One Billion People Will Suffer from “Unliveable” Heat Within 50 Years

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/one-billion-people-will-suffer-from-unliveable-heat-within-50-years-study-finds

by chmaynard • 6 years ago

61 28 6 years ago

e360.yale.edu

chmaynard• 6 years ago

Primary source:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117

DoreenMichele5• 6 years ago

areas currently home to a third of the world’s population will be as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, the paper warns. Even in the most optimistic outlook, 1.2 billion people will fall outside the comfortable “climate niche” in which humans have thrived for at least 6,000 years.

Or we could start now with more remote work, less driving, etc. The pandemic has shown us just how much pollution levels can drop in a short time if we just feel adequately motivated to make such changes instead of our usual talking smack and doing nothing.

And this may not be the last pandemic.

We do not have to take this sitting down, so to speak. We can vote with our feet and our pocketbooks and begin creating a more pedestrian-friendly world and more human-friendly culture and so forth.

Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is set in stone.

If mankind is the cause of global warming, mankind can fix it. We just have to stop making excuses and pretending we are helpless because "Well, I'm just one person and there are 7 billion other people, so what I do doesn't matter, so why bother?"

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

We can not rapidly push much of the population into extreme poverty and still solve this with Carbon Extraction: https://www.npr.org/2018/12/10/673742751/how-1-company-pulls...

Bill Gates is investing in it about the same way he called a pandemic. He’s doing something but not making enough noise about it.

Vote for a carbon tax to pay for these plants, put them in areas that used to mine coal or drill for gas.

DoreenMichele5• 6 years ago

Here are some solutions for you:

Affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. We know how to build this. We used to do it all the time. We just zoned it out of existence.

Mixed use areas with residential above commercial.

Good public transit.

Passive solar design.

Vernacular architecture.

Support remote work and small time operators instead of actively crapping all over them and trying to drive them out of existence.

Institute universal health care in the US, like most developed countries have. That would go a long way towards protecting people from poverty. So would making affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods.

I've studied this stuff for a lot of years. I just don't get listened to because I was a homemaker and homeschooling mom and I spent years homeless.

I've lived without a car for over a decade. I currently do remote work. I currently live in a small space in a walkable downtown area with good public transit.

I would love to further enhance the downtown area I live in, but, hey, I don't have a driver's license and yadda, so no one is going to hire me to do that kind of work.

But this can be done. And it doesn't have to involve pushing people into poverty, though we would all benefit if we would stop wallowing in North American Affluenza. Less is more and all that.

pacala• 6 years ago

Exponential growth doesn't work forever. As recently as 100 years ago there were less than 2 billion people in the whole world. At 7.8 billion and growing 80M [1 Germany] each year, we're running out of room to breathe.

scythe• 6 years ago

To be more specific, the figure of merit is the wet-bulb temperature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

There are a great many places where people live that regularly exceed 45 C in the summer. However, these places also tend to be very dry. So it's misleading to think "it only hits 105 in Memphis but it crosses 120 in Las Vegas, so Memphis will be fine". In reality the wet-bulb temperature in Vegas is usually lower than in Memphis.

Human beings cannot survive when the wet-bulb temperature goes above 35 C. There are a number of cities that occasionally see wet-bulb temperatures above 32 C, which could become deadly heat waves in a severe warming scenario. This is particularly true near the warmest seas -- the Gulf of California, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. (Mazatlan in June is absolutely miserable.) There was a recent study published in Science about it:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838

ddrt• 6 years ago

Arazona resident here: bring it on.

tdons4• 6 years ago

Could it not be the case that there are surprising mechanisms or feedback loops that we do not currently know about; mechanisms that could put a damper on these predictions?

More generally: aren't these multi-decade predictions simply hubris? The climate is a very complex non-linear system with tons of inputs and interactions. There's many examples of these types of systems for which our predictions fall short or are extremely inaccurate: weather over multi-week timescales, the economy, even the recent Covid-19 models.

Am I the only one that thinks we should be a little more careful and conservative when putting out these sorts of dire predictions?

fzeroracer2• 6 years ago

Isn't this Russell's Teapot? It's impossible to prove that there aren't mechanisms or feedback loops that could dampen climate change. It's an unfalsifiable claim. You have to prove the existence of mechanisms that could reverse climate change without human interaction.

