I always wonder when increasingly hostile climate is going to start redistribution of population. So far it seems like people are extremely resilient and would rather stay then move.
People are resilient here means that we have cheap enough energy and air conditioning as well as access to fresh water. Raise the cost of energy 100x and extracting fresh water and especially air conditioning becomes less economically viable than moving. Then again, the whole desert is wide open for building large banks of solar farms.
Of course, if you raise the cost of energy that much heating will have more of an impact then A/C. I still think the northern US cities will be more resilient (and I do live in one) but heating isn’t cheap
Northern US cities are much worse positioned than other cities. Those cities are full of old, poorly insulated houses with inadequate electrical infrastructure. No ducts for A/C, 100 amp electrical boxes, nowhere to put heat pump outdoor units, etc. It’ll be much easier for more recently built cities across the south and mountain west to go fully electric.
You are right. But also northern cities have water. You can rebuild a house to be more energy efficient. You can’t create a river (to a first degree of approximation).
The northern US is the original thirteen colonies north of the mason Dixon line. It’s not a bare geographic term. Just as the “Midwest” is actually in the east.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_USA_with_stat.... Geographic labels in the US are a product of history. North is the northeast. South is the south east. Midwest means the mideast (many parts of which are further east than parts of the south). The actual midwest is called the mountain region the west is actually the west. If you referred to Phoenix as a “southern US city” or Portland as a “northern US city” most people in the country would look at you weird.
You may be attributing lack of financial means to resiliency. It cost money to move and if you are already struggling to get by you may not have the money.
Only a small percentage of the population lacks the financial resources to move. It’s because people don’t care about the heat and will just turn up the AC. Arizona has the 4th highest rate of domestic net migration (people moving in from other states minus people leaving for other states).
Most people, even those who believe in global warming, don't viscerally feel that it will cause large parts of the earth to become inhabitable in their lifetimes.
And that's a point in favor of this article. Are you more or less likely to move to a city after hearing that it does a month straight over 110 degrees? I know how I answer that question (having left Texas 20 years ago after a month of 100 degree temps.)
Dry deserts just aren't that hostile until there's no more water to be found.
When the water runs out is when shit will get real.
Until then, articles like this are just describing normal desert life while trying to be alarmist about it. Judging from a bunch of the comments here, it seems to work.
The real insanity is doing agriculture in these regions, stealing dwindling groundwater supplies in bulk from the inhabitants who'll need it in the future just to survive.
The United States military has, for some decades, been planning for how to deal with the effects of climate change, which include the expected migration of huge numbers of people. Here’s one article:
As regions become too hot for sustaining livelihoods or human habitation, climate change may spur migration. Tensions over water and other resources could lead to instability and conflict. Climate change is already making the Arctic more accessible with nations vying over resources and access. Due to warming temperatures in many regions, diseases and viruses are expected to migrate to new areas of the globe.
And:
The world’s largest naval base, Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, is endangered by rising sea levels, Water in the bay has risen about a foot-and-a-half since the 1920s, and a normal high tide now comes close to lapping over containment walls. The Navy, the city and businesses that depend on the harbor must work to adapt to rising sea levels.
And in their last appropriations bill, the GOP nutjobs running the house literally stripped out funding even for that. Fortunately, the Senate will probably put it back, but the GOP are just out-to-lunch on this.
Nordhaus published a study how the economy is barely affected by rising temperatures because all high value activity happens indoors.
This ignores that in Africa there is a significant subsistence population that lives off their own food production which is exclusively conducted outdoors and very little of the produce is sold commercially which in turn means their monetary income is close to zero aka they are a low value industry. The fact that these people move away does in no way contradict the predicted impact on the economy, in fact, you would think that it expects them to move somewhere else with lots of indoor economic activity.
One of the many consequences of global warming is going to be a reckoning of trying to support large cities in areas that fundamentally cannot sustain them. Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Southern California do not really have any business existing in their present forms.
I disagree. These cities have vast amounts of solar power to the point that they could, with storage, not only self sustain on mostly just rooftop solar but could perhaps even be net energy exporters.
