
The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance - INGELRII
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838
======
skohan
I have to say when I took an extended layover in Doah it gave me a different
sense of urgency about climate change. It was just oppressive to be outside,
even during the night and they air-condition their open air markets. It got me
thinking that there are a lot of places like this which are probably on the
edge, and where a few degrees of warming will make them simply uninhabitable
to humans. It would be a strange thing to have "hot zones" like we have arctic
regions where it's not possible to go without special equipment.

~~~
gonzo41
Now is the time to buy a flat-ish block of land in Alaska or Tasmania that's a
little back from the waters edge. Also make sure you don't have too many
tree's too close to where you want to build your doomsday cabin. :) Really you
don't be between the tropics of Cancer of Capricorn. in the future

~~~
johnchristopher
When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not
be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.

When I was a teen I was sure we were headed for a bad future if we didn't act
but I always thought it'd come after I am dead. Now I am scared I am going to
be old and too frail to manage when life on earth will turn sour.

edit: maybe it's time we put out a a Pioneer 10 plate with messages of warning
about our own failures. One we send to space, another one we leave on earth.

~~~
qqssccfftt
> When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not
> be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.

I can only hope so.

~~~
fsloth
State enforced private land ownership is one of the key economic fundamentals
of a prosperous society.

Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and
more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all
land).

Do you have any grounds why you would want it abolished?

~~~
johnchristopher
> Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and
> more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all
> land).

Am I correct to assume you include communist and feudal regimes ?

~~~
fsloth
Well, in Feudal system you don't really _own_ the land. You can tax the
peasants farming it in exchange for military services for the state. But for
example you can't parcel it to small farms and sell those for their owners to
keep, or anything like that. You can't use the land as your own _capital_ ,
with all the financial potential of an asset.

I'd love to hear counterexamples, but that's the general gist of it in the
large scale I think.

Land ownership is not a silver bullet but in general smart parcelling policies
have made nations wealthier. So basically, most wealthy states today at some
point in their history have issued a parcelling policy that has distributed
land ownership among farms. This has made the economic basis more vibrant and
more durable. And, probably also affected the evolution of their political
institutions to be more inclusive.

For example, see the parcelling in my country Finland (which was Sweden at the
time)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Partition_(Sweden)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Partition_\(Sweden\))
and earlier in British enclosure
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

------
kharak
Personal anectode.

I already can't bear summer. I don't have AC, as most people don't have it
here in Switzerland. Even offices tend to not have them. There are 1 to 2
months a year where my productivity sinks, enjoyment of life plummets and I
just want it all to be over.

I also barely see any snow anymore, if I don't hike in the mountains. I love
snow.

The change is real and I hate it. Couldn't it be global cooling instead of
warming? Damn physics.

~~~
alt_f4
You live in an extremely rich country, surely you can afford to install an AC
unit if it impacts you as much as you're saying.

Seems like that has a much better shot at solving your problem than waiting
for the world to address global climate change.

~~~
tarsinge
I’m grateful AC are frowned upon in Europe. Putting a band-aid by consuming
even more energy is insane in large scale, with the perverse effect of hiding
the problem and delaying awareness.

~~~
humanrebar
Heating freezing temperatures to livable takes more energy than air
conditioning. Logically, we should frown upon living in cold places with
extended winter more than we frown upon living in places that require air
conditioning.

~~~
tarsinge
Sure, I‘m not debating AC vs Heating, but that installing AC alone in the
majority of the millions of European homes that don’t have it because it’s
starting to get too hot in the summer is not only not a solution to the
general problem but can have perverse short term effects. My point about being
grateful is that I hope it’ll push more awareness and starting action now,
compared to the US where prevalent AC might hide the issue longer. But that’s
just a thought.

------
r721
Related feature piece:

>What It’s Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon
Be Uninhabitable

[https://time.com/longform/jacobabad-extreme-
heat/](https://time.com/longform/jacobabad-extreme-heat/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobabad#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobabad#Climate)

------
finolex1
Color me optimistic, but we'll learn to survive and adapt. Humans in temperate
climates (Chicago, Toronto, etc.) already live in places where it's too cold
to survive outside for long in winter. Just replace heaters with ACs in this
case.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Having lived both in the extreme heat of South Asia and the extreme cold of
the Canada, cold is technically a lot easier to deal with physically. Wearing
the right clothes will let you survive indefinitely in temperatures as low as
-10C. You are also not in danger of dehydration. Note that -10C is -30-35C
away from comfortable temperature (20-25C).

