[studmuffin650]

in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer.

A wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.

[thworp]

In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The real issue is what to do about it, how to do it and in what timeframe.

With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude).

There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone.

If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions.

Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem.

The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.

[zarzavat]

A “wet bulb event” is not just a heatwave. A heatwave is a sustained period of high temperatures. You can protect yourself from a heatwave by staying indoors, using a fan, drinking water, etc.

A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of.

Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power. Anybody without AC would die, unless they found some non-evaporative way to cool themselves.

It’s the most terrifying natural disaster conceivable.

[NotMichaelBay]

> Anybody without AC would die

Couldn't you just eat ice to keep cool? Heat from blood transfers to the ice as it melts and warms in the stomach, then it leaves the body completely through urination.

[aidenn0]

Yes, consuming below-ambient liquids can cool you off. This will likely involve some form of refrigeration.

Similarly you could put a giant block of ice in front of a fan and sit there; most people would call this a from of AC though.

[sokoloff]

Indeed, we even still colloquially quote/measure the cooling capacity of air conditioning in "tons".

A ton of cooling being defined as 12000 BTU/hr, or the rate implied by the latent heat of fusion of 1 ton of ice at 0°C being consumed via melting over 24 hours.

[p1mrx]

> Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power.

Could you survive in a basement?

[aidenn0]

The really short answer: If the wet-bulb temperature in your basement is sufficiently low, then yes. Otherwise no.

Note that for a small poorly-ventilated basement, the humidity will rise from respiration, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature. For a well-ventilated basement, the air temperature will approach the outdoor temperature, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature.

If you have a giant, well-shaded, pool of water, the water temperature will usually be below the peak air temperature (water has high thermal mass, so it will take a long time for it to come up to the ambient temperature, even at high humidity, where evaporation effects are negligible) so that's another non-AC method of staying cool.

In any event pools of water and basements don't scale to densely populated areas.

[ChatGTP]

Or in a river ?

[dredmorbius]

It would of course depend on the river and its own temperature.

Keep in mind that we're now seeing sea surface temperatures above 38°C (100°F).

If the river itself is slow-moving and is in an area of prolonged heat, it will also be warm.

The areas most prone to high temperatures often also have little surface water, or at least, not enough to shelter all persons affected.

Water refuges being too warm for human survival is an early plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.

[p1mrx]

It's a lot easier to build a basement than a river.

[ChatGTP]

I was actually serious ?

[jmcqk6]

> In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life.

The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax.

If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.

[ryandrake]

Anecdote: None of my conservative-leaning acquaintances believe that Climate Change is even a top-20 problem, let alone something that requires urgent nationwide or worldwide action. I believe the filter bubble is real.

[hkpack]

> in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer.

It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.

[cogman10]

Hate to agree but yeah. We've already seen a number of deadly heat waves in Europe.

In 2003, 70,000 people died in the EU from a heat wave [1]. A fact that is never really comes up in talks about climate change.

The death toll could be millions and we'd still see deniers clamoring that we need to burn more coal for grid stability or whatever.

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...

[aeternum]

More people die of cold than heat, a fact that never comes up in talks about climate change.

Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.

[ironlake]

And think of all the money we'll save on jackets

[HPsquared]

The short-term patch is to install air conditioning (or go to the mall, or even an air conditioned car). That's what people at risk of this will do.

[dahwolf]

As is the case with the new social media meme where "Europoors" don't have ACs and should be ridiculed for it.

[whycome]

The 1896 New York heat wave lasted 10 days and killed ~1500 people. And has just 2 short paragraphs in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Eastern_North_America_hea...)

> "This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at night,"

https://www.npr.org/2010/08/11/129127924/the-heat-wave-of-18...

It wasn't necessarily a wake-up call then. But it may have at least been the crisis that spurred one guy...

[calgarymicro]

> A majority of the deaths were of working-class men in their twenties who performed manual labor.

Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.

[jncfhnb]

Some people have fantasies about these heatwaves that just decimate all living things. It’s not that simple.

It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable.

Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.

[DesiLurker]

True but you should also recognize the world has more than humans. most other species will not be able to survive such even. Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from humanity. some will be discovered immediately & some will be found in retrospect.

Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.

[jncfhnb]

> Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from humanity.

I know you threw babies in here but it feels like I have to point out that the old and sickly dying have a negligible effect on man years lost.

> Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.

I don’t really agree that the world is as fragile as you propose. But I feel like need to clarify that I’m not arguing against the threat posed by climate change broadly.

[falcolas]

> It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so.

How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.

[sjducb]

Fill a bath and get in it. The groundwater is usually much colder than the air.

However there is a limit to how long you can live in the bath.

[falcolas]

And how many bath tubs there are per-capita. Many newer homes are built with only showers.

You also have to worry about power when it comes to having access to sufficient water to cool a person in the first place.

[pengaru]

Parking yourself nude under a cold shower will keep you alive, assuming you don't run out of water.

There's no need for the bath. The shower will probably work better actually since it's constantly disposed down the drain after picking up some heat, and replenished with subterranean-temp fresh water running across your person.

[jncfhnb]

You do not need to submerge yourself underwater if that’s what you are suggesting. A bucket of water for your feet will do lots. A shower is good too.

[falcolas]

I'm not sure a bucket would be enough to cool a person down if they have no other form of heat dissipation available to them - specifically I'm not sure feet alone could dissipate heat fast enough. If the water is too cold (around 70°F IIRC), your body would constrict the blood vessels to your hands and feet, limiting how much heat could be moved to those extremities from your core.