They’re also not in areas likely to be inundated by flooding, and they are not in places where their expansion destroys forests. They are low density today too meaning they have tremendous room to build up.
Lack of freeze thaw cycles means roads and buildings last longer, reducing energy use in constant repair and CO2 from constant reapplication of concrete and asphalt.
Water is their big problem but with cheap renewable energy that problem is solvable either with pipelines or desalination.
Lastly air conditioning takes less power than winter heating in extremely cold climates and like I said above is more easily fueled by renewable energy. Solar generation peaks exactly with A/C demand. Cities up North tend to burn tons of fossil fuels for heat and that is harder to decarbonize. Heat pumps help but it’s still more intensive than A/C.
If the water problem is solvable these cities could become far more sustainable than say New York or Chicago due to all their cheap solar.
90% of water use in California is agricultural, not urban. Not sure about Arizona but it’s probably at least close. The city water problem is smaller than you think. Cities don’t directly use much water.
I do think we will be forced by climate change to relocate some agriculture. We probably won’t be growing water heavy crops in the Southwest in 50 years.
That's going to be peanuts against the reckoning of having incredibly population-dense places like Bangladesh, etc. mass-displaced. I think it's going to make the 2010s migrant crisis look like peanuts.
Honestly, I think you are going to see mass death and chaos in third world countries. The militaries of the first world countries are going to unite in a “us versus them” mentality and it’ll be bloody. Billions will die and we might hit our emission reduction goals as a result. The first world will be hit hard, but will adapt and limp along (likely under fascism).
Saudi Arabia is doomed because they have an extractive economy dependent on a globalized trade system that is unraveling due to American neglect. Not because of climate change.
Climate change is real. But it isn’t the cause of every problem, and it isn’t evidenced by extreme weather phenomena per se.
> Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Southern California do not really have any business existing in their present forms.
The Odd Lots podcast recently had an episode "An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert":
> Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa.
One observation: some of the earliest civilizations in history have been in arid areas, e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt. They just happen to be settled near rivers—just like the Native American did with what is now know as Phoenix:
> The Hohokam people occupied the Phoenix area for 2,000 years.[23][24] They created roughly 135 miles (217 kilometers) of irrigation canals, making the desert land arable, and paths of these canals were used for the Arizona Canal, Central Arizona Project Canal, and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct.
It is easier to keep warm than to cool down, but surprisingly these cities use less energy than their cold brethren. Also the cooling needs greatly correlate to solar availability so the potential to be very climate friendly is there. Cold northern climates mostly burn gas for heat which very climate unfriendly. In the US cold weather state use the most energy per capita, followed by hot states, and then of course temperate climates use the least.
"And it’s so dry that you barely sweat… a condition that conceals dehydration."
Without sweating I'd sure like to know what's happening to all that hydration...
It seems there's been a lot of stupid hyperbolic drama in the news lately about high desert temps and how unlivable they are.
But the reality is it's the non-arid regions that are unlivable in extreme heat waves.
Deserts are so dry it's trivial to stay cool enough to survive. All it takes is shade and water, perspiration and evaporation takes care of the rest.
You can't do the same with so much humidity the sweat can't carry the heat away from your body. That's what kills people.
(I own land in the Mojave by JTNP, on which I'm presently spending yet another AC-less summer. I wouldn't dare do this in muggy IL, but here it's really no big deal - I just get less work done outside having to stay in the shade.)
Yes, this is exactly right. The wet bulb temperature in parts of Texas and Florida in the heat wave a week or two ago got close to the limit of human survivability. Five years from now Texas, Florida, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia are all going to be seeing that limit exceeded at least briefly every summer.
I was in New Mexico a while back, and being outside walking around in 35 C heat was completely comfortable because of how dry it was. Relative humidity less than 20%. It's so dry that the heat index (by the National Weather Service's formula) is actually less than the true temperature.
By comparison, life at 60% humidity in the Northeast at 30 C is considerably more miserable without air conditioning. Without a fan blowing in my face constantly to improve evaporation, my head starts to feel like mush after about an hour.
