in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer.
A wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.
A wet bulb event occurs when the combined temperature and humidity (the so called "wet bulb temperature") exceeds the limits of human physiology, causing humans to overheat and perish even in the absence of any activity beyond basal metabolism.
I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.
All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage.
And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever.
Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
Temperature and humidity are high enough that you can’t cool off naturally via sweat. I would suspect most people don’t realize that’s even a thing. I’m from Texas, and everyone thinks they’re heat adapted and tries to act macho. A lot of people would just stay outside and keep working, ignoring any warnings they received.
In part, I'm sure culture in this particular instance is partly to blame here.
That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions.
However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.
I expect Texas to be the first state to experience a wet bulb event.
Its only a matter of time before we get a combination of extreme heat and a massive failure of their power grid.
Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing.
Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom
We had hundreds of deaths in the span of 2-3 days during the winter storm in 2021. It didn’t catalyze any political change then, so unfortunately I think you’re right about the effect the next time it happens.
I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.
Ambient temperature is always at or above the wet-bulb temperature, by definition. A wet-bulb temperature measures the temperature that can be achieved after energy loss due to evaporation of water, so as long as evaporation is possible (humidity < 100%), it is lower than the actual temperature.
Basically, it's when the wet-bulb temperature exceeds 35C. From the Wikipedia entry:
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"
The wet-bulb temperature is the minimum temperature a wet body can reach via evaporation--effectively the minimum temperature you can reach via sweating. When the wet-bulb temperature reaches body temperature, you can only maintain body temperature via active A/C.
Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner.
"Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"
If a thing that used to be a 1 in 100 year event starts happening every 10 years and all the science says it's because of man made climate change then yeah we can totally do things to make it go back to happening once every 100 years again.
> A majority of the deaths were of working-class men in their twenties who performed manual labor.
Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.
That's actually the inciting incident for the cli-fi book "The Ministry for the Future". Overall I really enjoyed the book, was a good mix of interesting economic/policy ideas interwoven through a compelling character based narrative.
> in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer.
It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.
More people die of cold than heat, a fact that never comes up in talks about climate change.
Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.
But think about the solution. It's making A/C very accessible and reliable. That requires cheap energy with a high-uptime grid. There are many ways to solve this problem but adding difficult to meet constraints to energy companies that risk price and availability is not one of them.
The short term solution is making A/C very accessible and reliable. The long term solution is no longer putting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is imperative to do both, no matter the (e: monetary) expense.
People will need to start thinking of the summer months in some places like the winter months in others: during certain periods you need shelter with working HVAC systems, and when you go outside you need suitable gear and emergency arrangements.
I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!
The one key difference is, in cold climates we heat our spaces and any heat that "leaks out" or is otherwise incidental is absorbed by the cold outside.
In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.
In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The real issue is what to do about it, how to do it and in what timeframe.
With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude).
There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone.
If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions.
Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem.
The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.
> In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life.
The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax.
If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.
Anecdote: None of my conservative-leaning acquaintances believe that Climate Change is even a top-20 problem, let alone something that requires urgent nationwide or worldwide action. I believe the filter bubble is real.
A “wet bulb event” is not just a heatwave. A heatwave is a sustained period of high temperatures. You can protect yourself from a heatwave by staying indoors, using a fan, drinking water, etc.
A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of.
Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power. Anybody without AC would die, unless they found some non-evaporative way to cool themselves.
It’s the most terrifying natural disaster conceivable.
The really short answer: If the wet-bulb temperature in your basement is sufficiently low, then yes. Otherwise no.
Note that for a small poorly-ventilated basement, the humidity will rise from respiration, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature. For a well-ventilated basement, the air temperature will approach the outdoor temperature, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature.
If you have a giant, well-shaded, pool of water, the water temperature will usually be below the peak air temperature (water has high thermal mass, so it will take a long time for it to come up to the ambient temperature, even at high humidity, where evaporation effects are negligible) so that's another non-AC method of staying cool.
In any event pools of water and basements don't scale to densely populated areas.
Couldn't you just eat ice to keep cool? Heat from blood transfers to the ice as it melts and warms in the stomach, then it leaves the body completely through urination.
Indeed, we even still colloquially quote/measure the cooling capacity of air conditioning in "tons".
A ton of cooling being defined as 12000 BTU/hr, or the rate implied by the latent heat of fusion of 1 ton of ice at 0°C being consumed via melting over 24 hours.
Some people have fantasies about these heatwaves that just decimate all living things. It’s not that simple.
It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable.
Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.
> It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so.
How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.
I'm not sure a bucket would be enough to cool a person down if they have no other form of heat dissipation available to them - specifically I'm not sure feet alone could dissipate heat fast enough. If the water is too cold (around 70°F IIRC), your body would constrict the blood vessels to your hands and feet, limiting how much heat could be moved to those extremities from your core.
Hence mentioning a bath tub.
Some interesting reading to go along with this topic:
You’re going to need to set some practical constraints here.
Can you survive wet bulb temperatures given a bucket of water indefinitely? No. Can you survive working hard labor with the water bucket? No. Can you survive wet bulb events significantly higher than the threshold? No.
Can you survive several hours in a typical (current typical) wet bulb event? Yes, definitely. Bucket of water is fine.
> Can you survive several hours in a typical wet bulb event?
I'm going to vote maybe. At best, it'll be close.
Resting metabolic output is about half the active value I provided (per NASA's PDF). That means for a bucket of water that starts at 32°, you have 5 hours before the bucket is also 95° if you discount ambient heating from the air, circulatory constriction, and assuming no prior conditions.
Since you can't discount those (and are unlikely to find barely-not-frozen water for an entire city's population), survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
> survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
Does that pass your personal sniff test for reasonability? Have you ever soaked in a 104°F (40°C) hot tub for an hour or more? Was your survival in serious doubt?
Wet bulb temperatures in excess of 35°C need to persist for around 6 hours to represent a serious hyperthermia risk. This is not a "you will die inside of 1-2 hours" scenario.
Parking yourself nude under a cold shower will keep you alive, assuming you don't run out of water.
There's no need for the bath. The shower will probably work better actually since it's constantly disposed down the drain after picking up some heat, and replenished with subterranean-temp fresh water running across your person.
Many of the places at the forefront of this threat also have water scarcity issues. There's also the problem of what to do with the water once it's heated up. You could pump it back into the ground to cool off, but eventually you're going to heat the ground itself and have an even worse problem.
Heat waves are dangerous. My point is that wet bulb events are not a magical inflection point.
The point to take away is that humidity matters in addition to raw temperatures. Not that there is a specific threshold at which things matter or didn’t matter.
I think that point was well understood, by falcolas, to whom I was replying. But your assumption that it is not that hard to cool down seems a bit strong to me.
In some countries electricity becomes unavailable quite regularly, so relying on A/C during a crisis like that might fail. And that is assuming that A/Cs are common (they are not, in large parts of the world).
Cooling yourself down by using water from a tap may also fail, if, in such a situation, everyone in a city tries to do that. You are assuming a very high level of infrastructure and no critical failures.
You don’t need much water. It doesn’t need to be that cool either. If you lack access to the water required to do this, which does not even need to be clean, then the lack of water is probably the bigger crisis.
