> A climate protestor went on the news in Britain and tried to warn everyone about wet bulb temperatures and heat stroke. The news anchors started snickering at him. They told him to grow up.
Here [1] is a wet bulb calculator. The first time I started playing with it, I actually assumed it was must have been somehow wrong. But as I get the same results from numerous other calculators, I can only assume it's right. The problem you run into pretty quickly is that the supposedly 6 hours of inescapable lethality at 35C occurs regularly around the world, and often significantly higher.
And people, in general, are not just dying in mass because of it, including those who work outside most of all day. For instance in Houston yesterday it was 41C/81%, which is a wet bulb of 38. Places with rainy seasons during hot parts of the year are also nailing it pretty regularly. Its things like this that I think causes distrust of reporting. There may be some nuance or explanation I'm missing, but it's not at all apparent. It's also not at all apparent to me why more people aren't asking this question.
Not everybody. Lots of people work outdoors for 6+ hour shifts, have transport jobs without AC, and so on. You could also consider primitive cultures. I know the Amazon can get upwards of 40C. I am not as familiar with the humidity on these days, beyond the fact that it's hella humid. And 40C + 70% = 35 wet bulb.
If the 35 wet bulb hypothesis was valid, then literally one solitary day of this, regardless of how infrequent, would have killed everybody in the Amazon. There are also many other areas along the equator with high temperature, high humidity, and lots of people without access to AC. Something just doesn't seem right.
Lots of dumb things have happened because people just assume somebody else would have checked [x], where [x] is something painfully trivial. My favorite example is NASA destroying a Martian orbiter [1]. Thousands of people involved in a NASA project carried out over 5 years, at the cost of about half a billion dollars. The mission was a failure because nobody bothered to ensure that the systems were all using the same units of measurement - one system was using metric, the other customary.
If something doesn't make sense to you, keeping it to yourself achieves little. At worst you learn something, at best - it's because something was wrong.
I don't know where on earth you got those numbers for Houston from... that would be a world record by an amazing margin. Very few places to date have recorded wet bulb temps above 35 degrees.
I can only assume you are putting incorrect readings into the calculators.
Are you making sure to put the temperature at the time of the humidity reading, since they reach their maximums at very different times of the day. If you just put max temp and humidity readings for a day in you are going to be wildly wrong.
This could well be it. It never really occurred to me how radically the humidity changes throughout the day. I suspect this is because as the humidity rises the temperature is in a low and vice versa. So it feels like a relative equilibrium, but it's not. It'll be interesting to check out the by-the-hour data the next time a particularly mean hot+wet window emerges.
I am not convinced that the climate change argument will result in any concrete action. You can yell as loud as you want, most won't be able to understand the supposed impact of their action.
Instead of trying to synchronize humanity against a single enemy, we should try to encourage each of them individually to improve their life by being simple and make them want to switch and notice a clear immediate change.
Climate change has never been the battle to fight, nobody care. If you live anywhere close to a city you definitely don't, you may believe in it, but you do not care. And we should stop pretending that it can change.
I agree 100% on the conclusion: nobody's driving. In particular, the fact that teens are sad is disturbing. If teens (do you remember how happy and fun life was when you were teens?) are sad, imagine how they will become when they are adults.
However, I am not really convinced about the list of effects and reasons that the author proposes.
From the article, it seems that climate change is the number 1 reason why teens are sad... Are we sure? I hope not... also because there is little that the West can do to fix that. Most of the emissions and most of the pollution come from China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam. Even if we magically (without polluting and emitting even more) the West goes to zero net emissions, we'd still have 99% of the problem to be solved. Or do you get rid of concrete? Or do you declare war to half of the world "to defeat climate change"?
No, teens are not sad because of climate change. Teens are sad because when they look at adults, it seems that there is nothing more important than climate change. Nothing more important than affirming their gender. Nothing more important than paying their loans. Nothing more important than owning a gun.
If life is not worth living, people become sad. This is why teens are sad. This is why adults stopped driving the bus. Nobody knows why life is worth anymore. Nobody knows where we are driving to.
