An incredibly "glass half full" take, but it looks like the location of all the places that will be most affected are also the biggest producers - maybe this will be a good thing in encouraging change? Unfortunately I assume it'll take a lot of death before that happens, and even then probably not, but I feel like at this point it's either look for a silver lining or descend into complete despair.
The trouble is the people most in power to make decisions are personally insolated from the affects of hot humid conditions (quite literally) by cooling infrastructure. If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death, /maybe/ an event like the mass heat death in Ministry for the Future would get some people's attention but COVID has really knocked my expectations for coming together in the face of a collective disaster.
True, but looking at the map the most populated sections of the United States are marked as danger zones. Though I realize after writing that line that the last few years have taught us that mass casualty events in Florida won't exactly cause dramatic societal change.
The effect will be blunted because in the US we have AC and a fairly robust national power grid so the number of people affected will be limited to poor and houseless people who we're already very good at ignoring suffering from. We've already had pretty bad heat waves in the past that have caused dozens of deaths in a day but they're diffuse and not in one giant group so they're easy to ignore like COVID, heart attack, and general poverty deaths.
Texas is a bit of a special case in the US power grid... They're not a part of it, Texas decided to not connect itself to the national power grid because it wanted to go way further in on deregulation and couldn't do that if it was connected to the national grid and had to follow the rules that came with that. That's why you don't really see huge blackouts very often in the rest of the country, power outages are usually due to direct storm damage and only affect things on a particular line/circuit. Texas couldn't bring power in from unaffected areas to balance the spike in demand so they lost the whole grid, it's harder to have that happen in other parts of the country.
>If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death
How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.
Essentially yeah. Look at the proposed alternatives from the right in the US which basically amounted to "If he dies he dies" but scaled up to millions of people. One of the most consistent deflections is that "only the already sick" are dying of COVID which beyond being wildly untrue also has the strains of "it's your own fault you're dying why should I do anything to prevent it?" which doesn't bode well for our response to climate disasters.
In the United States, I've heard a number of people say they would rather old people die than have their freedoms violated. Their reasoning is people who die of COVID would have died anyway if COVID didn't happen.
My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.
If you haven't experienced high humidity its hard to understand how debilitating it can be. You can't cool down easily doing even mild physical work.
I'm in a subtropical zone (Brisbane) and in high humidity weather I do about 30-50% of the physical work I can on a non-humid day I'd estimate. OOften it's best to work outdoors for an hour then cool down for an hour in pool/aircon as if you overheat yourself itcan be hard to get back to normal that day.
That said its a good HN opportunity too for entrepreneurs. We see more and more kit like ice jackets that you freeze then wear outdoors etc for outdoor workers. Tech has to kick in here too.
Ironically, the cosplay space has this covered. They have portable battery powered air conditioners connected to astronaut-style onesies-with-coolant-pipes.
Unfortunately they're still manually assembled, so not quite readily available yet.
The takeaway I see here is that we're looking at putting people, on Earth, in environmental suits, because we collectively haven't been able to agree on how (or whether, for that matter) to stop making it uninhabitable.
Technological solutions to discomfort can be done fairly easily at an individual level (though it may not be affordable to all). Solutions to our runaway climate change need to occur at corporate and government levels.
Once you identify which is easier (to implement and/or to monetize), it makes an unfortunate kind of sense.
The only lever we have as a society is regulation, and that is only because it has the capacity to change where people can make money. See what happens in countries where green energy is cheaper, it booms. It's not because they love the planet, it's because they can save or make money. There is zero chance corporations will suddenly have a long-term outlook on saving the planet and decide on their own to cut emissions, so we can forget that angle.
There was always a lot of talk about carbon taxes, but since we're somewhat past that point now, what about a carbon capture rebate as well? If you can make money from thin air, I'm sure carbon capture technology and industry would boom. If a company can't avoid carbon tax from it's process, which some products simply can't, it then has to offset that tax with carbon capture rebates to be profitable and exist in society. If the math doesn't make sense, they don't make the money, so sad, tears in the unseasonable rain.
Saying the only lever we have is regulation is just saying the only lever we have is violence but with an extra intermediary steps
The reason you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor isn't because some jackbooted thug will put you in a cage, it's because you know it's the right thing to do. Sure there might be some laws you begrudgingly put up with because of the risk vs reward but making a lot of people do that at scale that doesn't work well.
Convincing people to voluntarily do what you want is far cheaper than violence or threat of violence and it comes with a much lower risk of you being shot in the hole you just dug.
> you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor
Funny, the first three are covered by laws and regulations - local and international. I'm less certain about the conflict diamonds, but I believe there are regulations around those too.
> Saying the only lever we have is regulation is just saying the only lever we have is violence but with an extra intermediary steps
That's because there are enough people who value money and power that they will never do the right thing unless forced. The tragedy of the commons, as it is.
The Meditations on Moloch paper covers quite a bit of this.
I'm talking about regulating corporations, taxes, tariffs, trade restrictions, material bans and so on, maybe that wasn't clear in my argument or maybe I don't quite understand yours?
But even on an individual level, money is still a huge guiding factor for society in general, so taxing certain items even at the individual sale level could influence things. Putting fuel in your car? 10% carbon tax, both you and the corporation paid a tax, that goes into the coffer to pay for other kinds of more active carbon reduction programs.
> The reason you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor isn't because some jackbooted thug will put you in a cage, it's because you know it's the right thing to do.
People do all these things, knowingly ignoring all the externalities of their actions. The world is full of decent human beings, and yet the above is still true. Just look at the roads, we're all thoroughly aware that cars pollute our cities even in the immediate tense, let alone long term, yet the roads are still full.
Let's not blame the individual for industrial pollution anyway, since the majority of emissions are still from industrial activity. People have marginal agency on changing that. What's a consumer going to do about bunker fuel in shipping ships? How am I going to influence the processes used in steel mills?