Heatwaves and infrastructure failures can undoubtedly be serious threats. But the vast, vast majority of people survive wet bulb events when they encounter them.
So you are saying a small amount of water would be enough to cool you down when it is (for example) 35° C at 90% humidity? How would that work? Evaporative cooling is out, for the most part and a small amount of water would be heated up to 35° C in no time.
1 BTU is the amount of energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1°F. Take 5 gallons (~42 pounds) at say 70°F (21°C). Raising that 42 pounds of water by 25°F/14°C will take just over 1K BTU.
That's maybe 2 hours of cooling per person and it's not at all obvious that during such a heat event that you'll have access to a continued source of 70°F/21°C water. If you only have access to 82°F/28°C water, 5 gallons only lasts you an hour or less.
True but you should also recognize the world has more than humans. most other species will not be able to survive such even. Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from humanity. some will be discovered immediately & some will be found in retrospect.
Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
> Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from humanity.
I know you threw babies in here but it feels like I have to point out that the old and sickly dying have a negligible effect on man years lost.
> Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I don’t really agree that the world is as fragile as you propose. But I feel like need to clarify that I’m not arguing against the threat posed by climate change broadly.
If you haven’t read it yet, the first section of Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson describes a wet-bulb event in striking detail. The horror of this climate-change catastrophe is what finally triggers a significant global cultural shift around climate change.
The passage was vivid enough for me to suggest preparatory measures to my retired parents. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in near-term climate impact!
I hate speaking negatively about Ministry for the Future, because I admire KSR, and we need fiction that confronts the climate crisis and shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better. Still, I sadly cannot recommend this book. To quote from my spoileriffic review,
"This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways."
> Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways.
Honestly, that just makes the book better in my eyes and I haven't even read it.
Can't agree more. The wet bulb event chapter is definitely worth a read, though.
The sad reality is that the world's actual response to something like that happening will probably be about as disappointing and anticlimactic as the rest of the book was to read.
If the comment sections on any news story about e.g. the Maui fire or any other natural disaster are an indication - the world's response will be hyperpartisan conspiracy mongering involving random rich people (Oprah, Zuckerberg and Obama in Maui), shady groups of profiteers (developers and clean energy installers), and fictional tech (directed energy weapons and various "lasers) rather than the shortest moment of introspection.
If climate activists wish to change minds, they simply cannot react with apoplexy that after a generation of messaging about how "weather is not climate" that the new generation responds to catastrophic weather events with "weather is not climate"
If climate activists only wish to broadcast how virtuous and smart they are for not denying The Science, by all means, look down on the uneducated unwashed masses for arguing as to whether or not a hot day or season is definitive evidence of human caused climate change -- even though that's exactly what the climate activists taught them not too long ago.
1. I didn't even mention climate change or weather?
b. Your own source is making a different point that the one you're making..
> What they're saying: Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather summarized the volcano's contribution to 2023's record high temperatures this way: "So, not nothing, but only a small part of the story in the exceptional warmth the world is experiencing," he told Axios via email.
> Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, also thinks the significance of the volcano's warming role pales in comparison to human-driven climate change and other influences.
> Dessler likens climate change to a "rising tide" that is elevating the baseline temperatures from which heat waves begin. "This means that our heatwaves become hotter, essentially 'floating' on the 'rising tide' of our warming world," he said via email.
The Maui wildfire was driven by a hurricane, a weather event. Did you not mention that? The Axios article providing context and discussion around a topic -- some of which does argue in the affirmative for climate change -- is not contradictory to my post because I was not arguing against climate change. I'm arguing with your attitude towards the commentators on news stories, who you seem to view as ignorant, when they are parroting exactly the messaging that the climate activists trained them to parrot.
The commenters on news stories blaming HAARP and Directed Energy Weapons in concert with Oprah and the Biden Administration's clean-energy initiatives are in fact ignorant. And there are tens of thousands of them.
You're really convinced I made some sort of argument blaming the fire on Climate Change when I did nothing of the sort..
Any discussion of conspiracies draws the actual conspiracy mongers like flies. This is a real problem because they are more than capable of drowning out any other discussion.
Yes. Thank you. His book Aurora does a much better job at steering us towards action while still showing consequences of environmental disaster and I highly recommend it.
Crucially, after it tip goes into the complexity of global diplomacy and consensus building, a special black ops team of super eco-terrorists effect the change that really needs to happen. It’s right at home with right-wing military fantasy, Frederick Forsyth-“to bear the baddies we need to be worse than the worst of em” silliness
I agree that the plot repeatedly follows society making choices which I find implausible -- but if one reads that alienation (one's inner critic saying "this is not the world we live in") as part of the experience of the work, then it can function as a kind of compelling tool. Noting all the points where humanity in the book takes necessary and beneficial actions to improve their situation, that are available to but refused by our society, one arrives at a pretty jarring condemnation. Not only is the current disaster entirely of our making, but all the ways in which it will fail to be addressed are also our responsibility.
I'm not familiar enough with international diplomacy or central banking for that to be the most jarring part.
But, when the head of an international organization takes a week and a half to get to a meeting on the other side of the planet, and thinks that it's nicer to take a sequence of trains and sailing ships than it used to be to fly ... that seemed totally alien. When subsistence farmers were surprised by the large amount of money they were paid for getting more carbon into their soil, that seemed really implausible. When KSM glosses by how easy and quick it was to make giant wildlife corridors across North America, and talks about whole communities packing up and voluntarily abandoning towns to ceded those areas to nature ... that seemed wildly implausible.
There were a lot of these moments for me, and while I get the people that use these as a criticism against the realism of the book, I also think that gap is a criticism against all of us.
As much as the story centered around central banking machinations, the buried narrative was that a lot of people in power probably have to die. This realization and it's impossibility make the story a tragedy when compared to the real world.
Sorry, why is it an impossibility for people in power to die?
I'm not advocating for violence, to be clear, and in the novel KSM seems to take the stance that at some point violence is really counter-productive. But certainly there have been places and periods in which e.g. targeted kidnappings of rich people, assassination attempts on politicians, and terrorist attacks against high-profile targets have all been around -- why do you think is it impossible for those to be directed at people in power in the future? Especially if there are progressively more climate victims, it seems like we're setting the stage for a generation of people to be ripe for radicalization.
TMftF heavily hints and at times outright describes the existence of secretly funded UN blackops missions that target and assassinate people in power with strategic importance. It's been a few months since I read it, but if I can recall, it also described it's connection with ostensibly grassroots eco-activist/terrorists.
Submarine accidents not withstanding, I'm not convinced the UN in our current timeline could be transformed into one that engages in this behavior.
The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature - or political nature/societal nature - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation. "Why can't people not be the way they are" is just as useless a sentiment as "Why can't mathematics not be the way it is", and will be just as ineffective at causing 2 and 2 to add to 5.
I'm going to go back to my comparatively easy computer engineering tasks after writing this comment, and have the greatest respect for those willing to confront coordination problems in the political sphere. That's playing the game on hard mode.
The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
> I can't help but feel like TS Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
The good news is that we've developed systems of governance and economics that are not exclusively worse than uneducated tribalistic hunter-gatherer anarchy - a very large number of people live in significant comfort in relatively ordered, mostly polite societies, generally free to do what they want, and for the most part those societies build things like roads, landfills, electric grids, and fire departments together that make the community better. It's not perfect, for sure, and we're really missing the ball on this particular externality of global warming, but I have some hope that we'll figure out a way to address the problem that doesn't rely exclusively on weak moral appeals.