Perhaps it's time to figure out again a reason for which it is worth to fight. And then we'll fight climate change (if we can), we'll fight the issue with guns, we'll fight for a more equitable education, we'll fight for everything that is worth fighting for. And if we fail... it's okay, we'll start again. Why? BECAUSE IT IS WORTH IT.
If you don't answer the question: why is it worth it? Teens will remain sad. Adults will keep not driving.
I mean that these are great things to fight for, but I think it can't be the full horizon of someone's life. Because these fights don't justify themselves with their own importance. Why is it important to fight climate change? Why is it important to figure out how to pay your loans?
> do you remember how happy and fun life was when you were teens?
Well, no, not really? My teenage years weren't even particularly terrible, but I definitely had a lot more fun in my 20s, and I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.
That's rather off-topic but this article picture, with a woman pointing a gun at her head, finger on the trigger, intrigued me, so I followed the link to Adobe's stock photos. The photo is this one: https://stock.adobe.com/images/cheerful-woman-in-car-trip-jo...
There isn't a mention, anywhere in the tags, title, of the gun pointed at her own head. She's just a smiling, cheerful, attractive young woman on vacation sitting in a car, a finger movement away from firing the gun at her own head?
Are these keywords completely autogenerated with no human in the loop? And how does this picture happen in the middle of a photoshoot ("more from this series") that doesn't seem to involve guns other than in this one photo?
I also thought that suicide and lack of gun safety were somewhat taboo in the US, references to these things are very often accompanied with content warnings and such, so how does this photo happen?
I'm not outraged or shocked, just... very confused by this, I think.
I think the picture isn't supposed to imply she's going to shoot herself, she's just holding a gun and she doesn't care that she's doing it in an unsafe way because she's an actor and it's a prop gun.
We have, for better or for worse, no one-world government. We don't have a great way to overcome free riders, etc. A nation or group of nations can choose to reduce their emissions, but this means it's easier to undercut them on the global market. The same thing happens with human rights - it's cheap to buy stuff made by enslaved people, so we do.
There's no body that's really able to price negative externalities correctly. Emissions kill people - lots of people - yet there's no real price for using other people's lungs as a dump. For a brief window that body might have been the US and its hegemony, but the US doesn't have the power it used to. Perhaps China will take up the mantle - not much benefit to conquering the world if there isn't a civilisation left.
We should still do what we can, of course. Perhaps enough students on the bus can shift their weight or grab the wheel enough to stop it careening down the ravine. Technological advances have certainly helped in terms of making renewables more competitive against fossil power.
I also think teens are largely sad because they are lonely - so are adults; we have fewer friends and see them less than we used to, and social life has been torn to shreds. My mom thinks the same; she grew up on streets where kids ran outside to play with friends and neighbours _all day long_. But there were far fewer cars (and they were smaller and slower), and there was a parent in almost every home to keep an eye on things out the kitchen window.
This article perfectly encapsulates the current insanity that's infecting the young generation. To be honest it almost got me too.
Global warming can be solved. We're already transitioning to green energy at an amazing pace. Geo engineering is a solution in the meantime (which she dismisses completely without reason "which could either cool the planet or kill us all even faster."). Once we've built out an over capacity of solar and wind we can think about carbon capture and storage.
The real crisis is that people are not having kids, and unless you hate humanity you probably want there to be one in the future. We're all trending to be South Korea which now has a birthrate of 0.7. Zero point seven! Every thirty years a school class would go from 30 students to 10! South Korea is dying, and so is the rest of the developed world, albeit at a slower pace, so far.
The solution: AGI, robotics and longevity are all things that the doomers are actively opposed to.
>The real crisis is that people are not having kids
People aren't having kids because of the cost and the stress of living when combined with the cost and stress of raising kids sums to something too high for parents to bear.
Capitalists want you to ignore that calculation and simply sacrifice your health and time for the next generation while paying a sky-high cost of living that it created that requires both parents to be working. The economic conditions for life to thrive are becoming dim, and it's becoming rather obvious even to people who suck at valuing their time and worth. And climate change is a threat layered on top of that.
>The solution: AGI, robotics and longevity are all things that the doomers are actively opposed to.
These things will only go to the rich too, so not-rich people don't see it as a solution.