Not practically they're not. They would suffer fines, at worst you'd have the people running the company get fined, at an absolute extreme they'd go to jail (VW/dieselgate). You could argue that prison time is the point that it backed by violence, but I must admit I'm fairly surprised that we're discussing the validity of laws and regulation as a concept in general, in response to regulating industrial pollution.
I used to listen to Libertarian talk shows back in the day. Those people thought all laws, regulation, and taxation were violence (they only work because government will point a gun at you and throw you in prison). They're not exactly wrong, but I no longer find the argument very persuasive.
In the same sense, corporations are committing violence on us also, by destroying the planet that we all live on.
> so taxing certain items even at the individual sale level could influence things. Putting fuel in your car? 10% carbon tax, both you and the corporation paid a tax, that goes into the coffer to pay for other kinds of more active carbon reduction programs.
The issue is that there's no guarantee that the 10% extra burden is going to green initiatives. It ends up going to the ever ballooning government budget and pays for pension funds for underperforming government employees.
No, because of the need to power such systems. Putting a long duration powerpack on an environmental suit is going to be a problem! There was a cave in Mexico (AFIAK now underwater) where they ended up using plain ice as the cooling medium for environmental suits.
In the Marine Corps I used to run 8 miles a few days a week in direct sunlight in southern california. It wasn't even particularly humid, and I'd still get perilously close to heat exhaustion. Then I realized I could put a large icepack under my close-fitting camelback. Instant portable AC. This hack alone made a shocking difference in my performance.
thanks this is a great idea - I discovered this last summer... This really does work - I had to keep an icepack in my bag to keep my emergency protein bar from melting on my all day bike rides and I realized how much cooler I was from just that tiny bit - but then I have the condensation issue.
Interesting idea! Hiking I fill my hydration bladder with ice cubes then add water and I slip the whole thing in an insulated bag, but I never thought of using an actual ice brick for cooling. (And in most situations I don't think I would, anyway--too much extra weight. The ice in my pack becomes drinking water later.)
The irony here being that technology won't save us all. It will only save the people who can afford the technology. Which, unfortunately, doesn't include the people responsible for manufacturing that technology.
I am done with this mindset. It is useless brow furrowing and knicker bunching that traps you in an endless doom cycle.
One of the few things that still works about capitalism is you make an expensive toy, it catches on, and then it gets cost reduced ruthlessly to the point that almost anyone can afford it.
See flat screen TVs and cell phones for two compelling examples of this phenomenon. See Corsi boxes for an example of how to build cheap alternatives to an expensive thing. In Beijing, they got as cheap as buying a $25 fan and strapping a HEPA filter to it in order to filter out small particles.
The outlook that nothing ever gets better and there's nothing we can do about it because the rich control everything is what will get us all killed. The rich will make money where they can even if they have to make it up with volume.
Has capitalism made iPhones cheap enough for the folks working in iPhone factories to afford them? Can the bean pickers working coffee plantations afford Starbucks? Is there zero wealth gap between people who shop at Walmart and the people who make the cheap crap that gets sold at Walmart?
No, no, and no. Capitalism does not fix this. Capitalism exploits this and forwards the profits to the executives and shareholders.
Have you ever been to East Asia? They don't have the latest iPhones but they have a better cell phone network than the United States and cheap Android phones from which they do just about everything. You'll get four bars in the middle of nowhere compared to the United States spotty coverage concentrated on population centers. But pay no attention to geopolitical competitors, what could they possibly know that we don't?
Or if you call capitalism a failure because only rich people can afford MacLarens, you're just being disingenuous. See also cheap perfectly serviceable 60" flat screen TVs versus a 85" Samsung Goliath.
I don't want a society with zero wealth gap. They tried that during the cultural revolution and it sucked every bit as badly as the libertarian dystopia Peter Thiel wants to make happen. We have a really serious inequality problem with fairly simple answers that are politically infeasible until we federalize all campaign funding.
> I don't want a society with zero wealth gap. They tried that during the cultural revolution and it sucked every bit as badly as the libertarian dystopia Peter Thiel wants to make happen.
No, they didn't. That was the story the masses were sold, but power and wealth were a function of the hierarchy rooted at Mao Zedong. But also, I don't believe that zero wealth gap is a reasonable goal, so kindly lay off the strawman. Nordic countries show that there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of inequality, without a blush of the totalitarianism that you fear.
Yes, that's exactly what happens when you try to create a zero wealth gap - people cheat. You are the one that brought up the zero wealth gap with "Is there zero wealth gap between people who shop at Walmart and the people who make the cheap crap that gets sold at Walmart", not me. So if you don't want to be contradicted on a subject, try not mentioning it in the first place, pro-tip even.
And libertarianism is just institutionalized cheating for all. Same result as communism in the long run - a tiny ruling class and a world full of peasants where it's good to be the king. I'll take neither.
But I'd love socialized healthcare, medicare for all even. Spoilers: a country infested with a bunch of temporarily embarrassed millionaires will never let that happen. And even in a global pandemic, if you don't get private money out of campaign financing, you'll never get a shot at convincing those temporarily embarrassed millionaires of anything else. But by all means, you be you.
What? People cheat in america constantly. Wasn't there a whole ton of fraud recently when it came to unemployment and the small business loans? People cheated for billions, capitalism definitely doesn't prevent thag
Yes, people cheat* because they are selfish, and any economic system has to take that into account which is where communism and libertarianism fall apart.
But I thought we were talking about how if we have to wear stillsuits in the future, no one will be able to afford stillsuits except the rich despite the historical evidence 100% to the contrary. The rich will get them first though, designer stillsuits even, deal with it. Can't have everything.
*But if you had any idea how many weird tricks the $100M+ class employs to avoid paying taxes, 100% legally ATM because our 2500+ page WTF tax code, you'd probably want to storm the Capitol again (or maybe not because you might have convinced yourself those weird tricks might come in handy some even though they probably won't).
When the government gives away money or makes loans with zero effort to qualify the recipients/borrowers, yes there will be cheating. That's not capitalism though.