If you just go +20C from comfortable temperature, no amount of clothing will
help you survive for very long out in the open. You also have to drink copious
amounts of water and salts to avoid dehydrating to death.

Secondly, heating up a closed space is a lot cheaper than cooling it down.
Heating can always be done by burning fuel, but cooling greater than 5C
requires heat pumps.

The economics and practicalities of heat and cold adaptions are completely
different.

~~~
humanrebar
Fair point, though we are very far away from people dressing for Antarctica
while they sit on the couch watching Netflix.

You are also leaving snow and ice out of it. There are economics and
externalities of moving tons of solid matter around with relatively low
latency (people have to work, trucks have to ship). There are also the safety
implications and costs associated. Traffic and accident rates do not go up
because the precipitation was unexpectedly ten degrees warmer.

------
ganzuul
The narrative of combating global warming / climate change is ineffective and
it misses the point. The Earth can quite naturally be inhospitable to human
life. The narrative needs to be one of terraforming our own planet.

~~~
ArnoVW
There are several problems with this approach.

The person performing the forming would essentially be cleaning up the
polution of everyone else. Terraforming would require global agreement and
adherence to a highly capital-intensive enterprise. This is not unlike the
discussions about limiting global warming, which are not a frank success.

We currently have no means of cleaning up that is more efficient ie less
costly) than the methods we gave for limiting pollution. And it is already
impossible to get people to accept to pay those costs.

That is not to say that it should not be researched. But to propose it as an
alternative is not helpful in the current political context. It is akin to
saying "yea but we'll win the lottery anyway" when other people are trying to
get the community to accept a balancing of the budget.

~~~
chr1
> But to propose it as an alternative is not helpful in the current political
> context

Suggesting that we should keep silent about a way of solving the problem, so
that other people don't get "ideas", is even less helpful in any context, as
you lose your credibility in the eyes of people whom you are trying to
convince.

> essentially be cleaning up the pollution of everyone else. Terraforming
> would require global agreement and adherence to a highly capital-intensive
> enterprise

That would be true if we were talking about a toxic substance, CO2 is not a
pollutant, and there are ways to use it: for instance by terraforming deserts
into living ecosystems that would use the extra CO2. And this includes not
only deserts like sahara, but also vast areas of ocean devoid of life because
of currents not lifting nutrients from the bottom of the sea.

People do not accept to pay costs for "limiting pollution" because they are
not convinced that proposed solutions can work with anywhere reasonable cost.
And for that we need not to simply talk everyone into accepting unviable
solution out of fear, but to propose something that works and provides
additional benefits. Terraforming deserts and controlling the weather is one
such solution, which gets unfairly dismissed and downvoted.

~~~
ArnoVW
It does not matter if it is toxic or not. It's a chemical byproduct that we
don't want in the atmosphere. That means it's a pollutant.

Sure. Terra forming works. Conceptually. If you can manage to build a
rainforest in the desert, that will fix some co2. That is not the issue. The
issue is: how to build a rainforest in the desert. Technically, and
economically.

Have you considered the amount of water you'd need? The irrigation system
required for that? Where would the water come from? For reference, there is
already a lot of geopolitics over water supply in the middle east. Have you
considered how poor the soil is? How much work it would be to enrich that
soil? We are already raising alarm bells regarding our phosphate stock. How
would you keep the ecosystem in balance? If you can't you don't need an army
of people to maintain it.

Most importantly, it would only buy you time. It would fix some of the co2 in
trees. But if we continue to burn oil, we'll keep adding co2 to the
atmosphere. Every barrel of oil is 430 kilos of co2. That's a lot of tree for
one barrel.

And you've only fixed it temporarily. If at any time your artificial forest
collapses (this being your first terra forming attempt), your trees decompose
and release the co2.

