
One Billion People Will Suffer from “Unliveable” Heat Within 50 Years - chmaynard
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/one-billion-people-will-suffer-from-unliveable-heat-within-50-years-study-finds
======
mydongle
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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_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.

~~~
mydongle
>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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yes, I'm sure.

One of the things driving poverty and homelessness in the US is a lack of
affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. If you could work a shitty
minimum wage job part-time while living without a car and cover the cost of a
room while getting free medical care through the US government, you could
write or program or whatever.

Poor people have no voice in things like what kind of housing gets built or
how healthcare is paid for. Corporations and rich people design that and they
design stuff that works for them and that increases pressure on the masses.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Money follows rights and power, not the other way around. If money gave people
power, lottery winners would run this world. They don't. About 2/3s of them
end up bankrupt within five years.

Edit: I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I still
write about homelessness, such as:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/)

~~~
mydongle
I'm largely in agreement with you. UBI may not be the right path, but we are
thinking toward the same goal probably. I'll take whatever I can get.

~~~
DoreenMichele
If you want to write, you can do that for money right now and develop your
talent while enhancing your bottom line:

[http://writepay.blogspot.com/](http://writepay.blogspot.com/)

~~~
mydongle
Not necessarily looking to become part of a content mill. As I mentioned, I
want to write as a personal hobby/creative pursuit. Thank you though.

------
amasad
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/](https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/)

[http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/lockdown-and-
mathematic...](http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/lockdown-and-mathematical-
guesswork/)

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

------
jshprentz
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734865)
[2] [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-
earth...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-
hot-for-humans-annotated.html) [3]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9552](https://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9552)
[4]
[https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=978...](https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=9780525576709)
[5] [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-
uninhabita...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-
uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells)

------
scythe
To be more specific, the figure of merit is the _wet-bulb temperature_.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838)

------
DoreenMichele
_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
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...](https://www.npr.org/2018/12/10/673742751/how-1-company-pulls-carbon-
from-the-air-aiming-to-avert-a-climate-catastrophe)

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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
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.

------
chmaynard
Primary source:

[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117)

------
tdons
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?

~~~
fzeroracer
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.

~~~
tdons
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?

~~~
fzeroracer
I was specifically countering your argument because it is impossible to
disprove. No matter how accurate our climate simulations or understanding can
get, there's always the possibility for something we've missed. That's why we
create these models, refine them and adjust our behavior accordingly.

I'm afraid I can't agree with you here because if your claim is that 'we don't
know fully how climate works, then things might not be as bad as we think',
the opposite claim is also true. That is, 'we don't know fully how climate
works, therefore things might be worse than we think'.

It's entirely possible that there are other mechanisms or feedback loops we
don't know about which when triggered could cause a massive cascading effect
making the global temperature rise rapidly.

~~~
tdons
You are right when you say: it could also be worse.

I concede that it's impossible to disprove my assertion, but it might still be
true: we just don't know. I'm arguing that we should embrace the uncertainty
and accept that we can't know certain things.

These sorts of articles can cause immense stress in people and are therefore
doing harm.

The uncertainties involved are fundamentally unquantifiable. We think we can
know, but we make only educated guesses. We should keep doing that, but
communication about the results should be honest. A title that states "one
billion people _will_ suffer" isn't that.

------
m463
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.

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

~~~
quinndexter
[http://longbets.org](http://longbets.org)

------
ddrt
Arazona resident here: bring it on.

------
pacala
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.