In Minneapolis, they have skyways between large buildings so you're not exposed to the elements in the winter when moving between buildings. I imagine we’ll see similar in hotter climates (underground where the geography supports it, aboveground where not), with folks avoiding the outdoors for significant part of each year.
And of course, it would not be difficult. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country, but I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided.
Some southern cities in Europe like Barcelona have historical city centers with really narrow streets (enough to walk but no more) with tall buildings. This allows those streets to almost never directly receive sunlight. It's so impressively effective that you can sometimes even feel cold in summer, and in very hot days, heat doesn't accumulate.
That cooler temperature has got to be compounded by the lack of cars pumping out heat as well. But I wonder how such a design would handle large snow falls. Old northern cities in Europe don't seem as compact.
Yeah--my car has an outside air temp thermometer. Big streets are a few degrees warmer than small streets. The only reasonable cause I can see is the heat is coming from the other cars. (Note that this isn't even in heavy traffic.)
It's also the heat from the sun warming the asphalt/tarmac/concrete and that heat warming the air (which will continue long into the night -- "urban heat island" is I believe the name for the effect).
In the Phoenix metro, we moved to an area farther away from downtown that has more nature (there are large parks on two sides of our house). The temperature is regularly 5 degrees cooler here.
Coober Pedy (/ˈkuːbər ˈpiːdi/) is a town in northern South Australia, 846 km (526 mi) north of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway. The town is sometimes referred to as the "opal capital of the world" because of the quantity of precious opals that are mined there. Coober Pedy is renowned for its below-ground dwellings, called "dugouts", which are built in this fashion due to the scorching daytime heat.
Certainly a popular solution for harsh winters in Canada. Even some of the universities have tunnel systems. E.g. Carleton with 5KM of tunnels connecting almost every building.
I live in a very cold part of the US but for a couple years traveled frequently to the south of Israel for work. I think a lot of people don’t consider dressing or designing spaces for high heats because most people live in temperate climates. It wasn’t unusual to have 113+ days there in the summer and no one but me (the American) seemed phased by it.
The predictions are that climate change will bring even more extremely cold winters to the Midwest as the polar vortex more often breaks through and moves south.
Building up big blocks of ice at night is inherently less efficient than cooling only as much as needed. The reason it's done is to take advantage of night time power being cheaper. On the scale those buildings operate at it's worth it.
From a naive perspective, energy is energy, so melting 1 kg of ice eats 300 kJ of energy, and heating 8 kg of water from 20 C to 30C also takes 300 kJ.
But if the ambient temperature is 30 C, how much did it take to make that 1 kg of ice or that 8 kg of 20C water?
With a heat pump, like your refrigerator or freezer, producing cool water is much easier with high efficiency multipliers, while producing ice is a lot harder.
If the outside temperature is 30 C, the the ice machine radiator must be at a higher temperature, say, at 40 C, to radiate heat, and the cold end must be below freezing to actually freeze the water. So, the radiator might be at 40C and the cooler at -10 C. So, the compressor must transport the 300 kJ of heat energy "against the grain" from cool to hot, a temperature difference of 50 C.
With the refrigerator, the hot end might be at 40 C and the cool end at 10 C, meaning the difference is only 30 C.
COP or Coefficient power is the amount of energy (J) the heat engine uses to transfer 1 Joule of energy.
You're right that it's mainly a power time shifting scheme. But there's no fundamental reason that I can see that it should be much less efficient than on-demand cooling - you can always insulate the ice storage well, and air tends to be cooler at night, so your heat pumps should be somewhat more efficient at radiating heat into the air than during the day.
I don’t like the idea of needing tech to be outside, but ice packs would be most needed in places and at times when there’s lot of sunlight, so solar probably will be the way to produce it.
I lived for 2 years in Cancún and the climate was just horrible for me.
I spent like 8-10 months every year trapped indoors with AC. Just being a couple of minutes outside meant sweating _a lot_. Heck, after showering you had to dry yourself two times because you got way too sweaty unless you had AC in the bathroom.
No thanks. I really don't understand how people like living in tropical weathers.
Yeah, so long as it's not too extreme you can wrap up against cold. There's nothing you can do against heat. My idea of ideal weather is the coolest place where I don't need to contend with snow accumulation.
Hot, high-humidity days are the days I like to go out and run several miles. A lot depends on your fitness level. And Westerners are becoming decreasingly fit.
The average hackernews user probably never was ;) But yes, I agree. There is a worrying trend of people living increasingly unhealthy lifestyles calling for politicians to protect them from life.
Btw before you write angry replies accusing me of not knowing what I'm talking about I grew up in a part of Asia that gets extremely warm/humid in spring and summer. We're talking way above 80% average humidity for over 4 months, some days close to 100% and subtropical temperatures around 30-35 and above 40°C when it gets really hot.
An interesting example of this was at the recent Summer Olympics in Tokyo. With the wide view of athletes everything looks fine, just another nice sunny day. But when the camera cuts in close many of the athletes look like they're about to pass out but they're barely sweating.
> That said its a good HN opportunity too for entrepreneurs.
No, it isn't an opportunity for anybody, the only opportunity we get is to get off our asses and address the root cause instead of the symptoms to see if we can make money off the symptoms. That's what got us in this situation in the first place.
Yeah its a very poor visualization. Its difficult to tell if it is showing the hottest wet bulb temperature of an area over the time period, or the most frequent, or what.
It is (likely) showing the 0.1% percentile of measured wet-bulb temperatures. i.e. in a given year, we expect 0.1% of the wet-bulbs to exceed this temperature or approximately 8 to 9 hours in a year.
Models like the one mentioned (without references) are created by humans and the parameters they use are arbitrary. Scientists make some assumptions about parameters and run them through the system and get some results. They do this many times and vary the parameters to see what happens. It's the change in results vs the change in parameters that is the interesting stuff. Claiming they can predict the future is dishonest.