> The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature ... - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation.
Are we not society? Do we not make up the system? But more importantly, you're refuting a statement of responsibility by saying the underlying problem won't be solved by feelings. Whether a statement of moral responsibility is _true_ and whether concurrent emotions on their own solve anything are fundamentally different propositions, and denying one implies nothing about the other. If I murder someone by stabbing them, perhaps that reflects part of human nature -- but a jury telling me I'm guilty is _correct_, even though their condemnation will not bring back my victim. It would be absurd for me to say "oh your moralizing emotional condemnation won't solve the issue of murder which has always existed in human societies, and certainly won't bring back the person I killed -- therefore I'm not responsible."
But somehow, if a few generations knowingly trash a whole planet, aware that this would cause chaos which results in a large number of deaths, illness, property damage, etc you want to believe that the fact that morose feeling will not suck carbon out of the atmosphere somehow implies that responsibility cannot be assigned.
One can argue about whether moral statements can meaningfully be "true" (I think they can), but one can't jump from "moral condemnation doesn't on its own solve problems" to "therefore moral responsibility can be denied in any instance".
If anything, I think the reluctance to fully face the problem and acknowledge our role in it, and to recognize the ways in which our own lives will need to be different to stop exacerbating the problem, is part of the foot-dragging.
> The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.
But The Ministry for the Future is basically nothing _but_ constructive suggestions put in a nice palatable narrative container. We're not talking about a moral judgement in the absence of specific ideas about how to address climate change, environmental justice, and even wealth inequality. We're talking about acknowledging responsibility when, though opportunities stare us in the face, we do little or nothing to fix the situation we've created.
An individual can be expected to be moral, and should be judged if they are not.
A population or corporation should be expected to be moral. Collective behaviors are a function of incentives and penalties, of pure economics.
If your plan to fix the problems in society relies on every member selflessly cooperating and fails if one member defects, if you create a system that is trivially exploited by rich amoral sociopaths behaving like rich amoral sociopaths, then the defector is morally to blame when it fails, but that's still the expected outcome.
I really prefer Ministry to termination shock. I mean, it's a fun book, but it offers no solution (eg sulphur seeding does nothing for ocean acidification, not to mention termination shock). The fact that people read it and thing it offers a solution is puzzling.
Now Anathem is another matter! Brilliant! (although again I have quibbles).
Anathem is my favorite too. There is so much there and I keep encountering things it fictionalalized. For example, I wasn’t really familiar with the Everettian many worlds interpretation of quantum physics until after I read it. Likewise it’s treatment of the analemma as something coming before the splitting points of the different worlds and interpretable by all since the axis and orbital elipse would constitute a planetary signature.
I feel similarly, and really love his older books. However his slide towards glorifying terrorism in his recent work is really troubling. The increasing focus in his work on uni-bomber like characters is really off putting.
The recent interviews with Saul Griffith ("use our sunlight and iron ore and rare minerals to transform Australia into the world's forge"), Tim Latimer (Fervo Energy pioneered advanced geothermal, now scaling up), and Ramez Naam (climate tech investor) were quite uplifting.
The Mars Trilogy relies on a number of very idealistic characters to carry the politics specifically past what the earth was capable of, as well as unrealistically effective resolutions when violence does occur. But I really think you've chosen the wrong author if you're hoping for realism.
Have you heard him speak on it? I have, in person, several times, and this aspect of the book (which I am tepid on, as a novel for other reasons myself) is something that's been pulled apart.
I believe you can find recordings from e.g. his interactive discussion of it, in the archives of "SF in SF" which are typically recorded and available, maybe at SomaFM as Rusty usually runs sound. Strongly recommended and it should give you a frame for understanding why the narrative takes the path that it does.
TL;DR it's overdetermined and the opposite of naivety or wishful thinking; it's strategic.
I agree with this assessment. However, the book was never supposed to be realistic, simply a plausible beginning to a story. Idealistic hope, and imagining yet unimagined sci-fi stories that specifically reject the dystopian mindset that can often plague sci-fi, is kind of KSR's thing. All of his books are like this.
MftF is best understood as a best case scenario for successfully resolving the climate crisis.
That is, if we're to successfully address this challenge, with minimal global disruption (and where "minimal disruption" means all aircraft falling from the skies), then something like KSR's path is required.
I've seen your criticism voiced elsewhere (a major publication review that I'm lapsing on presently). This particular critique misses the book's point entirely.
I stopped reading it because the premise is entirely unbelievable. A mass casualty event of pretty much any size would not lead us to do anything about climate change.
For evidence, look at the deaths in the USA from gives and cars every year. Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
All life is a trade-off. There has been massive effort at reducing traffic fatalities, representing probably trillions of dollars of investment, including road design and barriers, speed limits, signaling, car safety features like crumple zones, seat belts, air bags, all manner of crash safety testing, enforcement actions, and much more.
We haven't entirely banned cars, and carbon emissions weren't totally banned after the wet-bulb event in Ministry for the Future.
A massive failure judging by the numbers. Which is my point. We will continue to feel bad, maybe drop in some metaphorical traffic circles, but do nothing to actually solve the issue.
Without being clear about what replacement transportation mode you expect to substitute for cars, it's not clear to me that your point is being proven. If we replaced cars today with walking or the current state of public transport in the US, I think my life is made vastly better by the near-ubiquitous presence of cars, even if it means I have a lifetime risk of just under 1%.
If cars save me just 10 minutes per day, my life is improved as compared to the just under 7 minutes per day of life lost to the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
We normalize traffic deaths because there is a net benefit. Just like we normalize other negative outcomes from overall positive-utility activities.
Another post demonstrating my point. 35K people in the US alone die in traffic every year. We have normalized this figure (see your response) as we will normalize climate deaths.
What I would do about traffic deaths is irrelevant to my point.
I should have written "fixing the problem" instead of "doing anything about those" as I did in other comments. I define "fixed" as reaching and sustaining the lower bound. So basically excluding deaths due to act of god only.
> There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Exactly. Despite that, here we are with 35K traffic deaths a year. Here's what would actually be necessary to "fix" the problem:
- 20 year project to build a tremendous amount of passenger rail
- Manhattan project for self-driving cars
- 10 year project to upgrade all city and highway signage to be self-driving car friendly
- Close roads to human-driven cars when self-driving upgrades are ready
This probably sounds crazy to you. It sounds crazy to me too. And that's why I'm blackpilled on climate change: if we can't and won't do what it takes to fix traffic or gun fatalities on a national level, we definitely won't do it for a problem several orders of magnitude more difficult on a global level.
> Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
There will be an impact. Just most likely not a positive one. It could highly negative (see post-9/11 wars), or completely insufficient (our current response to climate change).
Success would be the number in the USA moving in the right direction (down) which it is not as it is currently rising versus other wealthy nations such as France.
Success could have USA/Canada/[insert other poorly faring nation] looking more like the low casualty numbers of other wealthy nations (eg. Norway) as well.
