doesn’t feel darn near as hot the addition of mediocre air quality from the forest fires and higher than normal humidity make it suck something fierce.
72+ degrees and 80% humidity the past two mornings at 5am when I started the dog jog and it was not fun. 95 degrees last night at 9pm.
For those unfamiliar we usually have very low humidity and cool off a lot at night. It could easily be 85+ degrees during the day and we will normally be in the 50s overnight, with the temperature starting to drop a lot by 8 or 9pm.
Seems to be a term that has existed in meteorological circles for a while, but for some reason hit the mainstream media this year. This is the first year I'd heard it.
> High temperatures in Portland, Ore., are forecast to reach 98°F Wednesday, and 100°F on Thursday and Friday before cooling down for the weekend. The typical high temperature in Portland at this time of year is 83°F.
What does "typical high" mean? Wikipedia says that the average high for August is 82°F, but the mean maximum is 97°F.
It's crazy how hot Vancouver has been this summer. That and the smoke from wildfires. If this is a constant for every year I will seriously consider moving :/
103 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadThere have been recent (huge!) advances in renewable energy, chemistry, and climate modeling that open the door to solving this problem.
The path I see in front of us involves temporarily geoengineering our way to a +1C ceiling while massively scaling up carbon capture operations. At the same time, we transition as much industry to renewable energy as possible.
This can be done. It's entirely within our grasp.
And therein lies the rub. A big chunk of the population thinks climate change is a lie, or there isn't anything reasonable we can do about it, or it's too expensive to try and do something about it. And the opposing side will only accept massive reductions in quality-of-life to fix climate change and absolutely won't support geoengineering.
Maybe the pragmatic middle is bigger than I think, and has the power to push the various wingnuts out into irrelevancy so we can get on with trying to innovate our way out of this mess like we always do.
Then there's those who realize that we won't solve the problem without some adjustment to the way we live.
For prevention the time is up.
I personally think that's incredibly far off base, but if you are confident in your prediction for mass doom, I recommend throwing some money into prediction markets around it. It could be a great way to calibrate your model of reality (and potentially make money if you are right!).
If you're betting against collapse, and you are wrong, you aren't going to be around to pay up.
If you're betting on collapse, and you are wrong, you will be around to pay up
If you bet against collapse, and you are right, you will be around to collect
It should also be said that with prediction markets, you don't have to wait until the event happens before selling your position.
I doubt heat related deaths will be a large factor in the next decade. More people than ever have access to AC and clean water.
Also, I feel like this should go without saying but the climate has changed perceptibly since 1999 and will continue to get warmer for the foreseeable future, so relying on past trend lines like this is a mistake.
This is true, but even in Portland, which is regarded as having one of the lowest rates of air conditioning in the nation, three out of four homes have it. We experienced around 100 deaths statewide (getting an exact count eludes me, as recently as three days ago NPR put it at 83, though earlier reports put it over 100) due to the heat wave.
As long as we can keep the power going, Portland can probably find practical ways to keep the death toll very low in future heat waves. I'm guessing we will get an opportunity to test that.
Don't count on AC saving all that many lives as the decade wears on.
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
It’s unfortunately roughly double the cost of a regular roof (and 3x as much if your current roof is already due for replacement).
Tesla's solar tiles are interesting, but cost prohibitive for anyone but the wealthy.
[1] https://solarapp.nrel.gov/
(i facilitate, pm, and help with rooftop solar installs as time permits in the US)
Roughly, the math for my situation worked out like this.
$20K out of pocket for a 13.5kW system, installed. This should, over a year's time, cover close to 100% of my average consumption.
Break-even time was something just over 11 years.
Existing roof is 10 years old. Reasonable life expectancy of the roof is 15 more years. Value of panels in 15 years is likely to be dwarfed by uninstall/reinstall costs when roof is replaced, so I call that EOL for the system.
The most optimistic scenario I can come up with, assuming PGE raises their rates 2.5% a year, is an ROI of 56K, which works out to about 10% annually. Not bad. But this only happens if nothing breaks, the roof really does last 15 years, the installed cost is only $1.5/W, and I invest $20K out of pocket (i.e. no loans).
So the way I see it, this is something to do for the non-economic benefits, e.g. installing battery so it will work when the grid is down.
In rich countries like the US throwing money at the problem works, but for the much of the world the extra infrastructure simply isn’t worth the extra comfort.
[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...
[2] https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewab...
I think batteries-- distributed or as part of utility-scale deployments-- can help a bit but are not economical enough to use to solve this problem.
It's going to take more of everything-- more solar overprovisioning, a lot more wind power, a fair bit of battery, more load shedding and demand pricing, more DC interconnect allowing power to be shipped large distances... and other stuff, like gas-to-power-to-gas and/or more nuclear baseload... to really let us move to an overwhelmingly renewable grid and have stable power.
The issue, IMO, is that there's many different timescales/types of shortfall (very cloudy couple weeks in winter with no wind vs. daily duck curve)... and then there's the 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 events, too (heat wave in summer + overcast rolls in at 2:00PM trapping heat in all night with less insolation and little wind). Chemical storage can't blunt the longer timescale shortfalls much.
Alternatively: just don't overthink things and install a mini-split/window unit/small portable that doesn't get connected to the house thermostat in the first place.
(I saw some mention of a "smart switch" also installed under this program, which I assume is there to prevent "overriding" the meter by just yanking it off the wall and shorting the contacts.)