Why do all references to climate models refer to 'The models or model'? It's like they are supposed to be oracles -- they are NOT. There is not just one or a few. They do not all show the same things.
Models are a useful way to learn, but picking one result, not showing any work or stating assumptions, and then publishing click-bait referencing it is not ethical.
> Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century.
Which Climate models? Oh sorry it's the ONE so I won't question further. It could never be wrong.
Do other models show anything different? Oh there are no others I see.
What parameters were used? What datasets? There are zero references to any of this in the original paper but that didn't slow down the click-bait climate-fear-porn author who is not a scientist but a corporate communications person.
> Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else.
As others have said the 'survey data' they do reference seems to be mostly about how many stations a region has.
Who funded this?
> The study was supported by NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program.
Big government looking to get bigger.
For my part I have many years experience designing and running HPC scientific computing models in related domains.
Friendly hint. If you are skeptical of climate change dogma, point out the clearest / most obvious failures in the individual paper / article / claim being presented. Do not go further by offering conclusions extrapolated from that. That enables you to engage people's critical thinking without engaging their ideology.
You say this work is “without references,” and mock the research and the expertise of the authors in several ways. Very little you say is specific and most of it is not even accurate.
TFA is a gloss on a paper published at Science Advances. The details you seek about the data and the models are there in the journal article and in the supplemental material of the article.
These are observational station locations, so typically located at airports, but will cluster in highly-developed countries and where people live or build things.
Wet-bulb temperature is to first approximation the average of the dry-bulb (ambient temperature of air) and dew-point temperature (direct measure of amount of water vapour in air). So we're looking for places that can be both hot & wet in summer (e.g. eastern US) or really hot and still somewhat moist (e.g. near Arabian Sea) [0].
"Faster than expected" is a common phrase in climate research. For example, the arctic is warming 4X faster than the rest of the planet, antarctic ice melt, arctic ice extent reduction, methane emissions, etc, all happening faster than expected, depending on the source. Someone even put together a namesake blog, fasterthanexpected.com - it's a decent source for a high level picture of what is going on.
I say "depending on the source" because there are some extreme doom and gloom types for whom these changes are happening more slowly than expected. However, the difference is negligible. The doom and gloom types might say the end of the world is only 2 years away, which is extreme, but now even peer reviewed research in respected publications are starting to mention very severe outcomes within decades. In previous decades, these publications wouldn't publish anything like that at all, then eventually they began to publish papers that mention these events happening within centuries, and now papers are coming out with very serious consequences being only decades away. The really scary thing is that the likelihood of sudden catastrophic change (eg: methane bombs, Thwaites Glacier collapse) is increasing, which could make the shorter time frame predictions actually come true.
So much so that it is known for at least 10 years that this is the case. And also why: Fear of being accused of being an alarmist or sounding too extreme.
It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…
> It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…
It was a lost opportunity to shift the Overton window, which led to the moderate — rather than the extreme — projections being labelled as alarmist.
Yeah, but had there been a loud minority of climate scientists professing less moderate views, then the opponents would have simply retorted "see, they themselves can't even agree on what they think will happen!" And the scientific community was painfully aware that any internal disagreement would be used by the opponents to spread doubt, as seen in the leaked Climategate correspondence. Of course, this call for a united front was then used by the denialists as evidence for their climate conspiracy theory, so it's not like the humanity had any actual chance of winning against itself here. We really done fucked up this time.
Presumably, that scenario still includes figures advocating complacency, so you're really comparing a situation where opinion is presented as split between complacency and moderation vs complacency, moderation, and alarmism.
Both-sideism works in your favor in the latter case, and if someone digs into the numbers a bit more, they would find that the alarmists outnumber the complacents.
The only real risk is that the alarmists provoke an "it's already too late to fix anything" response, which I don't think is terribly likely, as there isn't an upper bound on how bad things get until you hit a tipping point of civilizational collapse.
Weird how the IPCC reports have consistently pushed their models' disaster and negative effect predictions further into the future every year for over a decade then.
every few or so year, IPCC picks the best model from hundred in the past few years that predicted the present the best, extrapolate the future, and call it the truth, and people online get flogged for suggesting that maybe the whole process reek of selection bias, since the model in exam are for the most part curve fitting and not derived from first principles, so in a changing environment their long term accuracy is questionable.
I can appreciate why its used. It’s a retort to common thought terminating cliches often said to dismiss climate reporting, which are, “this won’t happen anytime soon,” and “it won’t be that bad.” Once you get that out of the way, you can move on from rhetoric and focus on content.
How much confirmation bias is happening here? If things happen more than expected, would they get reported? The non-disappearance of the glaciers in Glacier National Park[1] is one example I can think of.
Also like the 115 yo who has been drinking and smoking heavily for most of their life managing to live a long life because when they were young nobody knew those things were bad for you.
> Instead, the new signs will say: "When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking."
Predicting a specific date limit for a specific area was probably not a great idea. Maybe someone wanted a photo-op. Disappointing. The point remains: faster-than-expected is going to depend on whose expectations you're talking about and at what time. But things are accelerating, and in the wrong direction. Also, some of the dozens of tipping points have likely already been triggered.
According to the latest Global Glacier Change Bulletin[1] compiled by the World Glacier Monitoring Service:
"The percentage of positive annual mass balances decreased from 28% in the 1980s to 9%
(2017/18–2018/19), and there have been no more years with a positive mean balance for more than four decades. The melt rate and cumulative loss in glacier thickness continues to be extraordinary. Furthermore, the analysis of mean AAR values shows that the glaciers are in strong and increasing imbalance with the climate and hence will continue to lose mass even if climate remained stable (Mernild et al., 2013)."
Another infamous too-early prediction is Maslowski's 2007 projection of an ice free arctic by 2016 +- 3yrs. There will always be too-early predictions out there. But whether we're EOL in 2 years, 20 years, or sometime within a millenial's lifetime, I think is the wrong thing to be focusing on.
