[roenxi]

If there is a theory for how climate change will doom us, you should spend time talking about it. The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild. Eg, wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening. Human societies deal with nasty weather events already.

I've heard scenarios put as mild as a reduction in real GDP growth, which is just a non-issue compared to the risks people want to shoulder to mitigate climate change.

> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life

These people tend to be anti-nuclear in my experience; so I'm not sure from your comment if that strategy is a good idea. Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.

[ben_w]

> wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening

First time I've heard that, everyone else says "this will kill anyone experiencing it for more than a brief period, meaning hours or minutes depending on the details".

Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.

[roenxi]

> Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.

India's real growth rate is >5% p.a. They're going to be a rich society pretty soon, because they are behaving like a clever country and building lots of power plants.

And while horrific things are likely to happen in Africa, horrific things have been happening in Africa every year for my entire lifetime. So yeah, it is terrible but not going to make me depressed by the future so much as the present. They need to figure out economic growth like Asia did. It is their only hope.

> stop working outside and install aircon inside

I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without.

Order of magnitude it sounds pretty doable. I don't see where the scale issue comes from to the point where I'd consider anyone I know "doomed".

EDIT If you described snowstorms, earthquakes, bushfires or tropical cyclones in the abstract they sound civilisation ending too. They are bad but people cope.

[inference-lord]

If India is building more power plants, which I'm assuming are coal? Isn't that going to mess them up worse than before? I mean, having air-con is nice, it's not possible for the whole of India to be inside with air-conditioning on for 3+ months of the year.

Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.

[logifail]

> Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.

I was in Singapore on Friday, for one day.

There's air-conditioning in the MRT (metro) stations, but (at least from what I experienced during my brief stay) the stations are not typically closed off from the outside.

You approach a station at street level and it's perhaps 33°C (91F) w/ humidity outside. Around midday my phone reported the weather as '33°C feels like 38°C (104F)'.

You go down an open set of stairs/escalators, and it gets progressively cooler and then you're in the metro and it's pleasantly cool. I was very quickly wondering whether this wasn't a mind-blowingly wasteful use of energy.

Anyone care to comment?

[paulmd]

heat rises and cold falls, so the cold air will stay in the subway system. there is no real need for doors/etc at the entrances as long as you're going down.

the subways themselves put off a substantial amount of heat (from friction, motor loss, etc - all inefficiency eventually becomes heat) and for example in london they have problems with heat buildup in the tube system. so air-conditioning the platforms is generally desirable and probably necessary (especially in a more equatorial climate than england).

[inference-lord]

What about the waste heat from the a/c units heating the surrounding areas?

[ben_w]

> I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without.

Your "solution" is an example of what I meant by "easy on a scale of one person […] or rich societies", and no, they won't work for India. Not yet, anyway, as their power grid can't supply enough to run AC for everyone at the same time[0] in the event of a sufficiently wide and hot heatwave — and possibly never, as even the UK has measurable excess deaths during heatwaves (although caveat the UK has approximately no AC installed). On the plus side, India has completed the electrification of all the villages.

Remember, it's not just the national average that matters, if the bottom 15% can't afford it, they can't survive those events — 15% of India is earning no more than 125k INR/year[1], which at current rates is $1,508/year[2]. A few low income people might choose to get AC and have their friends over, but I think[3] it is sadly unreasonable to suggest that even a significant fraction of low income people could find a high income person with AC who will let them stay over for a bit.

Also, 45.6% are currently working in agriculture[4], and when these events happen, approximately all of that sector (in any specific location) has to stop working even if they have access to a building with AC and aren't just killed by such an event in their area. So do all the builders, though that's a much smaller sector. And when that happens, they earn less, so they have less money to spend on AC.

[0] http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/Growth%2...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/482584/india-households-...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=125000+INR+to+USD

[3] On the basis of western culture, which may be an incorrect framing… https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5317-when-asked-what-he-tho...

[4] https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-02/Discussi...

[roenxi]

This is kinda what I mean about the doomer cases I hear being weak. This is all bad, but bad in line with what humanity has pretty much always been dealing with. History is a really nasty place. The present too. There are risks here, but they are not significant enough to justify abandoning fossil fuels or economic growth. Or being gloomy, for that matter.

Using those figures, you seem to be making an argument that 15% of Indians are at risk. That is pretty bad. But the upside of business as usual is much bigger than the downside. At a 5% real growth rate, income doubles in about 15 years. That is a lot of wealth that they can use to solve this problem. And approximately 80-90% of living Indians seem to be due to the fossil fuel economy that people are blaming for global warming; so by raw numbers most people are still coming out ahead. The obvious path is to keep going with coal until it runs out.