Honestly no death is a pretty good goal. Cynically one could say it's not achievable but trying is nonetheless worth while. In my jurisdiction in Canada I don't see the government even lifting a finger to implement the lowest hanging fruit of policies that would move the needle in the right direction, such is the status quo and politicization of the traffic safety issue. They're not even trying.
Efforts to implement various traffic safety concepts well used elsewhere in safer jurisdictions would be politically attacked here I'm quite sure.
You sighted a problem and cited zero anything else.
Pandemic response was effective at avoiding healthcare system collapse and churning out a vaccine. It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
What else do you want? Too many seem to think the MCU should hop on saving them from themselves.
Say something useful yourself or get over it. You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
> You sighted a problem and cited zero anything else.
Perhaps you missed the analogy in my original between climate deaths and gun+traffic deaths.
> It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
You're so close to getting it. We will be talking about "sensible solutions" that maintain our current lifestyle until the planet turns into Venus.
> What else do you want?
I reluctanty have to admit I'm black pilled at this point. I see no reason to believe that our species is capable of the kind of collective action that's needed. There are no positive examples and so many negative examples.
> You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
It's a bit different than 9/11 though. Climate change is like a fully loaded supertanker. You can hit an emergency break all you want, but still that ship will have a 5..10km (or longer?) breaking distance.
So if a mass death event were to occur, and policy were to change course drastically, the changed climate would continue to pound our biosphere for many decades (if not centuries). Or hit tipping points and get worse & worse no matter what we do.
To put it blunt: at some point, prolonged mass suffering & death is practically guaranteed. Just with a decades-delayed fuse. That fuse is already lit, while we can't see (with any certainty, that is) how big a powder keg it goes into.
Car accidents and even COVID deaths in a hospital ward are possibly different because they're isolated and you can rationalize that it will not affect you.
Might be different when a lot of people die in a whole region and it's very obvious. But who knows, I made detailed predictions at the onset of COVID and believed it would be handled like SARS and the likes and stopped in about 3 months. Well, I was completely wrong.
Or the million+ deaths in the US from Covid, which I have seen brushed off on HN as not a big deal.
It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal when it doesn't fit their worldview. If you travel to 2000 and told people "in 2020 a pandemic will kill over 1 million Americans, and a good portion will brush it off as a 'nothing burger'" people would think you were being ridiculous and would dismiss it as unbelievable fiction.
> It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal
It's one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses. It let's us keep living, but also allows us to normalize that which shouldn't be accepted.
If the opening of MFTF happened, within 2 weeks people would be posting graphs showing how per capita all cause deaths are actually going down over time.
That’s aggregate deaths one at a time, though. If all the car deaths happened all at once in a localized area and took out half of Rhode Island, it would spur action.
These are good examples of mass casualty events that didn't motivate effective responses. For both climate change and guns, there are people that want to keep the status quo as it is. I believe that popular arguments against gun control will be able to stay effective in ways that arguments against climate action will fail.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
> A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
Or Sandy Hook for that matter. Also, elsewhere in the thread people have mentioned comment sections on major news sites coverage of the Maui fires, and apparently droves of people are more interested in blaming clean energy installations, imaginary energy weapons, and Obama, Zuckerberg, and Oprah (of all people) than anything else.
Within a year of the Las Vegas shooting, the "bump stock" device used by that person was banned by the US.
The Trump administration has banned the use of bump stocks, devices that let rifles fire like machine guns, after promising to do so earlier this year.
Great example of my main point. Instead of fixing the real problems (availability of weapons and to some degree mental illness) we ban an accessory. Meanwhile elsewhere the bodies keep dropping.
Great example of moving the goalposts. You wrote "total lack of action" for which there is counter-evidence in the form of a national government action. With the same logic, one might as well claim that an entire firearm is an accessory to whatever is redefined as the "real problem."
This commenter also fails to recognize that there is a tremendous amount of political activity aimed at changing gun laws, and that represents real and earnest efforts on the parts of tens of thousands of people (or orders of magnitude more, depending on where we set the bar for having "done something").
It's true that our system of government and industry is set up to preserve itself and resist sweeping change. It is further true some incredibly wealthy and influential individuals within the system are aligned with those goals, making change all the more difficult and unlikely (this applies to climate change as it does to gun laws, car culture, throw-away consumerism, etc). It is a mistake to equate trying and failing to change massive and powerful institutions with doing nothing.
I get it, from a cynical and pessimistic perspective, doing nothing vs trying hard but failing to do something all looks the same in the end (when society is roasting canned spam on it's own embers, as we might imagine). But fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and mostly appeals because it has the "benefit" of requiring no action of the individual. Just a lifetime of depression, apathy, and/or moral bankruptcy.
Even if the fatalist is wrong, it means people made things work out for them in the end and they didn't even have to lift a finger. What a deal! It certainly has its appeal to those parts of our brain that we share with lizards and other creatures that look to avoid personal risk and conserve energy at almost any cost.
In the book, the Indian government takes unilateral action to cool the planet (spraying reflectants into the upper atmosphere, iirc) after the heat wave kills 20 million Indian people in the space of a few days - a few weeks. Given the fractious state of international politics and the urgency of the problem, this seems like a fairly realistic depiction of how efforts to cool the planet might commence IRL.
There was about paragraph or so spent on that realistic response, and then huge swathes dedicated to India switching to collectivized farming (a la early Soviet Union), the world's central banks putting carbon offsets onto a blockchain, and millions of Americans willingly displacing themselves to create a giant wildlife preserve in the midwest.
News media like to have stories they can focus popular attention on, and no one car accident (unless it kills someone famous) will matter to enough people to warrant broader coverage than one's local paper. Despite this lack of media visibility, there actually is some movement at the city level to change the design of roads to reduce the lethality of accidents. This isn't very publicly visible yet, I don't think, and there's certainly very little in the way of public desire to drive less lethal vehicles.
I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.
The idea in the book was this was a new event that never occurred previously that finally did and was able to demonstrate that climate change is doing some new and not survivable.
In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future
Last year there was a local heat bubble that killed 69 people in my city. There was a bit of news coverage, but it hardly moved the needle in terms of local politics. Hell, the city can't even bother keep alive the trees it's recently planted nor stop pulling out more canopy to expand arterial roads in areas of the city that are heat islands due to lower than average tree coverage.
I think it's going to take more than hundreds of deaths to go beyond a few news stories that get lots of clicks for a week or two and talking points for politicians to bring up when it's convenient and forget when it is not.
It's silly to look only at deaths. Any reasonable analysis looks at cost-benefit.
What is the benefit of vehicle transportation? Immense! They move goods around the country, provide people with rapid transportation, improve the movement of people of people around the country, etc, etc.
It's like looking at surgical deaths and saying "look at the death toll from surgery! such a tragedy!" all the while completely ignoring it's benefits.
The US is a worst case example. Most other developed countries also had major issues with gun and car deaths and have made major progress in resolving them.
It's probably already too late, but I keep seeing people confusing the concept of "web bulb temperature" (all temperatures have a wet bulb temperature, even ones very pleasant for people) with "the human survivable maximum wet bulb". I frequently see people saying things like "when we reach wet bulb temps..", which feels a bit silly.
This always feels like talking about a "Kelvin event" or "Kelvin temps" referring a temperature reaching absolute zero.
