53° C (127.4° F) is extreme, even for Death Valley. We're rapidly approaching the point where larger and larger areas will be uninhabitable for humans, not just uncomfortable.
> 53° C (127.4° F) is extreme, even for Death Valley.
This. And we're not even in the hottest part of the year yet. I'd like to see the wet bulb temperatures too, but I'm guessing they're in the low 70's because of their low humidity. So it's technically possible for humans to survive that level of heat there given enough water and shade, though we'd probably see deaths in the eldest and youngest populations regardless.
But should you move the location much in any direction, and you'd have conditions which would require artificial cooling for any human to survive.
I think that's all of Earth when it comes to a population of give or take 10 billion people. It really feels like all the stuff that people said wasn't sustainable when I was a kid wasn't sustainable and it's all starting to come apart.
Sustainable means "we could keep doing it this way indefinitely" and the answer...no, we absolutely cannot keep doing it (i.e. producing energy) this way indefinitely. It never was sustainable, we just live in a system with a huge amount of inertia and big reservoirs that allows us to imagine things are sustainable when they aren't.
Since the Earth is finite every use of raw materials is unsustainable eventually. That's not something I worry about because costs will shift around and new ways to meet needs will be found.
The Earth is finite, but it is not a closed system. This is how solar, wind, tidal, and hydro are able to work: The Sun. Aside from that, it's that whole "matter neither created no destroyed but merely changing forms."
The difference with fossil fuels, overfishing the oceans, etc. is as was mentioned earlier, the huge reservoir of stored energy we've been consuming without replenishing, extending beyond fish populations' ability to reproduce and the system's ability to absorb excess CO2.
We can be sustainable on a finite planet as long as we find the balance, which means dramatically changing the way we interact with our world: dramatically less fossil fuels converted to greenhouse gases and sustainable fisheries that protect breeding grounds (for example).
And yet life on Earth has managed to carry on for 3.7 billion years. How?
Recycling. The answer is recycling.
> That's not something I worry about
Oh, we know. There are plenty of people thoughtlessly devouring irreplaceable things, consuming the habitat of life's creatures, and farting up a literal shit storm of carbon waste. Such people make lousy neighbors and their unsustainable habits are going away, one way or another. "Yeah I don't care about that" isn't nearly the burn you might think it is.
And I suppose you devour nothing irreplaceable, consume no part of nature's habitat and create minimal carbon waste? Anyone can criticize others for their supposedly evil habits, but then somehow be utterly blind to how their own are similar or the same in substance, if not in superficial form. At the very least, you own and use a laptop or mobile device, since you're commenting here. Any idea how much colossal mining is needed to manufacture both?
This is the fundamental failure of capitalism: there is no market for global climate change, because humans have trouble en masse thinking in terms longer than a human lifetime. We're living on credit when the bill due will be paid by our children or grandchildren. It's not immediate and we mistake that for not being urgent. "Costs will shift around" falls down when large areas of the planet reach 150+ degrees and aquatic populations collapse. Then you're not simply paying in dollars. You're paying in refugees, water rights, food rationing, war, disease, etc.
"Disease? What?" Yep, just think of all of those cities at higher altitudes. Most were established at altitudes where biting insects that carry diseases don't propagate. Heat up the planet, and all of those disease vectors move up with the expanded heat envelope.
Compound interest is a real monster, and far too many of us refuse to look beyond the current balance sheet, expecting to pay just what they see today, not what the bill will look like a year from now.
You have to consider what would happen if power went out. If everyone for whom power went out dies within a few hours, then yes, I would consider it uninhabitable without extraordinary means of ensuring that the power can't go out (see, for example, the measures taken at south pole bases to ensure power continuity).
Power outages are inevitable, and above a certain wet bulb temperature you can't hydrate or shade yourself out of overheating. It's a when you'll die, not if.
If it's hot and humid (a wet-bulb temperature above body temperature) and you lose power, you're dead within hours, not months. You can't hydrate or shade to cool yourself sufficiently in those conditions.
Sure, there are places that would kill people quicker than others, but that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about the benchmark of survivability without artificial means.
Truthfully, as a species, most of us require artificial augmentation in order to survive, which makes that artificial augmentation a poor benchmark for survivability.
Our ancestors' survival in Africa, Siberia, and pretty much every place in between gives lie to the notion that "most of us require artificial augmentation in order to survive".
And to be clear, no, I do not consider the use of fire, animal skins, etc. to be artificial augmentation. I do consider electricity and inter-continental supply lines to be artificial augmentation.
Right, so, do you know how to hunt? Can you start a fire without matches? Ever skin an animal?
I can do 1/3 there, only because of years in boyscouts, and there's no way in hell I'd survive without artificial augmentation, regardless of where you put me, I'm simply not prepared for it, same as almost everyone else.
If you're not basically the primative technology guy from youtube, very slim odds you'd figure it out quickly enough.
I don’t know, sure plenty would die, but I’m hell of a lot more likely to re-discover how to hunt and cook it on fire vs building a goddamn air-conditioner, and the two is not even comparable.
This is not hyperbole. We are already seeing heat indexes above 160 degrees. Even if everyone in these areas had air conditioning or heat pumps—which they don't—it's far more likely a power grid failure will rear its ugly head with all of them turned on to the max. There's also livestock and crops to consider. Do they have air conditioning too?