Otherwise, what we're operating on is known mechanisms that are currently causing climate change. One of the facts is that there are already places in the world which are reaching unlivable wet bulb temperatures.

tdons4• 6 years ago

I was merely claiming that we have an incomplete understanding of the climate system, and because of that we shouldn't make these types of claims and state them with absolute certainty like the article is doing.

Surely we can agree there?

amasad• 6 years ago

Has anyone ever reviewed the code and analyzed the software engineering practices behind the climate models?

I used to take these things for granted and just believe articles and studies like this one but after humongous public failure of Imperial College Coronavirus model I'm not so sure anymore.

We need code and tech reviews in addition to peer review.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/lockdown-and-mathematic...

tdons4• 6 years ago

Questioning these types of assertions isn't appreciated. I'm already being downvoted in this thread because of it.

mydongle4• 6 years ago

Now, is perhaps the best time to do something about climate change if that is something we seriously want to defeat. Right now, we have already laid off and forced so many people to stay home and stop working. We are in the perfect position to evaluate what jobs are actually necessary and cut off as much fat as we can in our society. Pay a basic income so that these people don't have to forever drive to their wage slave jobs that they hate and then drive back home and sleep, only to repeat again the next day. Kill off huge industries that have been kept alive by low wages and poor working conditions that people have no choice but to endure at the threat of poverty and death. Let people live their lives and if even one person, who would've originally been working at McDonalds to pay rent, can invent something like the cure for cancer or a solution to increasing CO2 levels, then it will all pay off. If not, at least you get a nicer society who won't be a few meals away from rioting and killing each other on the streets.

DoreenMichele5• 6 years ago

Let people live their lives and if even one person, who would've originally been working at McDonalds to pay rent, can invent something like the cure for cancer or a solution to increasing CO2 levels, then it will all pay off.

If you are suggesting that UBI will give us this, this is highly unlikely.

I have been getting myself well with a very deadly condition for 19 years. I spent nearly six years homeless.

The biggest barrier I face to disseminating this information boils down to credibility and connections. No one wants to hear what I have to say. I'm a former homemaker, not a "scientist."

I don't think UBI will lead to what people think it will. Money is not the biggest barrier. That's not the problem poor people have.

Mostly: The problems they have lead to a lack of money, not the other way around.

mydongle4• 6 years ago

That's not the problem poor people have

Are you sure? I don't have any numbers on it, but I like to think the amount of homeless who are truly lost causes where money would not help is very small. I'm poor and if money was not a priority, I'd be able to work on stuff like programming and pursuing writing as a hobby. That's pretty much what I've been doing now that I can justifiably take UI and stay home for some time without worrying about how to pay rent and buy food. For me, hell yeah money is the biggest barrier. And the only options in front of me are to work at shitty minimum wage food service jobs which are now destroyed.

hackeraccount• 6 years ago

"We are in the perfect position to evaluate what jobs are actually necessary"

Who's this "We" you're talking about? 'Cause if it's me then I think this is a great idea. If it's you than I think it's maybe not the best idea ever.

And if it's "experts" all I would say is that that it better be an expert of my choosing not yours.

tengbretson• 6 years ago

Are there websites where people can actually bet on the outcomes of predictions like these?

m4632• 6 years ago

It would be more profitable to invest $1 in a stable fund for 50 years.

quinndexter• 6 years ago

http://longbets.org

m4632• 6 years ago

When I read things like this, my first though is that we will live in climate controlled buildings, like they do in desert countries or near the arctic circle.

I think about humanity surviving and being more uncomfortable.

But the thing is, this kind of thing will decimate birds and fish and insects and crops and more, and it might not come back.

jshprentz• 6 years ago

HN discussed [1] this topic three years ago when New York Magazine published "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells.

In section II, Heat Death, he states, "At seven degrees of warming, that [human cooling] would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem." He adds, "At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner."

The annotated version of that article [2] cites the 2010 paper, "An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress" [3] by Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber for these claims.

(Sections IV, Climate Plagues, and VII, Permanent Economic Collapse, from Wallace-Wells' article anticipate our current situation.)

Wallace-Wells expanded his article into a book published last year, "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming." [4] I found the book informative, relentless, and somewhat depressing. Recommended. But don't take my word for it. [5]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734865 [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth... [3] https://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9552 [4] https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=978... [5] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabita...

One Billion People Will Suffer from “Unliveable” Heat Within 50 Years

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