> This always feels like talking about a "Kelvin event" or "Kelvin temps" referring a temperature reaching absolute zero.
Reminds me of Ex Astris Scientia complaining about bad script writing in Enterprise, specifically "deuterium can burn almost as hot as plasma, when it's ignited": https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/episodes/ent2.htm
I've used "wet-bulb event" as a shorthand for the scenario where the wet-bulb temperature rises above human survivability. That's why I used "event" instead of "temperature."
I found that passage pretty disturbing too. But my takeaway was that there aren’t any individual plans you can make unless you plan on hanging out in a body of water breathing through a straw for a few days.
What prep did you recommend to your parents? I’m interested for what I can reuse or adapt.
I've recommended an emergency battery system for their house / air conditioner, a reserve stock of water in the house, a "go bag," and an escape plan to the mountains. Longer term, they are realizing that their primary residence risks unhabitability in summer months. I realize they're in a privileged position, though.
I clicked into this to see if MFTF was mentioned. Powerful opening scene.
Other commenters criticizing the book for the ending and the positivity turn it takes are missing the point of why the book is valuable, I think.
Like for you maybe, it was the first book that got me serious about climate. The value isn’t in the ending, but in the first half with unpleasantly accurate the early “oh sh*t” disasters were and same for the totally inept societal responses.
Made me realize we were likely procrastinating our way into an emergency, and any magical way out we find IRL will be at a high cost of suffering. We will probably get disasters, we will get climate terrorism, and it will get much worse before we get saved (by magic blockchain carbon fediverse haha?).
If you enjoyed that, you might enjoy Perihelion Summer by Greg Egan. It's climate change scifi kicked off by cosmic scifi. A micro-blackhole is discovered that will pass through the solar system, slightly modifying earth's orbit and raises the tides by a few feet while it passes. It's essentially "what if we instantly jumped forward by 500 years on our current climate progression".
Spoiler, I found the ending very unsatisfying. It feels like a cliffhanger into a second book, but there is no second book it just ends without much resolution. The actual climate change/societal terror in the first 75% is great though, it was on pace to become a favorite book of mine.
In the book that event happens to India. I sadly think that when climate change starts killing people in poor countries (like it already is). The western wealthy world will ignore it for as long as possible.
I sometimes get very dark about the future we're headed into.
I worked as a snowmaker at ski resorts for most my my adult life before getting into tech. We always use wet bulb temperatures because it’s a representation of temperature and humidity. With extremely low humidity, you can actually make manmade snow at about +3 degrees Celsius. That was always fun but scary, because a small change in humidity can turn snowguns into water guns in the blink of an eye.
I’ve occasionally wanted to try snowmaking at home on brutally cold days.
Any tips for someone wanting to try this at home? Let’s assume that I have access to tap water at 60psi dynamic pressure and air at 90psi and 10 SCFM continuous (more for short bursts if needed).
That's pretty cool that they are selling "external mix" plans/kits. Snowmaking (at scale) is incredibly energy intensive and over the last few years many resorts have been moving towards various "low-energy" gun designs, which basically means external mix.
They definitely don't make as good snow at marginal temperatures but it's impressive what they can do given a lot use 1/20th of the compressed air compared to a tradition air/water snowgun.
A tradition air/water gun is just an 1.5" air inlet, a 1.5" water inlet, a mixing chamber and a nozzle. At higher temperatures, they take an incredible amount of air. We had a few guns that could take 300 horsepower worth of an air compressor, each, to run at -2.5 celsius wet bulb. As is gets colder it gets a little more efficient.
There are some designs that are basically the same but incorporate a "baffle" that attempts to cut down the size of the mixing chamber when there's a high air/water mixture to make them more efficient, but those baffles would often get stuck open, making them useless.
A fangun is the style of snowgun that uses a giant electric fan to project the snow out from the gun. There is an onboard electric air compressor hooked up to a few nozzles that spray out a mixture of air and water. The tiny droplets freeze into the "nucleus" (a tiny ice particle), which other droplets from water-only nozzles bind onto and freeze, creating a "snowflake".
An external mix gun is basically a fangun, minus the big electric fan, and suspended 30+ feet in the air on a pole. A small number of nozzles spray out an air/water mix, creating the nucleus, and then water only nozzles spray out droplets that then bind to the nucleus. It works but needs to be a bit colder, and they are much more susceptible to winds (especially cross winds). If winds don't allow the two types of sprays to mix, you get a nice skating rink instead of snow!
That was a great summary of the tech. Your height comment helps explain why my external mix setup didn’t produce as much snow as it did frost. I only had it about 8’ off the ground.
This coming winter I may try increasing the height of the mixer and positioning a fan underneath to help push the mix upward to give it more time to bind to the nucleus crystal.
My only concern would be that your water pressure isn't high enough. In commercial systems, the air pressure is at 90-120psi, but the water pressure usually at a minimum 250psi (and sometimes as high as 900psi).
When the water pressure drops below the air pressure, you get what we called "the helicopter", where the snowgun pulses and makes a "whomp whomp whomp" sound (like a helicopter).
I have always assumed this is happening because the air and water are "fighting" each other and instead of getting a constant stream of mixed air/water you are getting a period of water only, then a period of air only. The snowgun will actually bounce up and down. We'd run into this a lot when trying to turn down the water really low on days where the temperatures were very marginal.
I have heard of people using pressure washers to up their water pressure.
Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I'm annoyed with the use of the term 'wet bulb event' here and elsewhere. Wouldn't it put less burden on the reader to just say "wet bulb 35C"? (That is the temperature that most people seem to be referring to when they say 'wet bulb event'.)
Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page:
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"
I feel like the terms in use around this are quite abstract and hard to reason about. I like that the wikipedia article converts this to something more useful to intuit for most of us:
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.
The US NWS, for example, uses heat index commonly. In the US south I seldom see it go much over 110F, and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat.
This isn't just a case of hitting some threshold where we all drop dead, but as temperatures rise it will slowly cause people to migrate to more temperate climates and/or seek out better cooling structures (either actively through air conditioning or passively where that isn't an option).
I recently spent some time camping in a place that hit daytime temperatures of over 100°F. When it's that hot all you can do is wet your clothing and spray mist and fan yourself to get evaporative cooling. Thinking about wet-bulb temperature in that context was terrifying.
The hot dry breeze can cool you off. The hot humid breeze is death.
If you live somewhere where this could happen you should move now.
Temperature without humidity is like voltage without current, or per-capita GDP without the Gini coefficient. Many measures alone are of little practical value.
I personally believe that I've been in a short-lived "wet bulb" situation twice in my life. In both cases, in the Amazon, pretty much at the equator, at some of the hottest days of the year. 40-45C, humidity near a 100.
A cold shower does nothing, it actually makes it worse as it activates your body to warm up. Stripping naked does nothing. Sweat just streams down the entire body as if a tap is open. It's near impossible to keep up with drinking water.
It was short-lived as the weather was extremely variable, but the feeling of being completely unable to cool down despite throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it, is memorable.
Surely a cold shower helps? If it causes your body to trigger self-heating process, surely that’s proof your body has been cooled to less than dangerously high levels and the shower has provided at least temporary relief.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadA wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.
I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.
All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage.
And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever.
Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions.
However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.
Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing. Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom
I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"
Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner.
"Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"
> "This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at night,"
https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-18...
It wasn't necessarily a wake-up call then. But it may have at least been the crisis that spurred one guy...
Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.
It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.
In 2003, 70,000 people died in the EU from a heat wave [1]. A fact that is never really comes up in talks about climate change.
The death toll could be millions and we'd still see deniers clamoring that we need to burn more coal for grid stability or whatever.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.
I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!
In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.
With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude).
There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone.
If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions.
Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem.
The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.
The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax.
If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.
A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of.
Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power. Anybody without AC would die, unless they found some non-evaporative way to cool themselves.
It’s the most terrifying natural disaster conceivable.
Could you survive in a basement?
Keep in mind that we're now seeing sea surface temperatures above 38°C (100°F).
If the river itself is slow-moving and is in an area of prolonged heat, it will also be warm.
The areas most prone to high temperatures often also have little surface water, or at least, not enough to shelter all persons affected.
Water refuges being too warm for human survival is an early plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.
Note that for a small poorly-ventilated basement, the humidity will rise from respiration, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature. For a well-ventilated basement, the air temperature will approach the outdoor temperature, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature.
If you have a giant, well-shaded, pool of water, the water temperature will usually be below the peak air temperature (water has high thermal mass, so it will take a long time for it to come up to the ambient temperature, even at high humidity, where evaporation effects are negligible) so that's another non-AC method of staying cool.
In any event pools of water and basements don't scale to densely populated areas.
Couldn't you just eat ice to keep cool? Heat from blood transfers to the ice as it melts and warms in the stomach, then it leaves the body completely through urination.
Similarly you could put a giant block of ice in front of a fan and sit there; most people would call this a from of AC though.
A ton of cooling being defined as 12000 BTU/hr, or the rate implied by the latent heat of fusion of 1 ton of ice at 0°C being consumed via melting over 24 hours.
It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable.
Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.
How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.
However there is a limit to how long you can live in the bath.
You also have to worry about power when it comes to having access to sufficient water to cool a person in the first place.
Hence mentioning a bath tub.
Some interesting reading to go along with this topic:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750007244/downloads/19...
Of particular note is the need to remove about 1k BTU/hour when walking/doing light work, and that's only from metabolic heat generation.
And 1 BTU raises 1 pint of water 1 degree, so 1k BTU/hour would raise 5 gallons of water by an unrealistic 25° every hour.
Can you survive wet bulb temperatures given a bucket of water indefinitely? No. Can you survive working hard labor with the water bucket? No. Can you survive wet bulb events significantly higher than the threshold? No.
Can you survive several hours in a typical (current typical) wet bulb event? Yes, definitely. Bucket of water is fine.
I'm going to vote maybe. At best, it'll be close.
Resting metabolic output is about half the active value I provided (per NASA's PDF). That means for a bucket of water that starts at 32°, you have 5 hours before the bucket is also 95° if you discount ambient heating from the air, circulatory constriction, and assuming no prior conditions.
Since you can't discount those (and are unlikely to find barely-not-frozen water for an entire city's population), survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
Does that pass your personal sniff test for reasonability? Have you ever soaked in a 104°F (40°C) hot tub for an hour or more? Was your survival in serious doubt?
Wet bulb temperatures in excess of 35°C need to persist for around 6 hours to represent a serious hyperthermia risk. This is not a "you will die inside of 1-2 hours" scenario.
There's no need for the bath. The shower will probably work better actually since it's constantly disposed down the drain after picking up some heat, and replenished with subterranean-temp fresh water running across your person.
The point to take away is that humidity matters in addition to raw temperatures. Not that there is a specific threshold at which things matter or didn’t matter.
In some countries electricity becomes unavailable quite regularly, so relying on A/C during a crisis like that might fail. And that is assuming that A/Cs are common (they are not, in large parts of the world).
Cooling yourself down by using water from a tap may also fail, if, in such a situation, everyone in a city tries to do that. You are assuming a very high level of infrastructure and no critical failures.
Heatwaves and infrastructure failures can undoubtedly be serious threats. But the vast, vast majority of people survive wet bulb events when they encounter them.
That's maybe 2 hours of cooling per person and it's not at all obvious that during such a heat event that you'll have access to a continued source of 70°F/21°C water. If you only have access to 82°F/28°C water, 5 gallons only lasts you an hour or less.
If this imaginary graph has an inflection point, I can't think of a better one.
Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I know you threw babies in here but it feels like I have to point out that the old and sickly dying have a negligible effect on man years lost.
> Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I don’t really agree that the world is as fragile as you propose. But I feel like need to clarify that I’m not arguing against the threat posed by climate change broadly.
https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
The passage was vivid enough for me to suggest preparatory measures to my retired parents. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in near-term climate impact!
"This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways."
https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compe...
Honestly, that just makes the book better in my eyes and I haven't even read it.
The sad reality is that the world's actual response to something like that happening will probably be about as disappointing and anticlimactic as the rest of the book was to read.
But of course, weather isn't climate. https://www.axios.com/2023/08/14/climate-change-heat-wave-ca...
If climate activists only wish to broadcast how virtuous and smart they are for not denying The Science, by all means, look down on the uneducated unwashed masses for arguing as to whether or not a hot day or season is definitive evidence of human caused climate change -- even though that's exactly what the climate activists taught them not too long ago.
b. Your own source is making a different point that the one you're making..
> What they're saying: Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather summarized the volcano's contribution to 2023's record high temperatures this way: "So, not nothing, but only a small part of the story in the exceptional warmth the world is experiencing," he told Axios via email.
> Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, also thinks the significance of the volcano's warming role pales in comparison to human-driven climate change and other influences.
> Dessler likens climate change to a "rising tide" that is elevating the baseline temperatures from which heat waves begin. "This means that our heatwaves become hotter, essentially 'floating' on the 'rising tide' of our warming world," he said via email.
You're really convinced I made some sort of argument blaming the fire on Climate Change when I did nothing of the sort..
Leto II, God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert
But, when the head of an international organization takes a week and a half to get to a meeting on the other side of the planet, and thinks that it's nicer to take a sequence of trains and sailing ships than it used to be to fly ... that seemed totally alien. When subsistence farmers were surprised by the large amount of money they were paid for getting more carbon into their soil, that seemed really implausible. When KSM glosses by how easy and quick it was to make giant wildlife corridors across North America, and talks about whole communities packing up and voluntarily abandoning towns to ceded those areas to nature ... that seemed wildly implausible.
There were a lot of these moments for me, and while I get the people that use these as a criticism against the realism of the book, I also think that gap is a criticism against all of us.
I'm not advocating for violence, to be clear, and in the novel KSM seems to take the stance that at some point violence is really counter-productive. But certainly there have been places and periods in which e.g. targeted kidnappings of rich people, assassination attempts on politicians, and terrorist attacks against high-profile targets have all been around -- why do you think is it impossible for those to be directed at people in power in the future? Especially if there are progressively more climate victims, it seems like we're setting the stage for a generation of people to be ripe for radicalization.
Submarine accidents not withstanding, I'm not convinced the UN in our current timeline could be transformed into one that engages in this behavior.
I'm going to go back to my comparatively easy computer engineering tasks after writing this comment, and have the greatest respect for those willing to confront coordination problems in the political sphere. That's playing the game on hard mode.