Again. I'm not saying that any option should be off the table. But I do not
think it benefits the already complicated debates, if we present theoretical
scenarios as solutions.

~~~
chr1
You do not build a rainforest in a desert, you build a densely populated
region with lots of agricultural land and some forests, so that people living
there take care of enriching the soil and making sure that nothing collapses.

To do that we need to learn how to control the weather. There are multiple
possible ways, like using mirrors in space, using large number of aerostats to
change reflectivity, and to guide clouds to the place we need, solar updraft
towers to inject dust from lower layers of the atmosphere into higher layers
to form clouds, etc. Many of these are may not work, and many won't be cheap,
but they will give us more control over the environment and will enable more
people to live.

------
dirtyid
>These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance,
have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2). They are
concentrated in South Asia, the coastal Middle East, and coastal southwest
North America, in close proximity to extraordinarily high SSTs and intense
continental heat that together favor the occurrence of extreme humid heat (2,
14).

Future Indian geopolitics is certainly going to be interesting. Would like to
see these hotspots mapped for the next 20-30 years to highlight the scope of
the situation. Will certain areas become perennially uninhabitable? Is it a
matter of having AC / low humidity shelters that people flock to a couple
hours a day during seasonal peaks? Estimates on climate refugees and migration
patterns etc. I suspect it's going to be onerous but workable. There's low
energy dehumidifying HVAC solutions that might be attainable even in poorer
communities. Ultimately, petro rich countries like middle East and North
America is going to be fine and AC through the solution if they have to,
aggravating the problem for everyone else. Regardless, it's a problem worth
mitigating and acclimatizing to, 85% of the world is seeking to develop and
will do so via the most cost-efficient (currently dirty) methods possible.
IMO, accommodating for this is a greater moral imperative that's ultimately
incompatible with aggregate reduction in emissions - that was never workable.
Developed countries should still strive to improve efficient and innovate to
flatten the environmental cost curve per unit of quality of improvement, and
modify their life styles so that rampant consumptive culture is not the
aspired endpoint. But that's even harder said then done because capitalism.

~~~
blueblisters
Many parts of South Asia already have home-grown solutions to battle the heat.
The rise of cheap construction without consideration for local climate
conditions have made them less prevalent.

For example, in Jaipur, traditional stepwells dug under houses absorb a lot of
the mid-day summer heat. With some engineering, these can be scaled up to cool
entire neighborhoods with energy efficient geothermal heat pumps [1].

It's easy to be all doom and gloom about climate change. But some mitigations
are staring at us in the face. Others will take a while to become usable/cheap
enough to be deployed at scale.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump)

~~~
dirtyid
It really depends on if prospective climate change is something that has prior
solutions that can be adapted for modern land use and urban demands. There's
always been historically appropriate architectural typologies to manage
regional climate, but also massive enough climate shifts that cause entire
regions to be abandoned. Typically it's water shortage, which can be a zero-
sum problem, India/Pakistan, Egypt/Ethiopia, China and all of Mekong etc. But
yeah, I think inhospitable heat and humidity in this study is largely...
technically and economically solvable with building interventions, both
historic and speculative. There's already many societies that's dependent on
conditioned air at scale, but very few on desalinating water at scale.

------
jotm
Temperatures have been rising even further north. I'm near the 47th parallel
and there was practically no winter this year. Used to have -20 degC with lots
of snow, but alas. Last year's highs were above 40 degC for weeks -
unimaginable 20 years ago, and rare 10 years ago.

Everyone's getting air conditioners now. For some unexplainable reasons,
people still use dark colored roofs - it's time that everyone painted them
white or silver, because those A/Cs will just make everything worse in the
long term.

Most people seem to think it's a temporary thing. They'll believe it until it
becomes the new normal I guess.

~~~
Scarblac
Well it is a temporary thing, the rate of change is still increasing. We'll
reach the new normal a number of decades after we stop burning fossil fuel.

~~~
anticensor
> after we stop burning fossil fuel

You mean, when we run out of fossil fuel?

~~~
gambiting
That's just not going to happen by any measure. Deposits might become more and
more expensive to tap into, but we're not just going to run out. We need to
stop using them, not hope that we'll just stop once they are out - they simply
won't be.

~~~
asdkjh345fd
That is what everyone means when they say "run out of oil". Read it as "run
out of oil worth extracting". We're obviously not going to spend 2 TJ of
energy to extract oil that contains 1 TJ of energy.