[1]: https://wgms.ch/ggcb/
So you're saying, yes. There is confirmation bias, and earlier-than-expected things will be reported more, while later-than-expected things are "the wrong thing to be focusing on."
Confirmation bias goes both ways, I'm not saying anything about how it might be affecting perceived report frequency.
I'm saying a prediction about a specific timeline in years or decades is not important. Whether you're right that it was a few years or decades sooner than expected, or right that it was a few years or decades later than expected, doesn't really matter to me.
They are happening faster than expected because IPCC reports have been sandbagging for decades. Which, TBH, is entirely rational not only for political, but also scientific, reasons.
I, for one, might be a doomer, but have no illusions about us meeting goals to keep warming under 1.5C, or even 2C for that matter, and it is going to happen "faster than expected".
We should just sit back wait for solutions to climate change to become profitable enough for the owner-class to act. Nothing to worry about. I'm sure they will figure it out before it is too late. If only they had been made aware of this problem earlier. The market will solve this in no time.
I think that's actually a rational position to take. We've already blown past 1.5 degrees C if you use the original 1750 baseline and 2 degrees C is already baked into the atmosphere. Short of some massively scaled up energy reflectance or capture / storage technology, implemented quickly, we're headed for extreme consequences. Note that we are already experiencing relatively mild consequences such as sudden human deaths in the dozens or hundreds, home loss, small species habitat loss, destruction of entire villages or small towns, etc. The mainstream is starting to accept attribution of these things to global warming now.
Interestingly, before the IPCC was formed their precursor had set the magic number at 1.0 degrees C. Then IPCC set it to 1.5 degrees C. Then they moved the goalpost by changing the baseline from pre-industrial 1750 to 1900 (or maybe 1850). Personally, I'm not a fan of arbitrary numbers anyway. I prefer to look at significant events. For me, the big slap in the face will come when we see an ice free arctic ocean.
The big danger is positive feedback loops. We don't know what they are until they hit and then things could tip quicker than we ever thought possible. Without any data to guide us other than the historical record, which has no precedent of the kind of change we have been able to achieve it is next to impossible to make a model that will accurately predict our near future.
There's some we have pretty good idea about (perhaps not exceptions to this rule, because we are to an extent already experiencing them to a certain extent) such as ice-albedo feedback.
I went skiing in minus 34 C a couple of weeks ago. It took a fair bit of thought to dress for it but I was able to last about three hours outside and had a great day. I don't think you can deal with heat extremes as easily.
Removing that last layer doesn't gain you all that much in high humidity conditions, and in some situations it's going to cause you sun protection issues.
Yeah. Wind chill is a difficult measure to use. Varies a lot, you make wind when you ski fast, it really only affects exposed skin which you don't have at this temp.
Gas or chemically powered personal air conditioners may become more common. Of course this solves the problem for the individual while worsening it for the planet/society.
Edit: At 500 watts, you could combine your personal cooler with a solar panel. The system would be 2-3000 dollars. A bit more than a parka but less than a car.
Based on the past two years and especially right now, we're not going to do a damn thing about it. Everyone's going to have an excuse or "don't tell me what to do" until it finally kills everyone or destroys the economy. Then it will be too late.
Research from ~20 years ago forecast this result, I'm not sure it's entirely unexpected, although the focus in those studies was on air temperature alone:
> Because of the loss of life, damage to crops and vegetation in general and the impact on water supplies, these recent heat waves have stimulated much interest in their climatological features, recurrence times, and, especially, whether they are a portent of greenhouse-induced climatic change. For example, Trigo et al. (2005) state that the hot summer of 2003 in Europe exceeded any over the past 500 yr, and Schär et al. (2004) claim that this event was statistically very unlikely, and was also consistent with results from climatic change simulations. Stott et al. (2004) estimate that past anthropogenic influences doubled the probability of the occurrence of the 2003 heat wave. More intense and frequent heat waves are also predicted by Meehl and Tebaldi (2004) and Beniston (2004) on the basis of greenhouse simulations.[1]
In the climate science literature, there's a recent focus on the humidity factor:
> Recent studies have pointed to a growing concern on increasing heat stress considering humidity effects as well as extreme temperatures. Kang and Eltahir emphasized the important role of humidity, and pointed out that North China Plain is likely to experience deadly heat waves with wet-bulb temperature exceeding the threshold defining what Chinese farmers may tolerate while working outdoors [15]. By applying 35 °C as a threshold for human adaptability, Pal and Eltahir predicted that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this threshold under business-as-usual emission scenarios [16]. Lin et al. determined trends of heat wave variation and stress threshold in three major cities of Taiwan based on WBGT, and suggested that the heat stress in all three cities will either exceed or approach the danger level (WBGT ≥ 31 °C) by the end of this century [17]. Russo et al. quantified humid heat wave hazards in the recent past and at different levels of global warming using the apparent temperature, showing that humidity can amplify the magnitude and apparent temperature peak of heat waves [11]. There have also been some studies assessing the adverse effects of heat stress on health and labor productivity [18,19]. [2]
Ultimately this is going to result in population migration away from the most severely affected areas, or drastic (and expensive) measures like shifting to living underground in termite-mound-like habitation will have to be implemented.
Recently read a novel, Ministry for the Future, the opening chapter illustrates a heat wave that happens in an extreme humid/heat climate. I was not a big fan of the rest of the book but this opening chapter was pretty alarming, that scenario would be terrifying.
There is something peculiar on the map in the article that caught my eye:
The formerly split country of Germany is also sharply split on the map! The western part (BRD/FRG) has significantly more hot humid days than the eastern part (former DDR/GDR). The colored area edge almost exactly matches the border.
One possibility: Western Germany is more industrialized and urban, with higher population and population density. Thermal measurements in the west are more likely to be taken in urban heat islands?
Other parts of West Germany also sport lower population density (Lower Saxony in the North, Bavaria in the South).
It is absolutely astonishing how strongly human behavior (industry and metropolitan areas) influences local environmental conditions. I guess most cities may (be forced to) change radically.