The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
> I can't help but feel like TS Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
The good news is that we've developed systems of governance and economics that are not exclusively worse than uneducated tribalistic hunter-gatherer anarchy - a very large number of people live in significant comfort in relatively ordered, mostly polite societies, generally free to do what they want, and for the most part those societies build things like roads, landfills, electric grids, and fire departments together that make the community better. It's not perfect, for sure, and we're really missing the ball on this particular externality of global warming, but I have some hope that we'll figure out a way to address the problem that doesn't rely exclusively on weak moral appeals.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130896
> The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature ... - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation.
Are we not society? Do we not make up the system? But more importantly, you're refuting a statement of responsibility by saying the underlying problem won't be solved by feelings. Whether a statement of moral responsibility is _true_ and whether concurrent emotions on their own solve anything are fundamentally different propositions, and denying one implies nothing about the other. If I murder someone by stabbing them, perhaps that reflects part of human nature -- but a jury telling me I'm guilty is _correct_, even though their condemnation will not bring back my victim. It would be absurd for me to say "oh your moralizing emotional condemnation won't solve the issue of murder which has always existed in human societies, and certainly won't bring back the person I killed -- therefore I'm not responsible."
But somehow, if a few generations knowingly trash a whole planet, aware that this would cause chaos which results in a large number of deaths, illness, property damage, etc you want to believe that the fact that morose feeling will not suck carbon out of the atmosphere somehow implies that responsibility cannot be assigned.
One can argue about whether moral statements can meaningfully be "true" (I think they can), but one can't jump from "moral condemnation doesn't on its own solve problems" to "therefore moral responsibility can be denied in any instance".
If anything, I think the reluctance to fully face the problem and acknowledge our role in it, and to recognize the ways in which our own lives will need to be different to stop exacerbating the problem, is part of the foot-dragging.
> The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.
But The Ministry for the Future is basically nothing _but_ constructive suggestions put in a nice palatable narrative container. We're not talking about a moral judgement in the absence of specific ideas about how to address climate change, environmental justice, and even wealth inequality. We're talking about acknowledging responsibility when, though opportunities stare us in the face, we do little or nothing to fix the situation we've created.
A population or corporation should be expected to be moral. Collective behaviors are a function of incentives and penalties, of pure economics.
If your plan to fix the problems in society relies on every member selflessly cooperating and fails if one member defects, if you create a system that is trivially exploited by rich amoral sociopaths behaving like rich amoral sociopaths, then the defector is morally to blame when it fails, but that's still the expected outcome.
Like Termination Shock?
https://www.amazon.com/Termination-Shock-Novel-Neal-Stephens...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/many-worlds_interpretation
> shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better
You might be interested in the Volts' podcast.
https://www.volts.wtf
The recent interviews with Saul Griffith ("use our sunlight and iron ore and rare minerals to transform Australia into the world's forge"), Tim Latimer (Fervo Energy pioneered advanced geothermal, now scaling up), and Ramez Naam (climate tech investor) were quite uplifting.
Lots of gems in the Volts archive too.
I believe you can find recordings from e.g. his interactive discussion of it, in the archives of "SF in SF" which are typically recorded and available, maybe at SomaFM as Rusty usually runs sound. Strongly recommended and it should give you a frame for understanding why the narrative takes the path that it does.
TL;DR it's overdetermined and the opposite of naivety or wishful thinking; it's strategic.
You may disagree with the strategy, of course.
That is, if we're to successfully address this challenge, with minimal global disruption (and where "minimal disruption" means all aircraft falling from the skies), then something like KSR's path is required.
I've seen your criticism voiced elsewhere (a major publication review that I'm lapsing on presently). This particular critique misses the book's point entirely.
For evidence, look at the deaths in the USA from gives and cars every year. Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
We haven't entirely banned cars, and carbon emissions weren't totally banned after the wet-bulb event in Ministry for the Future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
We will normalize climate related deaths the way we have normalized traffic related deaths.
If cars save me just 10 minutes per day, my life is improved as compared to the just under 7 minutes per day of life lost to the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
We normalize traffic deaths because there is a net benefit. Just like we normalize other negative outcomes from overall positive-utility activities.
What would you call a success? No death, total ban on driving?
What I would do about traffic deaths is irrelevant to my point.
Your original point was:
>Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
This is clearly false. There are many effective regulations and travelling by car continues to get safer.
Yes people still die, yes we already somewhat normalise people dying from e.g. air pollution (not something that will happen, we already do it)
There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
> There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Exactly. Despite that, here we are with 35K traffic deaths a year. Here's what would actually be necessary to "fix" the problem:
- 20 year project to build a tremendous amount of passenger rail - Manhattan project for self-driving cars - 10 year project to upgrade all city and highway signage to be self-driving car friendly - Close roads to human-driven cars when self-driving upgrades are ready
This probably sounds crazy to you. It sounds crazy to me too. And that's why I'm blackpilled on climate change: if we can't and won't do what it takes to fix traffic or gun fatalities on a national level, we definitely won't do it for a problem several orders of magnitude more difficult on a global level.
> Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
There will be an impact. Just most likely not a positive one. It could highly negative (see post-9/11 wars), or completely insufficient (our current response to climate change).
Success could have USA/Canada/[insert other poorly faring nation] looking more like the low casualty numbers of other wealthy nations (eg. Norway) as well.
Honestly no death is a pretty good goal. Cynically one could say it's not achievable but trying is nonetheless worth while. In my jurisdiction in Canada I don't see the government even lifting a finger to implement the lowest hanging fruit of policies that would move the needle in the right direction, such is the status quo and politicization of the traffic safety issue. They're not even trying.
Efforts to implement various traffic safety concepts well used elsewhere in safer jurisdictions would be politically attacked here I'm quite sure.
A heat related mass death event most likely would trigger a response. The real question is would it be organized and tidy response, or civil unrest?
When 4% hunt anymore and no one can grow a carrot? Suddenly logistics are interrupted worse than covid because, what, Phoenix burns down?
Oh, it’ll trigger a response.
Pandemic response was effective at avoiding healthcare system collapse and churning out a vaccine. It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
What else do you want? Too many seem to think the MCU should hop on saving them from themselves.
Say something useful yourself or get over it. You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
Perhaps you missed the analogy in my original between climate deaths and gun+traffic deaths.
> It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
You're so close to getting it. We will be talking about "sensible solutions" that maintain our current lifestyle until the planet turns into Venus.
> What else do you want?
I reluctanty have to admit I'm black pilled at this point. I see no reason to believe that our species is capable of the kind of collective action that's needed. There are no positive examples and so many negative examples.
> You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
You don't have kids do you?
My whole effort here is throwing your low effort back at you; including your misuse of sighted for cited.
Frankly I think I get you a lot better than you get me. You are your own generalization/analogy/metaphor.
You’re doing nothing substantive while complaining about lack of substantive effort in the part of others.
Functional illiteracy in the raw, dog
> Functional illiteracy in the raw, dog
Not your dog, dog
So if a mass death event were to occur, and policy were to change course drastically, the changed climate would continue to pound our biosphere for many decades (if not centuries). Or hit tipping points and get worse & worse no matter what we do.