Definitely. The only place in the deserts in the US that will be an exception to this is Yuma AZ because it is close to the warm ocean waters to the south of it so it's more humid. But it doesn't have a huge population unlike Houston or Miami.
I think the writer means that the sweat evaporates so rapidly that it does not feel like you are sweating. That is, you don’t get drenched in sweat. I think during heat exhaustion the body stops sweating. Perhaps it’s easier to miss the signs of impending heat exhaustion in such conditions.
Needing to hydrate isn’t an indicator of impending heat exhaustion. I mean, people need to hydrate sometimes in cool weather. The Mayo Clinic doesn’t list needing to hydrate as one of the symptoms to be on the lookout for.
I’m not a doctor. I’m just surmising that if you aren’t drenched in sweat because it has evaporated so fast that one might not be aware of impending heat exhaustion. Obviously I might be wrong. Heavy sweating is a possible symptom of heat exhaustion.
Edit: At the end it does list dehydration as something to look out for. I have no idea what it is like in 110 degree weather with virtually no humidity. I’d guess even being well hydrated still makes it easy to get heat exhaustion.
Yeah I tripped over that line too. I think maybe they meant you don't realize you are sweating excessively because it evaporates so fast which causes dehydration. Compared to a high humid area where you'd be drenched in sweat and realize you need to hydrate.
They clearly mean that rapid evaporation prevents sweat from accumulating on the skin, making it easy to miss rapid loss of water since you don't feel it very much.
Given that you explain exactly this, you seem to have understood it. If your biggest concern with this story is a relaxed use of the word "sweating" you might want to go back and reread it.
The problem is they're characterizing it like this is a negative thing, which only makes it further appear as if they don't know WTF they are talking about.
That quick evaporation of your sweat is a feature of the desert, and it's why you won't die in 120+F.
We have people who believe that we can take rockets to other planets, which have surfaces so hostile that it makes this example of Phoenix look like a garden paradise.
Meanwhile, we scratch our heads at those people who are attempting to live in a place that is literally only 30° hotter than average for the continent - yet completely hostile to life.
Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.
Help me reconcile this
Why aren’t we doing all that fancy Geoengineering and biodoming that is planned for Mars in Phoenix right now?
Futurology and progressology are the new religions that's why. They think science can and will resolve everything, we'll bend the law of physics, extract ressources indefinitely, live forever, &c.
> Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]
We don't need to bend the laws of physics, we just need to use them like adults not like clowns. We don't need to live forever, but we should do much better than 70-90 years.
These are not the same groups. The people who think we can go to Mars also think we can live in hot places on Earth and can decarbonize without returning to the Iron Age.
Doomers and anti-modernists are pessimists all around.
Personally I think the doomer thing (and political fantasies like significant degrowth) is as bad as climate denial in that it keeps us from even trying to solve the problem. Instead we throw up our hands and wait to die or waste energy promoting fantasies.
If we only do the latter we should prepare for 4 degrees or more. You are not going to sell the world on becoming poorer. It’s a fantasy of the naive and privileged.
At least doomers stop taking the plane, stop eating as much meat and only buy the strict minimum. Doing their part. Which is infinitely more than what I do tbh.
Some might but it’s honestly a drop in the bucket. There are over a billion more people in the developing world who want a middle class life, and we have no right to sit here in our privilege and tell them they can’t have it. Even if we do their response will be “fuck you.”
What we can do is develop decarbonized energy and transport tech and hope we have it ready for them in time.
Remember that this is a global problem. The US and Europe may have gotten this ball rolling but at this point you could turn both of these off and Asia would still take us way up past 500ppm.
At this point we aren’t going to avoid some dangerous climate change unless someone invents Mr. Fusion next year, but we could probably still avert the really catastrophic outcomes if we can at least flatten the emission curve over the next decade or two. The crazy projections are based on total business as usual.
The way I understand it, we can change a lot about the planet if we don't care about side effects. For mars - we don't. You can try changing whatever you want there and you're not going to affect the ecosystem, because it doesn't exist yet.