And the doom case hinges on 85% of the population sitting there and doing literally nothing while 15% fall over and die on the street. You m might believe that is likely, but I think it is implausible. And if it does happen that way, that doesn't seem like it'd sit on my conscience.

> Also, 45.6% are currently working in agriculture

Now that is a horrific stat. I would encourage Indian's to do whatever is necessary to get those poor people out of farm jobs and into something more comfortable. That sort of agricultural sector is a path of poverty, the people can't be productive enough to sustain a comfortably materialist society.

The path to doing that probably involves a lot of power stations. Likely coal fired. This point dovetails nicely with:

> Not yet, anyway, as their power grid can't supply enough to run AC for everyone at the same time

They'll need to beef up their grid, or they will be poor and probably die horribly. More electricity fixes a lot of problems simultaneously.

[ben_w]

IMO you're continuing to demonstrate the wrong type of world model, seeing numbers as absolute cut-offs rather than distributions.

The 15% number was being used to demonstrate that wages are not equal — that number is not my free choice, it is not due to me thinking an income of US$1508/year is a magic number below which one cannot have AC, but rather it comes from how that specific income distribution graph was broken down. The underlying reality is (unless all the UBI proponents have missed a huge example), not constant income in each of those boxes; and a separate point that not everyone in any given income category will be able to choose to buy AC simultaneously even if it is available for purchase.

I am going to say that when such events happen today[0], people already die. The question is how often, and how many are impacted at any given time. And given that temperature is a continuum, what implications this has for close-to-threshold conditions where people can live through it just so long as they don't move or stand up, or the even earlier broad transition zone where they can do decreasing levels of labour before being forced to rest (answer: sub-threshold events are more frequent).

> At a 5% real growth rate, income doubles in about 15 years. That is a lot of wealth that they can use to solve this problem.

The average income doubles in 15 years, but no, it's not a lot of wealth — it's starting at a moderately low level, and there's a lot of things that are also important to spend money on, and even if everyone picks AC first and then the rest, a fixed percentage growth for all groups puts most of the numerical growth in the already rich; if you want to argue around this issue, you would need a model that shows different growth rates for different income levels[1] or that the culture is significantly different from how the west demonstrably does things[4][5].

> And approximately 80-90% of living Indians seem to be due to the fossil fuel economy that people are blaming for global warming; so by raw numbers most people are still coming out ahead. The obvious path is to keep going with coal until it runs out.

Er, what? No. Even from the pure energy argument, the obvious answer is "use the cheapest power". That's not coal, and hasn't been for a while now. At least, it is everywhere else, when I tried searching for the Indian prices the pages I was given were clearly written by ChatGPT…

Also for the specific example you picked, "until the coal runs out" would put out enough CO2 to cause measurable cognitive impacts worldwide as humans, unlike plants, do not thrive with more CO2. Nuclear power would also be "green" in this sense, though given the geopolitics of India and Pakistan specifically, I'd hope both would move away from nuclear for reasons entirely out of scope of this discussion and regardless of any optimism about the price of future reactors.

> And the doom case hinges on 85% of the population sitting there and doing literally nothing while 15% fall over and die on the street. You m might believe that is likely, but I think it is implausible. And if it does happen that way, that doesn't seem like it'd sit on my conscience.

It won't sit on my conscience either, just as the grounds for my belief already don't sit on my conscience, though my beliefs are anchored on European culture rather than Indian culture which may well be different.

Specifically with regard to heat issues: "Despite the fact that many European countries activated heat prevention plans during the summer of 2022, the estimation of over 60,000 heat-related deaths suggests that prevention plans were only partially effective."[2] (Also note that Europe has a GDP/capita about fifteen times higher than India[3], which would take 55.5 years of 5% growth to match).

And with regard to "do rich people really help poor people?", using homelessness as a proxy: "The data shows that more than one million properties across England in 2022 were unoccupied (4.01 per cent of all dwellings), an increase of nearly 60,000 homes since 2018."[4] vs "New research from Shelter shows at least 309,000 people in England will spend Christmas without a home, including almost 140,000 children. This is a stark increase of 14%, 38,100 people, in one year."[5]