Minister of the future intro about a heat bubble gave me nightmares.
It make me think about how we could prevent death in case of a massive humid heat wave, and how we could do it at a low enough cost, especially in a situation where the grid fail. My best guess will be some tent with high isolation fabric (think emergency blanket) cooled with a tank of liquid nitrogen.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadThe local grid particularly in (parts of?) California is everything but robust.
How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.
My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.
[0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/mapping
I'm in a subtropical zone (Brisbane) and in high humidity weather I do about 30-50% of the physical work I can on a non-humid day I'd estimate. OOften it's best to work outdoors for an hour then cool down for an hour in pool/aircon as if you overheat yourself itcan be hard to get back to normal that day.
That said its a good HN opportunity too for entrepreneurs. We see more and more kit like ice jackets that you freeze then wear outdoors etc for outdoor workers. Tech has to kick in here too.
Reminiscent of Frank Herbert's stillsuits in Dune (1965).
Unfortunately they're still manually assembled, so not quite readily available yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE <- Adam savage building one for an astronaut cosplay suit.
Once you identify which is easier (to implement and/or to monetize), it makes an unfortunate kind of sense.
There was always a lot of talk about carbon taxes, but since we're somewhat past that point now, what about a carbon capture rebate as well? If you can make money from thin air, I'm sure carbon capture technology and industry would boom. If a company can't avoid carbon tax from it's process, which some products simply can't, it then has to offset that tax with carbon capture rebates to be profitable and exist in society. If the math doesn't make sense, they don't make the money, so sad, tears in the unseasonable rain.
The reason you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor isn't because some jackbooted thug will put you in a cage, it's because you know it's the right thing to do. Sure there might be some laws you begrudgingly put up with because of the risk vs reward but making a lot of people do that at scale that doesn't work well.
Convincing people to voluntarily do what you want is far cheaper than violence or threat of violence and it comes with a much lower risk of you being shot in the hole you just dug.
Funny, the first three are covered by laws and regulations - local and international. I'm less certain about the conflict diamonds, but I believe there are regulations around those too.
> Saying the only lever we have is regulation is just saying the only lever we have is violence but with an extra intermediary steps
That's because there are enough people who value money and power that they will never do the right thing unless forced. The tragedy of the commons, as it is.
The Meditations on Moloch paper covers quite a bit of this.
But even on an individual level, money is still a huge guiding factor for society in general, so taxing certain items even at the individual sale level could influence things. Putting fuel in your car? 10% carbon tax, both you and the corporation paid a tax, that goes into the coffer to pay for other kinds of more active carbon reduction programs.
> The reason you don't litter, dump used oil down the toilet, buy conflict diamonds and complain when Nike gets caught using sweatshop labor isn't because some jackbooted thug will put you in a cage, it's because you know it's the right thing to do.
People do all these things, knowingly ignoring all the externalities of their actions. The world is full of decent human beings, and yet the above is still true. Just look at the roads, we're all thoroughly aware that cars pollute our cities even in the immediate tense, let alone long term, yet the roads are still full.
Let's not blame the individual for industrial pollution anyway, since the majority of emissions are still from industrial activity. People have marginal agency on changing that. What's a consumer going to do about bunker fuel in shipping ships? How am I going to influence the processes used in steel mills?
In the same sense, corporations are committing violence on us also, by destroying the planet that we all live on.
The issue is that there's no guarantee that the 10% extra burden is going to green initiatives. It ends up going to the ever ballooning government budget and pays for pension funds for underperforming government employees.
One of the few things that still works about capitalism is you make an expensive toy, it catches on, and then it gets cost reduced ruthlessly to the point that almost anyone can afford it.
See flat screen TVs and cell phones for two compelling examples of this phenomenon. See Corsi boxes for an example of how to build cheap alternatives to an expensive thing. In Beijing, they got as cheap as buying a $25 fan and strapping a HEPA filter to it in order to filter out small particles.
The outlook that nothing ever gets better and there's nothing we can do about it because the rich control everything is what will get us all killed. The rich will make money where they can even if they have to make it up with volume.
No, no, and no. Capitalism does not fix this. Capitalism exploits this and forwards the profits to the executives and shareholders.
Or if you call capitalism a failure because only rich people can afford MacLarens, you're just being disingenuous. See also cheap perfectly serviceable 60" flat screen TVs versus a 85" Samsung Goliath.
I don't want a society with zero wealth gap. They tried that during the cultural revolution and it sucked every bit as badly as the libertarian dystopia Peter Thiel wants to make happen. We have a really serious inequality problem with fairly simple answers that are politically infeasible until we federalize all campaign funding.
No, they didn't. That was the story the masses were sold, but power and wealth were a function of the hierarchy rooted at Mao Zedong. But also, I don't believe that zero wealth gap is a reasonable goal, so kindly lay off the strawman. Nordic countries show that there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of inequality, without a blush of the totalitarianism that you fear.
And libertarianism is just institutionalized cheating for all. Same result as communism in the long run - a tiny ruling class and a world full of peasants where it's good to be the king. I'll take neither.
But I'd love socialized healthcare, medicare for all even. Spoilers: a country infested with a bunch of temporarily embarrassed millionaires will never let that happen. And even in a global pandemic, if you don't get private money out of campaign financing, you'll never get a shot at convincing those temporarily embarrassed millionaires of anything else. But by all means, you be you.
But I thought we were talking about how if we have to wear stillsuits in the future, no one will be able to afford stillsuits except the rich despite the historical evidence 100% to the contrary. The rich will get them first though, designer stillsuits even, deal with it. Can't have everything.
*But if you had any idea how many weird tricks the $100M+ class employs to avoid paying taxes, 100% legally ATM because our 2500+ page WTF tax code, you'd probably want to storm the Capitol again (or maybe not because you might have convinced yourself those weird tricks might come in handy some even though they probably won't).
Yes, they're called Android phones.