(I'm not claiming this is a reasonable / good idea)
I'm sorry but destructive terraforming techniques will take several thousand years to work on Mars. You know, things like bombarding it with asteroids or lasers to kick up enough CO2 to form a thick atmosphere. At that point you are going to need a better plan to make humanity survive the next thousand years. In fact, I would expect a patient humanity that is willing to go thousands of years without any economic growth to be more capable of space colonization, than a humanity that needs a new planet every quarter.
I mean even if you did that. Doesnt Mars lack the magnetosphere to hold that CO2. As in won’t most of it continue to escape or be shredded by solar wind
odd that you mention it -- as an environmentalist at a time I raged and gnashed teeth at this idea of remote planet colony 'fantasy' while rivers were in dire trouble globally. Yet one day, an issue of Whole Earth Magazine arrived with a cover story about a trial of a survival dome in the deserts somewhere, with Federal funding, as a complete testbed for off-world living.
To my guilty-delight it was found to be rotting with molds less than a year or two into the experiment, but I was humbled to find that multiple new materials-science products and techniques were realized in the process, with excellent application to difficult, real-life problems here on Earth. I realized two things: my emotional inner-war with the well-funded off-worlders was only costing me, nothing to them; second, excellent tech and invention is not predictable, and this experiment turned out to be quite productive for that.
So far the person making the largest push to Mars also owns the largest electric car company, a solar power company, makes battery packs for storing the power from unpredictable renewable energy sources, advocates for nuclear, and set up a $100M competition for carbon capture technologies.
Maybe the person you're describing only exists in your mind.
> Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.
The building codes on Mars (or wherever) will be more stringent: better air tightness, more insulation, efficient HVAC+D, etc.
What passes for "code compliant" is quite a low bar and a bit embarrassing. And it's not like you have to spend that much more to really improve things:
The people with the resources and thus power to effect real dramatic change don’t feel the pain that most depicted in this story are experiencing. I’ve spent some time in Phoenix and they (say, Scottsdale residents) can afford to have a well-watered, green yards and golf courses even during this and live with the A/C blasting 24 hours a day.
Until those people feel real pain from this, nothing will change. Not that that’s a sufficient condition though because most of the residents I mention can easily move or spent summers elsewhere. But the people in power have to be more than mildly inconvenienced before there’s a chance of anything happening. So maybe ten years before this is truly horrid in places like Arizona and Florida.
1. Predicting that humanity will be able to geoengineer Mars in the future says nothing about our current abilities
2. A single person/company/government deciding to geoengineer Earth is obviously incredibly controversial, as siblings already pointed out
3. Mars habitat wouldn't be free and Phoenix doesn't have the budget to cover the entire city in some kind of domes
4. People who settle Mars choose what they are getting into. I doubt that all Phoenicians would want to live indoor even if someone rebuilt their city into a space colony for free
One simple and relatively cheap way Phoenix could be more survivable would be to build underground.
The temperature at 12 feet below ground or more really doesn't change much throughout the year.
The reason they don't do that in Phoenix is that they don't need to dig foundations because there isn't any frost rise or fall at the surface. Since that is the case, the extra cost of digging a basement, which is around 3%, cuts into the margins of large home builders enough that it isn't done.
They could also drill into the ground even deeper and use it as a heat sink and pump air through pipes to cool homes. Again this is more costly at construction time, though it would save money for the homeowner and provide protection for the city in gear emergencies, and put less pressure on the power grid.
Finally, every home there should have solar on the roof to offset AC charges, and a passive dew condenser to provide extra water for the house. They don't.
It's more about per unit cost of existence vs per unit revenue from existence. We're at the point where it's definitely possible to take rockets to other planets (and probably possible to get back eventually) and it's probably possible to live there with continued help from earth, it's just really expensive and it will never be cheaper than just living on earth, as long as earth's climate stays within a reasonable band around where it is now and Earth doesn't become so uniformly corrupt that there is a massive savings available just by changing the venue to a less stupidly run venue.