Hence mentioning a bath tub.

Some interesting reading to go along with this topic:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750007244/downloads/19...

Of particular note is the need to remove about 1k BTU/hour when walking/doing light work, and that's only from metabolic heat generation.

And 1 BTU raises 1 pint of water 1 degree, so 1k BTU/hour would raise 5 gallons of water by an unrealistic 25° every hour.

[carapace]

Many of the places at the forefront of this threat also have water scarcity issues. There's also the problem of what to do with the water once it's heated up. You could pump it back into the ground to cool off, but eventually you're going to heat the ground itself and have an even worse problem.

[generic92034]

Also, can we all be sure that electricity will be available during such an event?

[jncfhnb]

Heat waves are dangerous. My point is that wet bulb events are not a magical inflection point.

The point to take away is that humidity matters in addition to raw temperatures. Not that there is a specific threshold at which things matter or didn’t matter.

[generic92034]

I think that point was well understood, by falcolas, to whom I was replying. But your assumption that it is not that hard to cool down seems a bit strong to me.

In some countries electricity becomes unavailable quite regularly, so relying on A/C during a crisis like that might fail. And that is assuming that A/Cs are common (they are not, in large parts of the world).

Cooling yourself down by using water from a tap may also fail, if, in such a situation, everyone in a city tries to do that. You are assuming a very high level of infrastructure and no critical failures.

[jncfhnb]

You don’t need much water. It doesn’t need to be that cool either. If you lack access to the water required to do this, which does not even need to be clean, then the lack of water is probably the bigger crisis.

Heatwaves and infrastructure failures can undoubtedly be serious threats. But the vast, vast majority of people survive wet bulb events when they encounter them.

[pengaru]

> Heat waves are dangerous. My point is that wet bulb events are not a magical inflection point.

If this imaginary graph has an inflection point, I can't think of a better one.

[losvedir]

People will need to start thinking of the summer months in some places like the winter months in others: during certain periods you need shelter with working HVAC systems, and when you go outside you need suitable gear and emergency arrangements.

I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!

[btbuildem]

The one key difference is, in cold climates we heat our spaces and any heat that "leaks out" or is otherwise incidental is absorbed by the cold outside.

In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.

[nonethewiser]

But think about the solution. It's making A/C very accessible and reliable. That requires cheap energy with a high-uptime grid. There are many ways to solve this problem but adding difficult to meet constraints to energy companies that risk price and availability is not one of them.

[NoraCodes]

The short term solution is making A/C very accessible and reliable. The long term solution is no longer putting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is imperative to do both, no matter the (e: monetary) expense.

[gopher_space]

I too see nationalizing our power grid as inevitable.

[mrjaeger]

That's actually the inciting incident for the cli-fi book "The Ministry for the Future". Overall I really enjoyed the book, was a good mix of interesting economic/policy ideas interwoven through a compelling character based narrative.

[hiatus]

What exactly is a "wet bulb event"?

[Zaskoda]

Basically, it's when the wet-bulb temperature exceeds 35C. From the Wikipedia entry:

"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"

[lukevp]

Temperature and humidity are high enough that you can’t cool off naturally via sweat. I would suspect most people don’t realize that’s even a thing. I’m from Texas, and everyone thinks they’re heat adapted and tries to act macho. A lot of people would just stay outside and keep working, ignoring any warnings they received.

[no_wizard]

In part, I'm sure culture in this particular instance is partly to blame here.

That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions.

However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.

[wonderwonder]

I expect Texas to be the first state to experience a wet bulb event. Its only a matter of time before we get a combination of extreme heat and a massive failure of their power grid.

Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing. Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom

[nocoiner]

We had hundreds of deaths in the span of 2-3 days during the winter storm in 2021. It didn’t catalyze any political change then, so unfortunately I think you’re right about the effect the next time it happens.

I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.

[ChatGTP]

People will probably blame “the woke” and of course China and India.

[irdc]

A wet bulb event occurs when the combined temperature and humidity (the so called "wet bulb temperature") exceeds the limits of human physiology, causing humans to overheat and perish even in the absence of any activity beyond basal metabolism.

I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.

[truculent]

Earnest question: what makes you doubt the depiction? Trust in infrastructure or institutions?

[irdc]

The widespread availability of air conditioning plus the fact that we've had such events before on rare occasions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_r...) and we didn't see bodies piled up in the street back then.

[RetroTechie]

True.. so far.

All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage.

And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever.

Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.

[jcranmer]

The wet-bulb temperature is the minimum temperature a wet body can reach via evaporation--effectively the minimum temperature you can reach via sweating. When the wet-bulb temperature reaches body temperature, you can only maintain body temperature via active A/C.

Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner.

"Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"

[makeitdouble]

I assume parent means a period of time where the ambient temperature is at or above the wet bulb temperature.

[jcranmer]

Ambient temperature is always at or above the wet-bulb temperature, by definition. A wet-bulb temperature measures the temperature that can be achieved after energy loss due to evaporation of water, so as long as evaporation is possible (humidity < 100%), it is lower than the actual temperature.

[makeitdouble]

Thanks for the correction, I need to revisit the subject in full I think.

[HumblyTossed]

I don't even think that would change people's minds. They'll just call it fake news and blame it on someone's laptop.