Why can they afford it? Capitalism. Don’t forget they tried the alternative and it failed.
There isn't just one alternative to capitalism, and Leninist state capitalism isn't really an alternative to capitalism.
TLDR It's an urban planning story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_tunnel_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2B15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonton_Pedway
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-11567-5
http://hdr-photographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/barce...
But yeah, being in the shade doesn't help that much either as the temperature is still high (and even remains high at night).
Coober Pedy (/ˈkuːbər ˈpiːdi/) is a town in northern South Australia, 846 km (526 mi) north of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway. The town is sometimes referred to as the "opal capital of the world" because of the quantity of precious opals that are mined there. Coober Pedy is renowned for its below-ground dwellings, called "dugouts", which are built in this fashion due to the scorching daytime heat.
But heat pumps are actually extraordinarily efficient, so ice production isn’t bad compared to the cooling it would give the wearer.
Which is one of the reasons many buildings build up big blocks of ice at night and then use them to cool themselves throughout the day.
But if the ambient temperature is 30 C, how much did it take to make that 1 kg of ice or that 8 kg of 20C water?
With a heat pump, like your refrigerator or freezer, producing cool water is much easier with high efficiency multipliers, while producing ice is a lot harder.
If the outside temperature is 30 C, the the ice machine radiator must be at a higher temperature, say, at 40 C, to radiate heat, and the cold end must be below freezing to actually freeze the water. So, the radiator might be at 40C and the cooler at -10 C. So, the compressor must transport the 300 kJ of heat energy "against the grain" from cool to hot, a temperature difference of 50 C.
With the refrigerator, the hot end might be at 40 C and the cool end at 10 C, meaning the difference is only 30 C.
COP or Coefficient power is the amount of energy (J) the heat engine uses to transfer 1 Joule of energy.
Some formulas:
eff = 1 - T_cold / T_hot
Refrigerator:
T_cold = 10 C = 280 K, T_hot = 40 C = 310 K
eff = 1 - 280/310 = 0.0968
COP = 1/eff = 10
Freezer:
T_cold = -10 C = 260 K, T_hot = 40 C = 310 K
eff = 1- 260/310 = 0.161
COP = 1/eff = 6.2
I spent like 8-10 months every year trapped indoors with AC. Just being a couple of minutes outside meant sweating _a lot_. Heck, after showering you had to dry yourself two times because you got way too sweaty unless you had AC in the bathroom.
No thanks. I really don't understand how people like living in tropical weathers.
Btw before you write angry replies accusing me of not knowing what I'm talking about I grew up in a part of Asia that gets extremely warm/humid in spring and summer. We're talking way above 80% average humidity for over 4 months, some days close to 100% and subtropical temperatures around 30-35 and above 40°C when it gets really hot.
These are vests like you describe. You take ice packs from the freezer and fit them into pockets of the vest. Not very high tech but they work.
No, it isn't an opportunity for anybody, the only opportunity we get is to get off our asses and address the root cause instead of the symptoms to see if we can make money off the symptoms. That's what got us in this situation in the first place.
The web bulb temperature of the top 0.1% of hot and humid days over a 38 year period?
Models like the one mentioned (without references) are created by humans and the parameters they use are arbitrary. Scientists make some assumptions about parameters and run them through the system and get some results. They do this many times and vary the parameters to see what happens. It's the change in results vs the change in parameters that is the interesting stuff. Claiming they can predict the future is dishonest.
Why do all references to climate models refer to 'The models or model'? It's like they are supposed to be oracles -- they are NOT. There is not just one or a few. They do not all show the same things.
Models are a useful way to learn, but picking one result, not showing any work or stating assumptions, and then publishing click-bait referencing it is not ethical.
> Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century.
Which Climate models? Oh sorry it's the ONE so I won't question further. It could never be wrong.
Do other models show anything different? Oh there are no others I see.
What parameters were used? What datasets? There are zero references to any of this in the original paper but that didn't slow down the click-bait climate-fear-porn author who is not a scientist but a corporate communications person.
> Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else.
As others have said the 'survey data' they do reference seems to be mostly about how many stations a region has.
Who funded this?
> The study was supported by NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program.
Big government looking to get bigger.
For my part I have many years experience designing and running HPC scientific computing models in related domains.
TFA is a gloss on a paper published at Science Advances. The details you seek about the data and the models are there in the journal article and in the supplemental material of the article.
The lead author (http://www.regionalclimateperspectives.com/) is a PhD in Earth science and is a postdoc at a reasonably well respected lab (JPL in Pasadena).
Taken together, all this makes your comment look both foolish and wrong. What’s the point of writing such junk?
Wet-bulb temperature is to first approximation the average of the dry-bulb (ambient temperature of air) and dew-point temperature (direct measure of amount of water vapour in air). So we're looking for places that can be both hot & wet in summer (e.g. eastern US) or really hot and still somewhat moist (e.g. near Arabian Sea) [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...
I say "depending on the source" because there are some extreme doom and gloom types for whom these changes are happening more slowly than expected. However, the difference is negligible. The doom and gloom types might say the end of the world is only 2 years away, which is extreme, but now even peer reviewed research in respected publications are starting to mention very severe outcomes within decades. In previous decades, these publications wouldn't publish anything like that at all, then eventually they began to publish papers that mention these events happening within centuries, and now papers are coming out with very serious consequences being only decades away. The really scary thing is that the likelihood of sudden catastrophic change (eg: methane bombs, Thwaites Glacier collapse) is increasing, which could make the shorter time frame predictions actually come true.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
"Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...
It was a lost opportunity to shift the Overton window, which led to the moderate — rather than the extreme — projections being labelled as alarmist.
Both-sideism works in your favor in the latter case, and if someone digs into the numbers a bit more, they would find that the alarmists outnumber the complacents.
The only real risk is that the alarmists provoke an "it's already too late to fix anything" response, which I don't think is terribly likely, as there isn't an upper bound on how bad things get until you hit a tipping point of civilizational collapse.