So, that being said it's pretty obvious the people that think we will be living on other planets are pretty delusional unless our birthrate explodes (unlikely) or our death rate drops from living way longer (unlikely but more likely than birth rate exploding) and so we actually need more living space. Revenue potential could drive colonization but you have to ask yourself if there is more revenue potential on mars or in something like an o'neill cylinder(s) mining things with miniscule gravity wells to overcome like asteroids and it seems pretty obvious that the latter will always win over the former.
The same reasoning applies to Phoenix. Biodoming would make cost of existence per unit of revenue from existence hugely negative but it turns out providing good air conditioning with backup power to upper middle class and higher to cool their homes and crappier air conditioning with no backup power to middle class and lower to take the edge off of the horrible 2-4 months of summer is still a net positive venture, despite sucking a lot for a part of the year, so we do that instead.
A better comparison to Mars is Antarctica. Antarctica is far more hostile to life without technology than Arizona is, yet hundreds of people live on Antarctica. It costs a ton of money to support Antarctic research, yet we do it, and I believe it's relatively uncontroversial to spend that money.
If several million per resident was spent annually on infrastructure and support in Phoenix like it is in Antarctica, there wouldn't be a water shortage -- that's more than enough to pipe and desalinate water from the ocean.
>> Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.
This is a mischaracterization. The majority of people that want a mars/moon/etc settlement believe that the future of humanity is multiplanetary. Serious people don't think that humans need to live on mars, they think the future of life on earth is bleak, and we need backups.
I think people in Phoenix would fare better if they were willing to make the changes expected for outer space colonization. How many of them would be willing to recycle urine, compost their own excrement, live in caves, become small farmers/yeast growers, only go outside in full spacesuits, repair their own equipment, get used to weird smells, etc.?
Civilization, as we know it, can't survive on Mars, Moon, or a space station. Think of them more as pioneers, and like pioneers, they will pay with life and blood every little mistake. Some people would kill for that adventure.
My flight through Phoenix was delayed 4 hours so I rebooked through another city.
On that flight the fellow next to me said - “good choice, Phoenix is no good for flying today.” I asked why and he said “ My wife is there, plane took off and had to dump fuel and land. Too heavy to get to altitude with the hot air. They had to reduce the load and take off again. All flights having to reduce load.” I did not try to confirm this report.
I hadn't considered it before reading your comment, but it seems plausible when I google "air density vs temperature". It seems a few degrees is enough to change the density by several percent, and IIRC density is proportional to the lift you get.
Yes, but usually the plane won't take off at all without getting lighter, the issue is in taking off, not in getting altitude once air borne.
Typically in case of particularly high temperatures or other adverse conditions, the plane is loaded with the minimum fuel needed to reach a near airport with better conditions, so that there is an added landing and take off, and since there are added costs for this, companies try to avoid it by disembarking luggage and even passengers.
The most recent case that made the news has been about disembarking some 20 people and their luggage by EasyJet:
Before I ever visited Phoenix, I'd hear people say something that I did not understand: "yeah but it's a dry heat". So what if it's dry, it's still an oven, right?
But I went there for work a few times. In the summer. And the fact that it was so dry made it bearable.
When the air is moist, sweating doesn't work well. Nothing is evaporating off of you, so you don't get cooled at all. But in pretty-much-nothing humidity, your sweat vanishes immediately and you are cooled. Just make sure you're drinking enough water (more than you think you need).
You also get neat tricks like swamp coolers that blow a mist of water above you. You don't get wet- the water evaporates, cooling the air, which falls on you.
Now do I want to live in 45C for weeks on end? Hell no. But I'd take that over 35C and 99% humidity.
Growing up in Chicago as a kid I was always envious of people living in places where it never got “freeze your ass off” cold. They seemed magical. Not needing a heavy coat, being able to go outside in the the winter. I was young and didn’t really know any better. The Chicago summer is nice this time of year but winter can be brutal. I couldn’t fathom the downsides of the summer.
I’ve come to realize that it’s quite different, all the things I enjoyed as a kid, playing outside, riding bikes, backyard sports, etc. are all but impossible in that kind of heat.