You signed up for a discount for them to have permission to adjust your AC condensing demand run time when necessary, correct? I have never heard of a mandatory residential load shedding program in the US, but that doesn't mean they might be out there.
https://bgesavings.com/programs/ac/
> BGE‘s PeakRewards Air Conditioning program helps prevent the need for additional power plants, keep down the overall cost of electricity and ease the burden on Maryland’s electricity delivery system as the state’s population continues to grow. Plus, participants receive up to $100 in BGE bill credits each summer (June – September).
> The PeakRewards program is completely voluntary and is open to all BGE residential customers with central air conditioning or an electric heat pump in good working order, regardless of their choice of electricity supplier.
No. You're right that the program is (currently) voluntary; I haven't volunteered, not least because I run the AC at 76°, I have and know how to use ceiling fans, and most months the bill barely breaks $150 if that - my house is 140 years old, and while that's not enough especially in Baltimore to say that its survival proves it is well designed, it is well designed.
This is targeted at two groups of people: fools who paid far too much for far too little and ended up house-poor in a place built last year that doesn't know how to stay cool, and folks for whom $100 a month makes a huge difference. One of those groups has my sympathy, especially because I expect they'll be first and hardest hit when these programs cease being voluntary because the state isn't investing enough in generation capacity and the city isn't investing enough in grid maintenance.
Why don't you just unenroll from the program? I only get a $30 rebate per year. You make it sound like someone's holding a gun to your head and making you live in hell.
Switches can be bypassed ;)
People who pay subsidized rates will be throttled but will still be colder than 10 years ago before ac was widely available, they will have to suffer at 80-85f while you crank it down to 68 and pay market rate for the privilege . That’s just how capitalism works and it’s not a bad thing
Norwegian company buildings are not allowed to install AC if you don’t have outside sunscreening. This is to save energy used by AC.
My point is you are cherry picking a starting point.
In 1999, there was just over 2 heat deaths per million
In 2000, there was just over 1 heat deaths per million
In 2018, there was just over 1.5 heat deaths per million
Can you explain how you extrapolate a downtrend if the starting point is 1, and the ending point is 1.5?
Won't air conditioners stop working altogether above certain temperatures? If the ambient air outside is too hot, then the heat exchanger in your AC will start absorbing heat from the outside air rather than dissipating it. On top of that, air conditioners are most efficient when the temperature differential between the outside air and the heat exchanger is large, meaning that ACs become increasingly less efficient as the temperature rises, disproportionately increasing energy usage, which exacerbates fossil fuel consumption and the risk of brownouts (at the worst possible time, no less).
Projections for the next century range from a 2-10 degree increase in temp. Even on the aggressive side of 10 most places on earth never see 110 today. This also assumes 0 innovation in AC technology over the next century.
"Heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s — on average at least six times a year in the United States in the 2010s. Record-breaking hot months are occurring five times more often than would be expected without global warming. And heat waves have become larger, affecting 25 percent more land area in the Northern Hemisphere than they did in 1980; including ocean areas, heat waves grew 50 percent."
Anecdotally, my central air didn't start to give up ground in the battle with the heat until the ambient temperature was about 115. Even then, the house only gained about 3 degrees F before coming back down a couple hours later when the ambient was back below 115.
IIRC, current residential air conditioner technology is engineered with the condenser expected to run at 120F. So it makes sense that this is the threshold where it stops being effective.
God forbid we ever get heat waves over 120 in Oregon, dang. I mean, we got close this last time, so never say never, but ... damn. I'll be moving if that happens.
We’re told it will affect us all, but obviously, some people believe that with money it will affect them less.
Although, it will be interesting to se what people with money do when their air conditioner breaks and the AC mechanic is out due to heat stroke.
No doubt there will be some schadenfreude. But there is a reason these things affect the poor harder.
Who grows your food etc etc?
There's also a coordination problem - if an individual rich person decides to slow down climate collapse (and many of them are, albeit possibly ineffectually), they're making their current life worse while not appreciably heading off the disaster.
There isn’t much that is bad that this doesn’t hold true for.
> ”if not billions”
Narrator: “It’s not billions.”
On the other hand, that post provoked a thought:
Society has lost valuable herd immunity to bad thinking. Used to be kooks had to try hard to spread nonsense.
Redefine kook as edgy, influencer, or in-the-know contrarian, and the nonsense practically spreads itself.
And your remark raised a point too: it’s indeed about feeling special. Now that everything is noisy, that takes a special kind of noise.
Smh...lemme know when winter comes and they predict we're headed for an ice age...again.
The whole NZ citizenship for the rich is a mix of preppers nonsense and elite club FOMO. If it gets bad enough that NZ is the easiest answer, then NZ won’t be the answer.
Remember these are the same people doing young blood transfusions to stave off death. Hey, maybe history will prove me wrong, but it’s not impossible they’re flawed humans with fears and insecurities like everyone else.
The world's a big place. There's much, much better spots to be at than the middle of nowhere, especially if you have money and/or the ability to create large structures around where you live.
I think the resource shortages, water wars and refugee crises that precede the actual climate-driven apocalypse will get us there a lot faster than we imagine.
72+ degrees and 80% humidity the past two mornings at 5am when I started the dog jog and it was not fun. 95 degrees last night at 9pm.
For those unfamiliar we usually have very low humidity and cool off a lot at night. It could easily be 85+ degrees during the day and we will normally be in the 50s overnight, with the temperature starting to drop a lot by 8 or 9pm.
What does "typical high" mean? Wikipedia says that the average high for August is 82°F, but the mean maximum is 97°F.