> Geo engineering is a solution in the meantime (which she dismisses completely without reason "which could either cool the planet or kill us all even faster.")
Geo engineering has exactly the same issue as ecosystem engineering, when we tried that without understanding the systems in play we simply create a gigantic game of whack-a-mole, with rats, cats, rabbits, so on and so forth.
We don't understand enough to be confident we are able to do geo engineering without massive unforeseen consequences. It's such a complex system, with interactions that we are not equipped to predict (or even have a good comprehension), that the thought we can "just geo engineer in the meantime" is, to me, of incredible naïvety... It's a belief in technology completely unfounded, as if technology is magic, borderline deus ex machina. Just because we can create some technology does not mean we do understand the consequences of applying said technology on a global scale to mess up with climate systems, we simply don't know what might happen.
Are you willing to bet the future of your children, grandchildren, etc. on unproven technology? I'm not. Geo engineering is not going to save us, stop believing in magic.
> Are you willing to bet the future of your children, grandchildren, etc. on unproven technology?
mon ami there is no choice. no amount of solar is going to magically meet our needs -- nuke or bust, basically -- and unless the human population gets cut in half, like, tomorrow, nothing is going to stop the impacts of climate change, that are now on a runaway train.
Not in the West. Most Western countries would be losing population if it weren't for the effects of immigration.
It's not even really true in China these days (in fact, China is looking at demographic collapse).
India's population is still increasing, but only at a rate of about 0.81% per annum, compared to 2% or more through most of the 20th Century. Many expect it to continue to decline and go negative sometime in the next few decades.
The so-called "Population Bomb" has turned out to be a dud almost everywhere.
They're having eight kids per woman in the majority of Africa. To say "unless you hate humanity you probably want there to be one in the future," with the implication that we're running out of humans, is some alternate reality.
Perhaps it will make sense to worry about depopulation when we've had several decades of reductions in human population. Would it be a bad thing if the world had 2 billion people in the year 2300? Would it be better to have a slow reduction in population because the TFR was below 2 for a couple centuries, or a crash when we exceed our planet's carrying capacity? Hand-waving about "geoengineering will fix it" doesn't seem like a good faith argument, given that it has been described as very risky by well informed people.
There seems to be this persistent romantic nostalgia for the culture of at least the postwar era but also extending back through the Industrial Revolution and maybe beyond. We have all these materials of men in suits looking so professional as they sit at drafting boards and prototype new machines! Oh, how our culture has degraded! Must be the dang kids with their dang TV/video games/hip hop/Tik Tok!
But the older I get the more I come to realize that human culture hasn't changed all that much, what has changed is the democratization of cultural displays. Now that the "elite" are forced to compete with the "rest" in media (social or otherwise), that retro perfection spell is broken and the idealists are butting up against the reality that humans basically want to be carefree and revel in the enjoyment of life.
So what achieved such rapid technological improvements the past couple hundred years? Well, it's pretty clear by now that good ideas happen all over the place, and money flows relatively freely to make these ideas available for public scrutiny and adoption. What changed seems to be the working conditions of the rest -- child labor and 12 hour days in grueling conditions made the Industrial Revolution successful (largely for the elite), and forced/exploitative labor made the computing revolution possible in the 60s up until now in the mining and manufacturing sectors. Now that people are fighting en masse for a global solidarity centered around respect in the workplace, you are seeing elite complaints about how it will destroy civilization as we know it, presumably based on a convenient and self-serving nostalgic view of progress as something that "requires" "sacrifice" from others (never themselves, somehow).
If culture has changed to any serious degree, what's changed in the rest is that we realized this life is about more than toil and scraping by.
Yet many of the rest believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed elite and so have looked upon those around them with contempt and disdain, citing arguments of moral degeneracy ("mind virus"), etc. to fuel their reactionary ideologies. The reaction has been swift and the elite have the money to fuel it as part of public discourse through influence of the media machines, but they cannot completely quash this rising tide because media companies are still beholden to the economic forces that the elite instituted in the first place -- popular stuff makes money, so these ideas continue to be visible in popular media.