I’m not sure which area is better prepared for climate change but reading these articles makes me appreciate where I grew up and remind me, when I’m freezing my ass off, that sometimes the winters aren’t so bad. As my parents used to say, “you can always wear an extra sweater but there’s only so many you can take off.”
Don't live in Phoenix. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that it's a desert, there's no water, and global warming, all lead to an endgame you don't want to be near. I figured that out 25 years ago.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI refreshed NPR this morning and it's literally the top story.
When the water runs out is when shit will get real.
Until then, articles like this are just describing normal desert life while trying to be alarmist about it. Judging from a bunch of the comments here, it seems to work.
The real insanity is doing agriculture in these regions, stealing dwindling groundwater supplies in bulk from the inhabitants who'll need it in the future just to survive.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/31...
Two excerpts:
As regions become too hot for sustaining livelihoods or human habitation, climate change may spur migration. Tensions over water and other resources could lead to instability and conflict. Climate change is already making the Arctic more accessible with nations vying over resources and access. Due to warming temperatures in many regions, diseases and viruses are expected to migrate to new areas of the globe.
And:
The world’s largest naval base, Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, is endangered by rising sea levels, Water in the bay has risen about a foot-and-a-half since the 1920s, and a normal high tide now comes close to lapping over containment walls. The Navy, the city and businesses that depend on the harbor must work to adapt to rising sea levels.
This ignores that in Africa there is a significant subsistence population that lives off their own food production which is exclusively conducted outdoors and very little of the produce is sold commercially which in turn means their monetary income is close to zero aka they are a low value industry. The fact that these people move away does in no way contradict the predicted impact on the economy, in fact, you would think that it expects them to move somewhere else with lots of indoor economic activity.
They’re also not in areas likely to be inundated by flooding, and they are not in places where their expansion destroys forests. They are low density today too meaning they have tremendous room to build up.
Lack of freeze thaw cycles means roads and buildings last longer, reducing energy use in constant repair and CO2 from constant reapplication of concrete and asphalt.
Water is their big problem but with cheap renewable energy that problem is solvable either with pipelines or desalination.
Lastly air conditioning takes less power than winter heating in extremely cold climates and like I said above is more easily fueled by renewable energy. Solar generation peaks exactly with A/C demand. Cities up North tend to burn tons of fossil fuels for heat and that is harder to decarbonize. Heat pumps help but it’s still more intensive than A/C.
If the water problem is solvable these cities could become far more sustainable than say New York or Chicago due to all their cheap solar.
Pretty big "if", gotta say.
So, they kill their big advantage by using it to kill the biggest disadvantage? Where is the gain in this?
And it's not OR situation, but AND. They would need both desalination plants and lots of pipelines to just alleviate, not SOLVE the water problem.
I do think we will be forced by climate change to relocate some agriculture. We probably won’t be growing water heavy crops in the Southwest in 50 years.
Moreover: Saudi Arabia exists.
Why Saudi Arabia is the World's Most Doomed Country
https://youtu.be/txmzVsBniZQ
Climate change is real. But it isn’t the cause of every problem, and it isn’t evidenced by extreme weather phenomena per se.
Cities aren't farmland, building one in a desert is basically an excellent use of land.
The Odd Lots podcast recently had an episode "An Arizona Farmer on How to Grow Alfalfa in the Middle of the Desert":
> Due to a combination of drought, climate change and booming growth, Arizona is facing looming water scarcity. But for all the sprawl and population increase, the overwhelming amount of water used in the state is not consumed by residences, but rather farmers. So naturally, many argue that we should be doing less agriculture in the desert and move the production of cotton, alfalfa and various vegetables towards places with more rain. On this episode, we speak with Trevor Bales, the proprietor of Bales Hay Farm & Ranch in Arizona about his family’s history in the state and why he thinks this dry desert is a great place to grow alfalfa.
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/an-arizona-farmer-on-how-to-g...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owieQnPYfT8
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36741112
One observation: some of the earliest civilizations in history have been in arid areas, e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt. They just happen to be settled near rivers—just like the Native American did with what is now know as Phoenix:
> The Hohokam people occupied the Phoenix area for 2,000 years.[23][24] They created roughly 135 miles (217 kilometers) of irrigation canals, making the desert land arable, and paths of these canals were used for the Arizona Canal, Central Arizona Project Canal, and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Phoenix,_Arizona
Aka: be smarter with water
Without sweating I'd sure like to know what's happening to all that hydration...