Remember, solar can't keep up with that due to the solar constant and cell efficiency dropping with extreme heat. Even fossil fuels can't track as well because they're governed by Carnot efficiency where the cold sink is largely affected by ambient temperatures.
The world is heating up, and there only needs to be a few days at 160 to kill all the cows, goats, chickens, start fires, and overwhelm the power grid. In the past few years we've seen the old and vulnerable die in European summers. As it gets hotter, the threshold for "vulnerable" expands to include larger and larger portions of the population.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist or is not going to be serious will not help anyone.
There's a lot of people living without air conditioning, in the developed world or otherwise. They also tend to be in many of the hotter and poorer areas around the equator. It's not a good combo :/
(Not the OP) "Uninhabitable" is a vague word, but I found it useful to think about this in terms of global stability. The US Dept. of Defense (not a traditionally environmentalist group, though perhaps traditionally alarmist) did a series of studies on this. Here's a recent summary: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/21/2002877353/-1/-1/0/DOD...
Basically habitability and stability isn't just a matter of "will this land burn you alive" but also access to cropland and rangeland, clean water, or avoiding negatives like increased hurricanes and wildfires, or simply floods and droughts. Migration out of increasingly harsh areas is expected to fuel global instability, across large regions of the world at a time, often in some of the most populous or contentious areas.
A large part of the inhabited world is absolutely uninhabitable for humans without the aid of technology, due to the cold. I'm no fan of extreme heat, but people come up with solutions for any environment.
It’s much easier to heat something than to cool it. You can build a fire without any technology at all, but you can’t do anything about unsurvivable heat without a working power grid.
It takes a lot less energy to cool down a dwelling than it does to heat it, due to the delta between the inside/outside being a lot lower when it's too hot vs when it's too cold (Which can easily go into the negatives).
Sure, it takes no technology to start a fire in an emergency, but that can't be done at a mass scale for non-emergency habitability without making the problem worse in the long run. AC can run from the very same energy that's heating up a dwelling, and power grids will need to be adjusted to incorporate more clean power sources.
> It takes a lot less energy to cool down a dwelling
...only in low humidity. Also, PV solar efficiency drops quite a bit as the temperature goes up. Carnot efficiency also drops noticeably as your cold sink, the ambient environment around you, heats up.
Are you going to provide AC to all the livestock and crops as well? Because they're kind of important in the long run too.
Running AC lowers the dwelling humidity, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Lower PV efficiency means some margin/overcapacity will be needed, not free but also not an insurmountable problem either. There's more energy being cast upon earth every single day than we'll ever need, and the same cannot be said for hydrocarbons.
Temperature control for livestock applies to cold climates too, so kind of a moot point to mention one and not the other.
Running AC in hot areas does not necessitate making climate change worse. Heat pumps are very efficient in cold climates too, but it doesn't change the fact that much more energy is required due to the temperature deltas being dealt with.
Heating is much easier, but in the right conditions you can still do a lot without power.
- The simplest is just having thermal mass to average day and night temperature. As long as the night is cold enough you can just stay in a brick or clay building with thick walls, preferably painted white.
- If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use evaporative cooling, like Persian Yakhchāls [1].
- If you go high-tech, certain paints can cool surfaces down by a couple degrees (by radiating heat at frequencies that don't get absorbed by the atmosphere, thus breaking the equilibrium between heat absorption and heat emission).
Of course there is a point where those fail. Evaporative cooling is dependent on a low wet-bulb temperature and fails quickly in humid climate. Thermal mass needs temperature differences. Paints only buy you a couple degrees. In contrast an AC can be scaled to much higher temperatures.
Your comment is 5 parents deep and not one mentions wet bulb until you just now. The wet bulb temp of Death Valley is in the 70s or 80s. Hardly unsurvivable wet bulb temperatures.
Death Valley is also a bit of an outlier in it's dryness. Of course, that's what also makes it a desert.
It wouldn't take much humidity to turn those temperatures into wet-bulb of 100+ - fatal to humans. Expanding the area of this level of heat a couple of hundred miles in any direction would probably be enough.
> Right, but we're talking about being extremely close to the point where these will fail due to unsurvivable wet bulb temperatures
I'm not sure who we is, and it wasn't clear anyone was talking about wet bulb temperatures. It's a comment on an article about Death Valley. At this point, you're just responding with things completely unrelated(behind paywalls).
Because Death Valley is our local bellwether for where heat extremes are headed. The issues of soaring temperatures will affect far more than Death Valley, especially where the humidity is much higher.
You're using the word soaring with Death Valley that has a long history of 50C+ temperatures. It may be more frequent, but hardly soaring. I'm not sure what local is in this context either, but Death Valley has a particular geography that helps it reach such high temperatures that aren't present in the surrounding areas. If you're worried about people living in this region, then looking at Death Valley isn't a good indicator. There is a long history of farming less than 100 miles away and that really isn't threatened.
Not dismissing your overall point (it's certainly easier to just combust something for heat) but it's not strictly true that you can't cool without electricity. There are techniques both modern and ancient that can help, though sadly most structures aren't built this way:
Where it gets really problematic is places that used to have a moderate climate (vs always having been hot) so the people and structures have no adaptations for the sudden extreme heat.
Yes, you can absolutely (and we will have to) mitigate hot temperatures with building design, but only up to the point where you have wet bulb temperatures >35C over several days. There are heavily populated areas that are in real danger of having something like that happening, and this is what that would look like: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