Now, if you're like me, at this point you're thinking "why isn't Ben giving evidence about specifically Indian heat deaths?": I wanted to, but it seems they don't actually exist in a good quality form, and it's politically divisive within the country: "The Indian Express newspaper reported that one hospital superintendent who’d publicly linked deaths to heatstroke was later removed from his position for giving “a careless statement.” It then quoted a doctor who’d visited the same clinic as saying the causes were unclear. […] Beyond that, though, it’s symptomatic of the parlous state of health services and public data in a country that lacks the means to even know for certain how many people its broiling climate is killing, let alone take measures to help them. […] A common solution to that problem is looking at excess deaths — comparing recorded fatalities with the number you’d expect in a typical year to iron out the effects of reporting bias. […] Even that approach may be inadequate in India, however, because the most basic data on mortality is too patchy. Nationwide, roughly 8% of estimated deaths in 2019 went unrecorded, according to an annual government survey, and only 19% of the total were certified by a medical professional, a step considered routine in most countries."[6]

(Also, "fall over and die on the street" is more likely to be "go home and lie down out of the sun, and still die", as the 'wet bulb' condition is that you can't even survive in a breeze in the shade, and I'd expect people to seek shade and a breeze before the temperature reached true deadly 'wet bulb' levels over the course of any given day. This also means the AC has to be actual AC and not just a fan).

> More electricity fixes a lot of problems simultaneously.

On this we agree.

[0] and they do happen, with increasing frequency, which is why they are in the meme-sphere at all, though caveat the language in the meme sphere often conflates "hot bulb" with all heat-related deaths and that's not actually what the term means.

[1] Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_changes_in_real_in...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02419-z

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Europe+GDP%2Fcapita%...

[4] https://www.local.gov.uk/about/news/empty-homes-england-rise....

[5] https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/at_least_...

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/21/heat-wave...

[corney91]

> Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.

If environmentalists are so effective, climate change would have been a higher priority over those decades. It seems likelier to me that there's other, more convincing reasons we haven't rolled out nuclear at a huge scale. For example the following are typically more convincing and applicable to nuclear as well: high costs, high political risk, fossil fuel lobbying.

[jemmyw]

I've always been pro nuclear. We talk about it a lot now (on hn anyway), but when I was growing up in the UK the greens had such a minor voice I didn't even know their stance on the issue.

The hypothesis of doom that I subscribe to is that it'll cause cascading effects that destroy parts of the existing ecology (this is already happening) and then the same to our food supply faster than we can react to. I don't worry it's going to mass cause temperatures that kill me directly if that's your implication. It'll be social collapse far away from where I live that will spread.

I live in a safe country that gets about 80% of its power from renewables. But we don't build those wind turbines here and we certainly don't mine for their materials, if the supply of stuff goes awry we'll be just as buggered as everywhere else.

[zelphirkalt]

Well, if you don't see the problem, then please hand over your home to someone else, and move soon. Not a problem right, if your area becomes uninhabitable? Also change your diet, because of other plants growing in your (new) area, or the old ones no longer growing in your previous area. Also calculate in to pay way more rent, because world population will have less space to live in and more people compete for your new home. I am sure you also won't mind devastating floods and other weather evens happening, forcing you to leave your previous home. In case of part of climate researcher being right and there being a point of no return, please also calculate in the cost for building a climate bunker under ground.

[jay_kyburz]

>The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild

Failed crops on a global scale may result in widespread famine and war. Crops can fail as a result of not enough rain, too much rain, not enough insects, too many inspects, all kinds of climate related things.

I remember reading during covid that there is not some massive food cache somewhere with the government ready to bail us out if they need to. That we are basically living season to season.

[tda]

Putting the blame for the climate crisis on environmentalists for opposing nuclear is very disingenuous. Nuclear would not have saved us from SUV's, consumption society or all the other forces wrecking the earth we live on. If nuclear would have made electricity cheap and abundant without addressing other factors, we just would have wasted more of it.

[roenxi]

If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter. It is like someone from 200AD being worried that we're not all working the fields and we're going to starve in winter - that isn't a constraint on modern society, we broke it with cheap energy. Fuel goes in the machine, the machine does lots of work, and then we get food.

In fact, it might literally be like someone in the UK in 17xx worrying about the early industrial revolution because of climate change. The cost benefit calculation favours the industrial revolution by a heavy margin. If energy gets cheap enough, climate change happens and nobody needs to care.

[ben_w]

> If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter.

Not so — the person you're responding to was demonstrating that important things had not in fact been invented, while your example only worked out because we did actually invent stuff.

Indeed, even today electricity is only about 10% of humanity's total power usage, and that's with batteries cheap enough to make electric cars viable. (Bit of a shame that the alternative to batteries, hydrogen, still isn't cheap enough to be a great contender today, even despite the strong incentive to replace gasoline during the height of pro-nuclear attitudes and the OPEC-induced fuel crisis).