No one was ever driving. Only the superorganism called society can be said to be "driving", and even then we would need to qualify that heavily to be clear despite the clumsy language. Treat your fellow humans as such so collaboration is possible and this may actually work out.
Also, please stay alert and in control when you drive. Collaboration works best when you keep your neighbors alive.
Bit too easy to point the finger at "the adults" and "tech bros" while at the same time not providing even a glimpse of a suggested solution to any of the problems the author enumerates.
Teens are sad, oh my god! Bad adults are taking their tiktok away.
I pretty much felt the same when I was a teenager. We're polluting the planet, destroying our habitat. We knew about climate change all the way back then. I'm gen X, and nothing much has changed.
The only difference I can see is that not many people seemed to feel like that when I was a kid. It would make you some kind of hippy tree hugger.
At least kids these days seem to be more aware of these things.
If you think the problems created by previous generations are bad, just wait until the upcoming generation starts over-correcting for things they have zero understanding of.
This young author is wearing "doomer" like a fashion accessory and it shows. It's dripping with ignorance and stupidity. Although, I suppose if the education system has failed her that badly, perhaps she has at least one valid complaint.
I dislike the slant, which is about control. Someone has to be in control is a cry that blends into authoritarianism.
I do think there's a polycrisis of issues. To me, most of these stem not from a top down directing. They stem from a system which restraints & holds humanity back in an individual level. The basic common good counts for so much, but when folks are struggling for food shelter and housing, when jobs eat away at self respect, when corporations have become such vast government-devouring titans, when we have such a powerful capable world but are DRM & legally locked out of interaction & mastery with the worl: when these factors all align against the individual there's no space left for the good to be evinced out.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadWould love to see this interview.
I've seen the video sometime back and it was absolutely bonkers the way they talked back at him.
And people, in general, are not just dying in mass because of it, including those who work outside most of all day. For instance in Houston yesterday it was 41C/81%, which is a wet bulb of 38. Places with rainy seasons during hot parts of the year are also nailing it pretty regularly. Its things like this that I think causes distrust of reporting. There may be some nuance or explanation I'm missing, but it's not at all apparent. It's also not at all apparent to me why more people aren't asking this question.
[1] - https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb
If the 35 wet bulb hypothesis was valid, then literally one solitary day of this, regardless of how infrequent, would have killed everybody in the Amazon. There are also many other areas along the equator with high temperature, high humidity, and lots of people without access to AC. Something just doesn't seem right.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/wp-content/themes/sotp-fou...
If something doesn't make sense to you, keeping it to yourself achieves little. At worst you learn something, at best - it's because something was wrong.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
I can only assume you are putting incorrect readings into the calculators.
Are you making sure to put the temperature at the time of the humidity reading, since they reach their maximums at very different times of the day. If you just put max temp and humidity readings for a day in you are going to be wildly wrong.
yep,nobody's driving, and thanks for that.
Instead of trying to synchronize humanity against a single enemy, we should try to encourage each of them individually to improve their life by being simple and make them want to switch and notice a clear immediate change.
Climate change has never been the battle to fight, nobody care. If you live anywhere close to a city you definitely don't, you may believe in it, but you do not care. And we should stop pretending that it can change.
Mossy bottom comes to mind - https://www.youtube.com/@MossyBottom
However, I am not really convinced about the list of effects and reasons that the author proposes.
From the article, it seems that climate change is the number 1 reason why teens are sad... Are we sure? I hope not... also because there is little that the West can do to fix that. Most of the emissions and most of the pollution come from China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam. Even if we magically (without polluting and emitting even more) the West goes to zero net emissions, we'd still have 99% of the problem to be solved. Or do you get rid of concrete? Or do you declare war to half of the world "to defeat climate change"?
No, teens are not sad because of climate change. Teens are sad because when they look at adults, it seems that there is nothing more important than climate change. Nothing more important than affirming their gender. Nothing more important than paying their loans. Nothing more important than owning a gun.
If life is not worth living, people become sad. This is why teens are sad. This is why adults stopped driving the bus. Nobody knows why life is worth anymore. Nobody knows where we are driving to.