Because, well, nobody wants to listen to 'alarmists' and 'extremists'.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-202... -- In 2020, Glacier National Park in Montana had to remove signs saying that the Glaciers would be gone by 2020, since the glaciers were still there.
Predicting a specific date limit for a specific area was probably not a great idea. Maybe someone wanted a photo-op. Disappointing. The point remains: faster-than-expected is going to depend on whose expectations you're talking about and at what time. But things are accelerating, and in the wrong direction. Also, some of the dozens of tipping points have likely already been triggered.
According to the latest Global Glacier Change Bulletin[1] compiled by the World Glacier Monitoring Service:
"The percentage of positive annual mass balances decreased from 28% in the 1980s to 9% (2017/18–2018/19), and there have been no more years with a positive mean balance for more than four decades. The melt rate and cumulative loss in glacier thickness continues to be extraordinary. Furthermore, the analysis of mean AAR values shows that the glaciers are in strong and increasing imbalance with the climate and hence will continue to lose mass even if climate remained stable (Mernild et al., 2013)."
Another infamous too-early prediction is Maslowski's 2007 projection of an ice free arctic by 2016 +- 3yrs. There will always be too-early predictions out there. But whether we're EOL in 2 years, 20 years, or sometime within a millenial's lifetime, I think is the wrong thing to be focusing on. [1]: https://wgms.ch/ggcb/
I'm saying a prediction about a specific timeline in years or decades is not important. Whether you're right that it was a few years or decades sooner than expected, or right that it was a few years or decades later than expected, doesn't really matter to me.
I, for one, might be a doomer, but have no illusions about us meeting goals to keep warming under 1.5C, or even 2C for that matter, and it is going to happen "faster than expected".
It's already too late.
Interestingly, before the IPCC was formed their precursor had set the magic number at 1.0 degrees C. Then IPCC set it to 1.5 degrees C. Then they moved the goalpost by changing the baseline from pre-industrial 1750 to 1900 (or maybe 1850). Personally, I'm not a fan of arbitrary numbers anyway. I prefer to look at significant events. For me, the big slap in the face will come when we see an ice free arctic ocean.
Could you elaborate + provide a few sources for this?
I'm not doubting you -- I'm just curious about this assessment and would like to understand how you've come to it.
No one talks of the "end of the world" being 2 years away.
There are some who speak of "tipping points" happening N years from now, but that is something very different. Right?
There's some we have pretty good idea about (perhaps not exceptions to this rule, because we are to an extent already experiencing them to a certain extent) such as ice-albedo feedback.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice%E2%80%93albedo_feedback
Edit: At 500 watts, you could combine your personal cooler with a solar panel. The system would be 2-3000 dollars. A bit more than a parka but less than a car.
Also beware of Bronteroc's on alien planets...they're pretty but they're not friendly....
> Because of the loss of life, damage to crops and vegetation in general and the impact on water supplies, these recent heat waves have stimulated much interest in their climatological features, recurrence times, and, especially, whether they are a portent of greenhouse-induced climatic change. For example, Trigo et al. (2005) state that the hot summer of 2003 in Europe exceeded any over the past 500 yr, and Schär et al. (2004) claim that this event was statistically very unlikely, and was also consistent with results from climatic change simulations. Stott et al. (2004) estimate that past anthropogenic influences doubled the probability of the occurrence of the 2003 heat wave. More intense and frequent heat waves are also predicted by Meehl and Tebaldi (2004) and Beniston (2004) on the basis of greenhouse simulations.[1]
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/20/15/jcli42...
In the climate science literature, there's a recent focus on the humidity factor:
> Recent studies have pointed to a growing concern on increasing heat stress considering humidity effects as well as extreme temperatures. Kang and Eltahir emphasized the important role of humidity, and pointed out that North China Plain is likely to experience deadly heat waves with wet-bulb temperature exceeding the threshold defining what Chinese farmers may tolerate while working outdoors [15]. By applying 35 °C as a threshold for human adaptability, Pal and Eltahir predicted that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this threshold under business-as-usual emission scenarios [16]. Lin et al. determined trends of heat wave variation and stress threshold in three major cities of Taiwan based on WBGT, and suggested that the heat stress in all three cities will either exceed or approach the danger level (WBGT ≥ 31 °C) by the end of this century [17]. Russo et al. quantified humid heat wave hazards in the recent past and at different levels of global warming using the apparent temperature, showing that humidity can amplify the magnitude and apparent temperature peak of heat waves [11]. There have also been some studies assessing the adverse effects of heat stress on health and labor productivity [18,19]. [2]
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539408/
Ultimately this is going to result in population migration away from the most severely affected areas, or drastic (and expensive) measures like shifting to living underground in termite-mound-like habitation will have to be implemented.
i expect a switch in the coming decade
it's speeding up
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/earth-mag...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
The formerly split country of Germany is also sharply split on the map! The western part (BRD/FRG) has significantly more hot humid days than the eastern part (former DDR/GDR). The colored area edge almost exactly matches the border.
A political map of FRG/GDR for comparison: https://www.stepmap.de/karte/brd-ddr-ddIwvxHotF
Why does this data follow political borders so sharply in this case? Is that effect real or caused by methology error or skewed data?
Apparently the basic data stems from the HadISD database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/index....
This file lists the stations (version v311_2020f) in the database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/files/...
Many stations in the former GDR seem to be present, for example:
If the effect is real: Which difference between FRG and former GDR areas causes it?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media...
Other parts of West Germany also sport lower population density (Lower Saxony in the North, Bavaria in the South).
It is absolutely astonishing how strongly human behavior (industry and metropolitan areas) influences local environmental conditions. I guess most cities may (be forced to) change radically.
It make me think about how we could prevent death in case of a massive humid heat wave, and how we could do it at a low enough cost, especially in a situation where the grid fail. My best guess will be some tent with high isolation fabric (think emergency blanket) cooled with a tank of liquid nitrogen.