~~~
MauranKilom
This assumes we use the oil purely due to its energy content. Which is true in
some sense or the other, but unless you can replace all uses of oil
derivatives with either synthetic sources (that don't cost significantly more
energy to create than the oil extraction would) or something different
altogether (e.g. in the "producing electricity" use case).

And even then, who knows whether dumping spare electricity into oil wells
instead of e.g. batteries or pumped storage hydroelectricity might remain
profitable.

My point is, it's not necessarily that obvious, and we better not wait for
people to stop running out of ideas to make a profit on fossil fuels.

------
perfunctory
Climate related reports are getting scarier by the day. I am scared. Really
scared. Everyone should be.

If I may, let me make a little plea.

May I remind everyone that we are not a mere spectators of the show. We are
active participants. We can influence things. We as in you and I, HN crowd. It
may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of
influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it. I used to urge
people to please go and do _something_ about climate. I think the phrasing has
to change now. Please! Go out and do _everything_ you possibly can to fight
climate change. The future of humanity is in _your_ hands.

~~~
WilTimSon
> It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount
> of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it.

What do you mean by a 'non-trivial amount of influence'? Sure, we can ask our
employers to enforce climate-friendly practices and talk to friends and
family, but even protesting companies that contribute the most to pollution
doesn't provide much relief as they either ignore the protests or make small
changes that give them positive PR and make the less active people happy to
stop trying.

What steps can a random person take to actually help the planet? I'm asking
this without a shred of irony or doom and gloom, I legitimately would be happy
to help stop the crisis but the only thing I can think of is planting dozens
of trees every year.

~~~
catawbasam
If you own a house in the US, you can very likely cut your energy use at least
in half even without lifestyle changes. Cut back air travel and switch from a
gas powered vehicle to an alternative that works for you.

------
k33n
Most of these models will be proven inaccurate. If there’s anything “climate
scientists” have demonstrated over the past 100 years or so, it’s that they
have little to no understanding of the global climate. Have any of their
“predictions” aged well?

~~~
jajag
> Have any of their “predictions” aged well?

No, but only in the sense that they've tended to be too conservative and to
understate the degree and pace of change.

And just to be clear, the paper linked to is a review of weather station data
which finds that extreme heat & humidity conditions are occurring sooner and
more frequently than models predicted.

~~~
k33n
Way off. The vast majority of their doom and gloom claims have been completely
disproven. Only the woefully ignorant peddle this stuff.

It’s perfectly natural for the weather to be extremely hot and humid
sometimes.

~~~
Intermernet
[https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-
mo...](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-
getting-future-warming-projections-right/)

Unless you believe that NASA are in on the whole conspiracy because of, um,
some reason I can't even fathom...

~~~
KozmoNau7
Don't feed the low effort trolls. Downvote, flag and ignore.

~~~
Intermernet
The only options available for dealing with misinformed conspiracy theorists
are downvoting, flagging, ignoring and rebuttal. The first three are
interpreted as validation. It sucks, but that's the reality.

~~~
KozmoNau7
You forget about moderation. HN has pretty active moderators who generally
come down hard on trolls and bad faith arguments.

The troll may see it as validation when their posts are struck down, but that
only matters to them, and since they're struck down and banned, it doesn't
matter to anyone else.

For some cases, I agree that a well-pointed rebuttal _can_ be effective, not
to convince the troll, but rather to inform the audience. You cannot convince
the troll, but you can show the audience how his arguments are flawed and
false.

There is a balance, because you also risk giving his posts more attention,
which is counterproductive. If possible, take the arguments to a place where
the people who are already sympathetic to your arguments are in the majority.
Have the discussion on your home turf, don't discuss in forums where the troll
has the majority.

And obviously know when to disengage. Arguing with a pure bad faith troll is
utterly pointless, they'll just keeping spinning bullshit while you try to
seat down their nonsense. The takes a lot of effort on your part and
absolutely none on theirs. In the process, they get to air even more of their
nonsense to an audience.

Facts are precise and specific, lies are random, unlimited and don't have to
have any connection to truth or reality.

~~~
Intermernet
Yep, but dang and co are quite light on the moderation (which I respect,
mostly) so I find rebuttal to be the most likely response to succeed on HN.

I think your point regarding showing the audience is the salient one here.