Perhaps it's time to figure out again a reason for which it is worth to fight. And then we'll fight climate change (if we can), we'll fight the issue with guns, we'll fight for a more equitable education, we'll fight for everything that is worth fighting for. And if we fail... it's okay, we'll start again. Why? BECAUSE IT IS WORTH IT.
If you don't answer the question: why is it worth it? Teens will remain sad. Adults will keep not driving.
What do you mean, exactly? That adults are focused on the various challenges they face in life?
Fuck it, dude. Let's go bowling.
Well, no, not really? My teenage years weren't even particularly terrible, but I definitely had a lot more fun in my 20s, and I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.
No, I do not. I was sad, as were most teens I knew (perhaps, admittedly, selection bias).
What an absolutely insane question. Tell me you were popular in high school without telling me you were popular in high school.
There isn't a mention, anywhere in the tags, title, of the gun pointed at her own head. She's just a smiling, cheerful, attractive young woman on vacation sitting in a car, a finger movement away from firing the gun at her own head?
Are these keywords completely autogenerated with no human in the loop? And how does this picture happen in the middle of a photoshoot ("more from this series") that doesn't seem to involve guns other than in this one photo?
I also thought that suicide and lack of gun safety were somewhat taboo in the US, references to these things are very often accompanied with content warnings and such, so how does this photo happen?
I'm not outraged or shocked, just... very confused by this, I think.
We have, for better or for worse, no one-world government. We don't have a great way to overcome free riders, etc. A nation or group of nations can choose to reduce their emissions, but this means it's easier to undercut them on the global market. The same thing happens with human rights - it's cheap to buy stuff made by enslaved people, so we do.
There's no body that's really able to price negative externalities correctly. Emissions kill people - lots of people - yet there's no real price for using other people's lungs as a dump. For a brief window that body might have been the US and its hegemony, but the US doesn't have the power it used to. Perhaps China will take up the mantle - not much benefit to conquering the world if there isn't a civilisation left.
We should still do what we can, of course. Perhaps enough students on the bus can shift their weight or grab the wheel enough to stop it careening down the ravine. Technological advances have certainly helped in terms of making renewables more competitive against fossil power.
I also think teens are largely sad because they are lonely - so are adults; we have fewer friends and see them less than we used to, and social life has been torn to shreds. My mom thinks the same; she grew up on streets where kids ran outside to play with friends and neighbours _all day long_. But there were far fewer cars (and they were smaller and slower), and there was a parent in almost every home to keep an eye on things out the kitchen window.
Global warming can be solved. We're already transitioning to green energy at an amazing pace. Geo engineering is a solution in the meantime (which she dismisses completely without reason "which could either cool the planet or kill us all even faster."). Once we've built out an over capacity of solar and wind we can think about carbon capture and storage.
The real crisis is that people are not having kids, and unless you hate humanity you probably want there to be one in the future. We're all trending to be South Korea which now has a birthrate of 0.7. Zero point seven! Every thirty years a school class would go from 30 students to 10! South Korea is dying, and so is the rest of the developed world, albeit at a slower pace, so far.
The solution: AGI, robotics and longevity are all things that the doomers are actively opposed to.
People aren't having kids because of the cost and the stress of living when combined with the cost and stress of raising kids sums to something too high for parents to bear.
Capitalists want you to ignore that calculation and simply sacrifice your health and time for the next generation while paying a sky-high cost of living that it created that requires both parents to be working. The economic conditions for life to thrive are becoming dim, and it's becoming rather obvious even to people who suck at valuing their time and worth. And climate change is a threat layered on top of that.
>The solution: AGI, robotics and longevity are all things that the doomers are actively opposed to.
These things will only go to the rich too, so not-rich people don't see it as a solution.
Geo engineering has exactly the same issue as ecosystem engineering, when we tried that without understanding the systems in play we simply create a gigantic game of whack-a-mole, with rats, cats, rabbits, so on and so forth.
We don't understand enough to be confident we are able to do geo engineering without massive unforeseen consequences. It's such a complex system, with interactions that we are not equipped to predict (or even have a good comprehension), that the thought we can "just geo engineer in the meantime" is, to me, of incredible naïvety... It's a belief in technology completely unfounded, as if technology is magic, borderline deus ex machina. Just because we can create some technology does not mean we do understand the consequences of applying said technology on a global scale to mess up with climate systems, we simply don't know what might happen.