It seems there's been a lot of stupid hyperbolic drama in the news lately about high desert temps and how unlivable they are.
But the reality is it's the non-arid regions that are unlivable in extreme heat waves.
Deserts are so dry it's trivial to stay cool enough to survive. All it takes is shade and water, perspiration and evaporation takes care of the rest.
You can't do the same with so much humidity the sweat can't carry the heat away from your body. That's what kills people.
(I own land in the Mojave by JTNP, on which I'm presently spending yet another AC-less summer. I wouldn't dare do this in muggy IL, but here it's really no big deal - I just get less work done outside having to stay in the shade.)
By comparison, life at 60% humidity in the Northeast at 30 C is considerably more miserable without air conditioning. Without a fan blowing in my face constantly to improve evaporation, my head starts to feel like mush after about an hour.
Conversions: 35 C = 95 F, 30 C = 86 F
I’m not a doctor. I’m just surmising that if you aren’t drenched in sweat because it has evaporated so fast that one might not be aware of impending heat exhaustion. Obviously I might be wrong. Heavy sweating is a possible symptom of heat exhaustion.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heat-exhausti...
Edit: At the end it does list dehydration as something to look out for. I have no idea what it is like in 110 degree weather with virtually no humidity. I’d guess even being well hydrated still makes it easy to get heat exhaustion.
Given that you explain exactly this, you seem to have understood it. If your biggest concern with this story is a relaxed use of the word "sweating" you might want to go back and reread it.
That quick evaporation of your sweat is a feature of the desert, and it's why you won't die in 120+F.
The article is trash
We have people who believe that we can take rockets to other planets, which have surfaces so hostile that it makes this example of Phoenix look like a garden paradise.
Meanwhile, we scratch our heads at those people who are attempting to live in a place that is literally only 30° hotter than average for the continent - yet completely hostile to life.
Yet somehow this group believes that the future of humanity is on a less hospitable planet.
Help me reconcile this
Why aren’t we doing all that fancy Geoengineering and biodoming that is planned for Mars in Phoenix right now?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history
Doomers and anti-modernists are pessimists all around.
Personally I think the doomer thing (and political fantasies like significant degrowth) is as bad as climate denial in that it keeps us from even trying to solve the problem. Instead we throw up our hands and wait to die or waste energy promoting fantasies.
If we only do the latter we should prepare for 4 degrees or more. You are not going to sell the world on becoming poorer. It’s a fantasy of the naive and privileged.
What we can do is develop decarbonized energy and transport tech and hope we have it ready for them in time.
Remember that this is a global problem. The US and Europe may have gotten this ball rolling but at this point you could turn both of these off and Asia would still take us way up past 500ppm.
At this point we aren’t going to avoid some dangerous climate change unless someone invents Mr. Fusion next year, but we could probably still avert the really catastrophic outcomes if we can at least flatten the emission curve over the next decade or two. The crazy projections are based on total business as usual.
(I'm not claiming this is a reasonable / good idea)
To my guilty-delight it was found to be rotting with molds less than a year or two into the experiment, but I was humbled to find that multiple new materials-science products and techniques were realized in the process, with excellent application to difficult, real-life problems here on Earth. I realized two things: my emotional inner-war with the well-funded off-worlders was only costing me, nothing to them; second, excellent tech and invention is not predictable, and this experiment turned out to be quite productive for that.
who knew?!
No one cares what you do the Martian atmosphere though, because it doesn't have any users
Maybe the person you're describing only exists in your mind.
The building codes on Mars (or wherever) will be more stringent: better air tightness, more insulation, efficient HVAC+D, etc.