To put it blunt: at some point, prolonged mass suffering & death is practically guaranteed. Just with a decades-delayed fuse. That fuse is already lit, while we can't see (with any certainty, that is) how big a powder keg it goes into.
Might be different when a lot of people die in a whole region and it's very obvious. But who knows, I made detailed predictions at the onset of COVID and believed it would be handled like SARS and the likes and stopped in about 3 months. Well, I was completely wrong.
It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal when it doesn't fit their worldview. If you travel to 2000 and told people "in 2020 a pandemic will kill over 1 million Americans, and a good portion will brush it off as a 'nothing burger'" people would think you were being ridiculous and would dismiss it as unbelievable fiction.
It's one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses. It let's us keep living, but also allows us to normalize that which shouldn't be accepted.
If the opening of MFTF happened, within 2 weeks people would be posting graphs showing how per capita all cause deaths are actually going down over time.
A million people die a week, worldwide, from all causes.
Last I checked people are quite considered with global HIV death, especially since they can obviously be reduced dramatically.
0. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/stat...
Almost all politicians are also owned by the car and oil industries, so that would explain the lack of action with the high number of RTCs.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
The Trump administration has banned the use of bump stocks, devices that let rifles fire like machine guns, after promising to do so earlier this year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46614001
It's true that our system of government and industry is set up to preserve itself and resist sweeping change. It is further true some incredibly wealthy and influential individuals within the system are aligned with those goals, making change all the more difficult and unlikely (this applies to climate change as it does to gun laws, car culture, throw-away consumerism, etc). It is a mistake to equate trying and failing to change massive and powerful institutions with doing nothing.
I get it, from a cynical and pessimistic perspective, doing nothing vs trying hard but failing to do something all looks the same in the end (when society is roasting canned spam on it's own embers, as we might imagine). But fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and mostly appeals because it has the "benefit" of requiring no action of the individual. Just a lifetime of depression, apathy, and/or moral bankruptcy.
Even if the fatalist is wrong, it means people made things work out for them in the end and they didn't even have to lift a finger. What a deal! It certainly has its appeal to those parts of our brain that we share with lizards and other creatures that look to avoid personal risk and conserve energy at almost any cost.
As far fetched as any science fiction ever written
I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.
In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future
I think it's going to take more than hundreds of deaths to go beyond a few news stories that get lots of clicks for a week or two and talking points for politicians to bring up when it's convenient and forget when it is not.
What is the benefit of vehicle transportation? Immense! They move goods around the country, provide people with rapid transportation, improve the movement of people of people around the country, etc, etc.
It's like looking at surgical deaths and saying "look at the death toll from surgery! such a tragedy!" all the while completely ignoring it's benefits.
It's probably already too late, but I keep seeing people confusing the concept of "web bulb temperature" (all temperatures have a wet bulb temperature, even ones very pleasant for people) with "the human survivable maximum wet bulb". I frequently see people saying things like "when we reach wet bulb temps..", which feels a bit silly.
This always feels like talking about a "Kelvin event" or "Kelvin temps" referring a temperature reaching absolute zero.
Reminds me of Ex Astris Scientia complaining about bad script writing in Enterprise, specifically "deuterium can burn almost as hot as plasma, when it's ignited": https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/episodes/ent2.htm
Every following chapter- terrible, not worth your time.
What prep did you recommend to your parents? I’m interested for what I can reuse or adapt.
Other commenters criticizing the book for the ending and the positivity turn it takes are missing the point of why the book is valuable, I think.
Like for you maybe, it was the first book that got me serious about climate. The value isn’t in the ending, but in the first half with unpleasantly accurate the early “oh sh*t” disasters were and same for the totally inept societal responses.
Made me realize we were likely procrastinating our way into an emergency, and any magical way out we find IRL will be at a high cost of suffering. We will probably get disasters, we will get climate terrorism, and it will get much worse before we get saved (by magic blockchain carbon fediverse haha?).
Spoiler, I found the ending very unsatisfying. It feels like a cliffhanger into a second book, but there is no second book it just ends without much resolution. The actual climate change/societal terror in the first 75% is great though, it was on pace to become a favorite book of mine.
I sometimes get very dark about the future we're headed into.
Any tips for someone wanting to try this at home? Let’s assume that I have access to tap water at 60psi dynamic pressure and air at 90psi and 10 SCFM continuous (more for short bursts if needed).
I made snow in my front yard a few times. I also completely covered my tree and car in a blanket of ice a few times too.
It was a fun little project to hack on.
They definitely don't make as good snow at marginal temperatures but it's impressive what they can do given a lot use 1/20th of the compressed air compared to a tradition air/water snowgun.
A tradition air/water gun is just an 1.5" air inlet, a 1.5" water inlet, a mixing chamber and a nozzle. At higher temperatures, they take an incredible amount of air. We had a few guns that could take 300 horsepower worth of an air compressor, each, to run at -2.5 celsius wet bulb. As is gets colder it gets a little more efficient.
There are some designs that are basically the same but incorporate a "baffle" that attempts to cut down the size of the mixing chamber when there's a high air/water mixture to make them more efficient, but those baffles would often get stuck open, making them useless.
A fangun is the style of snowgun that uses a giant electric fan to project the snow out from the gun. There is an onboard electric air compressor hooked up to a few nozzles that spray out a mixture of air and water. The tiny droplets freeze into the "nucleus" (a tiny ice particle), which other droplets from water-only nozzles bind onto and freeze, creating a "snowflake".
An external mix gun is basically a fangun, minus the big electric fan, and suspended 30+ feet in the air on a pole. A small number of nozzles spray out an air/water mix, creating the nucleus, and then water only nozzles spray out droplets that then bind to the nucleus. It works but needs to be a bit colder, and they are much more susceptible to winds (especially cross winds). If winds don't allow the two types of sprays to mix, you get a nice skating rink instead of snow!
This coming winter I may try increasing the height of the mixer and positioning a fan underneath to help push the mix upward to give it more time to bind to the nucleus crystal.
When the water pressure drops below the air pressure, you get what we called "the helicopter", where the snowgun pulses and makes a "whomp whomp whomp" sound (like a helicopter).
I have always assumed this is happening because the air and water are "fighting" each other and instead of getting a constant stream of mixed air/water you are getting a period of water only, then a period of air only. The snowgun will actually bounce up and down. We'd run into this a lot when trying to turn down the water really low on days where the temperatures were very marginal.
I have heard of people using pressure washers to up their water pressure.
Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page:
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.
The US NWS, for example, uses heat index commonly. In the US south I seldom see it go much over 110F, and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat.
This isn't just a case of hitting some threshold where we all drop dead, but as temperatures rise it will slowly cause people to migrate to more temperate climates and/or seek out better cooling structures (either actively through air conditioning or passively where that isn't an option).
In the air-conditioned US. Much of the world gets as hot, if not hotter, without AC to help alleviate the heat.
The hot dry breeze can cool you off. The hot humid breeze is death.
If you live somewhere where this could happen you should move now.
Stay _comfortable_ there!
A cold shower does nothing, it actually makes it worse as it activates your body to warm up. Stripping naked does nothing. Sweat just streams down the entire body as if a tap is open. It's near impossible to keep up with drinking water.
It was short-lived as the weather was extremely variable, but the feeling of being completely unable to cool down despite throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it, is memorable.