Are you willing to bet the future of your children, grandchildren, etc. on unproven technology? I'm not. Geo engineering is not going to save us, stop believing in magic.
mon ami there is no choice. no amount of solar is going to magically meet our needs -- nuke or bust, basically -- and unless the human population gets cut in half, like, tomorrow, nothing is going to stop the impacts of climate change, that are now on a runaway train.
It's not even really true in China these days (in fact, China is looking at demographic collapse).
India's population is still increasing, but only at a rate of about 0.81% per annum, compared to 2% or more through most of the 20th Century. Many expect it to continue to decline and go negative sometime in the next few decades.
The so-called "Population Bomb" has turned out to be a dud almost everywhere.
They're having eight kids per woman in the majority of Africa. To say "unless you hate humanity you probably want there to be one in the future," with the implication that we're running out of humans, is some alternate reality.
> They're having eight kids per woman in the majority of Africa.
First off, that's not true. The mean fertility in Africa is 4.2, not 8 or anything like it (8 may be the case in some areas, but not the "majority").
Secondly, China, India, and even Europe and the United States had very high fertility rates in the past.
Now they don't.
But the older I get the more I come to realize that human culture hasn't changed all that much, what has changed is the democratization of cultural displays. Now that the "elite" are forced to compete with the "rest" in media (social or otherwise), that retro perfection spell is broken and the idealists are butting up against the reality that humans basically want to be carefree and revel in the enjoyment of life.
So what achieved such rapid technological improvements the past couple hundred years? Well, it's pretty clear by now that good ideas happen all over the place, and money flows relatively freely to make these ideas available for public scrutiny and adoption. What changed seems to be the working conditions of the rest -- child labor and 12 hour days in grueling conditions made the Industrial Revolution successful (largely for the elite), and forced/exploitative labor made the computing revolution possible in the 60s up until now in the mining and manufacturing sectors. Now that people are fighting en masse for a global solidarity centered around respect in the workplace, you are seeing elite complaints about how it will destroy civilization as we know it, presumably based on a convenient and self-serving nostalgic view of progress as something that "requires" "sacrifice" from others (never themselves, somehow).
If culture has changed to any serious degree, what's changed in the rest is that we realized this life is about more than toil and scraping by.
Yet many of the rest believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed elite and so have looked upon those around them with contempt and disdain, citing arguments of moral degeneracy ("mind virus"), etc. to fuel their reactionary ideologies. The reaction has been swift and the elite have the money to fuel it as part of public discourse through influence of the media machines, but they cannot completely quash this rising tide because media companies are still beholden to the economic forces that the elite instituted in the first place -- popular stuff makes money, so these ideas continue to be visible in popular media.
No one was ever driving. Only the superorganism called society can be said to be "driving", and even then we would need to qualify that heavily to be clear despite the clumsy language. Treat your fellow humans as such so collaboration is possible and this may actually work out.
Also, please stay alert and in control when you drive. Collaboration works best when you keep your neighbors alive.
Teens are sad, oh my god! Bad adults are taking their tiktok away.
The only difference I can see is that not many people seemed to feel like that when I was a kid. It would make you some kind of hippy tree hugger.
At least kids these days seem to be more aware of these things.
This young author is wearing "doomer" like a fashion accessory and it shows. It's dripping with ignorance and stupidity. Although, I suppose if the education system has failed her that badly, perhaps she has at least one valid complaint.
I do think there's a polycrisis of issues. To me, most of these stem not from a top down directing. They stem from a system which restraints & holds humanity back in an individual level. The basic common good counts for so much, but when folks are struggling for food shelter and housing, when jobs eat away at self respect, when corporations have become such vast government-devouring titans, when we have such a powerful capable world but are DRM & legally locked out of interaction & mastery with the worl: when these factors all align against the individual there's no space left for the good to be evinced out.
Yes we are all going down and there is little we can do about it. So find meaning where you can and be kind to your neighbor.