What passes for "code compliant" is quite a low bar and a bit embarrassing. And it's not like you have to spend that much more to really improve things:
* https://www.prettygoodhouse.org
Until those people feel real pain from this, nothing will change. Not that that’s a sufficient condition though because most of the residents I mention can easily move or spent summers elsewhere. But the people in power have to be more than mildly inconvenienced before there’s a chance of anything happening. So maybe ten years before this is truly horrid in places like Arizona and Florida.
1. Predicting that humanity will be able to geoengineer Mars in the future says nothing about our current abilities
2. A single person/company/government deciding to geoengineer Earth is obviously incredibly controversial, as siblings already pointed out
3. Mars habitat wouldn't be free and Phoenix doesn't have the budget to cover the entire city in some kind of domes
4. People who settle Mars choose what they are getting into. I doubt that all Phoenicians would want to live indoor even if someone rebuilt their city into a space colony for free
The temperature at 12 feet below ground or more really doesn't change much throughout the year.
The reason they don't do that in Phoenix is that they don't need to dig foundations because there isn't any frost rise or fall at the surface. Since that is the case, the extra cost of digging a basement, which is around 3%, cuts into the margins of large home builders enough that it isn't done.
They could also drill into the ground even deeper and use it as a heat sink and pump air through pipes to cool homes. Again this is more costly at construction time, though it would save money for the homeowner and provide protection for the city in gear emergencies, and put less pressure on the power grid.
Finally, every home there should have solar on the roof to offset AC charges, and a passive dew condenser to provide extra water for the house. They don't.
So, that being said it's pretty obvious the people that think we will be living on other planets are pretty delusional unless our birthrate explodes (unlikely) or our death rate drops from living way longer (unlikely but more likely than birth rate exploding) and so we actually need more living space. Revenue potential could drive colonization but you have to ask yourself if there is more revenue potential on mars or in something like an o'neill cylinder(s) mining things with miniscule gravity wells to overcome like asteroids and it seems pretty obvious that the latter will always win over the former.
The same reasoning applies to Phoenix. Biodoming would make cost of existence per unit of revenue from existence hugely negative but it turns out providing good air conditioning with backup power to upper middle class and higher to cool their homes and crappier air conditioning with no backup power to middle class and lower to take the edge off of the horrible 2-4 months of summer is still a net positive venture, despite sucking a lot for a part of the year, so we do that instead.
This is a mischaracterization. The majority of people that want a mars/moon/etc settlement believe that the future of humanity is multiplanetary. Serious people don't think that humans need to live on mars, they think the future of life on earth is bleak, and we need backups.
Civilization, as we know it, can't survive on Mars, Moon, or a space station. Think of them more as pioneers, and like pioneers, they will pay with life and blood every little mistake. Some people would kill for that adventure.
Typically in case of particularly high temperatures or other adverse conditions, the plane is loaded with the minimum fuel needed to reach a near airport with better conditions, so that there is an added landing and take off, and since there are added costs for this, companies try to avoid it by disembarking luggage and even passengers.
The most recent case that made the news has been about disembarking some 20 people and their luggage by EasyJet:
https://www.insider.com/easyjet-passengers-lanzarote-liverpo...
But I went there for work a few times. In the summer. And the fact that it was so dry made it bearable.
When the air is moist, sweating doesn't work well. Nothing is evaporating off of you, so you don't get cooled at all. But in pretty-much-nothing humidity, your sweat vanishes immediately and you are cooled. Just make sure you're drinking enough water (more than you think you need).
You also get neat tricks like swamp coolers that blow a mist of water above you. You don't get wet- the water evaporates, cooling the air, which falls on you.
Now do I want to live in 45C for weeks on end? Hell no. But I'd take that over 35C and 99% humidity.
I’ve come to realize that it’s quite different, all the things I enjoyed as a kid, playing outside, riding bikes, backyard sports, etc. are all but impossible in that kind of heat.
I’m not sure which area is better prepared for climate change but reading these articles makes me appreciate where I grew up and remind me, when I’m freezing my ass off, that sometimes the winters aren’t so bad. As my parents used to say, “you can always wear an extra sweater but there’s only so many you can take off.”
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Stillsuit
Right. Yes. Well, I for one have complete faith in our ability to solve this climate crisis. /s