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[–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

If you haven't yet, I suggest reading 'The Ministry for the Future' by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's quite a realistic and sobering take on the near future that is to come, and how we could have a chance at turning things around. The entire plot starts with a heatwave.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    a few years I got satellite data and calculated the wet bulb temperature of everywhere. some places already experience wet bulb temps of over 60°C. it's only going to get worse.

    imagine a heatwave that will kill everyone who cant manage cooling themselves.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    I think it would take an incident that kills a bunch of people that effect global economies for anyone care.

    Everyone dies in a small Vietnamese town that makes t-shirts on the cheap. It wouldn't be the people that died that would matter, it would be the stop of cheap production. If the work can be moved elsewhere, their deaths are unimportant.

    The world is a meat grinder for the rich and powerful. Eventually most of us will die because of it, the trajectory has been that way for so long. We did stop the hole in the ozone, but only because we developed technology to reduce factories producing CO2 not because we were willing to turn them off.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    CO2 didn't cause the hole in the ozone. It was CFCs. And it wasn't any huge endeavor to get rid of them because we already had relatively cheap, readily available alternatives. CO2 was harder to get away from for a long time, but there's less and less excuse these days.

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  • 36 comments in c/climate@slrpnk.net view that post
    [–] 35 points 7 months ago (12 children)

    In lieu of trees and shade, I've been told (by a woman that was almost 100 years old) that during a really miserable heat wave, (she hated being too hot) get into a basement or anyplace that has a first level that is in - not on - the ground.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    Unfortunately, that’s just not possible everywhere. For instance, where I live the water table is like 6 inches below the ground. Pretty much every house here has a crawlspace foundation. The few that do have basements pretty much all have mold issues and need sump pumps, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (8 children)

    Sounds like a good source for water cooling! Dig a small well and pump the water around you to cook your room.

    Not sure how effective this really is, should get some amount of cooling and have been curious to try it sometime.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    That's the issue with high wet bulb conditions: they are too hot and humid to allow for evaporative cooling to work.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Good news, it isn't evaporative. It relies on the ground being cooler than the air.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Oh, you mean geothermal cooling. Yes, some buildings use that for heating/cooling by using vertical wells or buried horizontal loops coupled with heat pumps. It's fairly green, though can be an expensive investment up front if one needs to use vertical wells due to lack of real estate. It's still air conditioning, just coupled to underground water as a heat sink instead of outside air.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    The DIY method I mentioned is just dumping heat into the ground using water to transfer it. No heat pump, just a pump and much cheaper. Of course anything with a heat pump is going to be more powerful.

    Not sure how many watts of cooling something like that could realistically manage but I have been interested in the idea.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I'm picturing a Corsi-Rosenthal box with automotive radiators connected in series instead of air filters! The inlet hooked to a sink, and the outlet hooked to the drain. Heat losses would be introduced at the well's pump, and at the box fan motor. As long as nothing leaks, the only things to worry about would be the added power consumed, the added wear on the well pump, and the well water's rate of replenishment. Oh, and the condensation which may collect on the radiators. An interesting DIY idea. I wonder if anyone has already tried it.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like you are combining both ideas somehow? The Corsi-Rosenthal box radiator in your sink would absolutely work. Though I don't know how much water you would be going through for it.

    If you instead used a closed loop and pumped water through the ground to cool off then the only thing going is the pump and fan.

    Condensation is a possible issue, tray and bucket to collect it?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Hmm, let me elaborate. If I were to do it, I'd hook a hose up to the spigot on a basement sink. I've seen some that have external threads so one may connect a garden hose to it. I would then take my length of garden hose into a convenient space in the basement, perhaps one that helps maximise airflow or is close to a basement drain or some other available place. Then I would plumb the garden hose into the inlet of one of my radiators, and the outlet to the next inlet, and so on. As the relatively cool well water passes inside the radiators, my box fan draws warm humid air (almost 100% humidity on a dangerous wet-bulb day!) through the grilles of the radiators and exchanges some heat. In theory, the exhaust of the box fan/radiator assembly is now somewhat cooler and possibly drier. The now heated well water I would then plumb from the outlet of the final radiator to the sink so it could go down the drain. If the heated water were returned to the well, there are contamination issues as well as significantly more heat losses depending on the available water capacity and exchange rate of the well. Does this setup differ from what you had in mind?

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  • [–] 56 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Anything that doesn't kill you brings you closer to death in some way if it is hurtful.

    Heatwaves push EVERYBODY closer to the edge and for many elderly and people with health issues the edge was already right there.

    I don't care if a city can claim technically zero heat deaths in the immediate aftermath of a heatwave, people die indirectly from the pure body stress of it excaberating other pre-existing issues and the impact doesn't disappear the next day.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Anything that doesn't kill you brings you closer to death in some way if it is hurtful.

    Uhhh exercise can be hurtful (muscle soreness) and I'm sure we can find other examples

    Not that I disagree with the rest of your post. I love a good sauna, but the joy of it is that it ends when I get out (and maybe jump into a pile of snow). A heat wave is just... Taxing

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  • [–] 27 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I love it when OP adds their own clarification in the square brackets to de-clickbait a title

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    Hasn't it been like 20 years since Afghanistan was digging anticipatory mass graves before summer because of the expected number of routine deaths that would be caused by the heat?

    We've been in the middle of the dystopian climate catastrophe for decades now. It's amazing some people haven't noticed.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    heatwaves have always wiped out people haven’t they?

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    This is talking about the weather conditions at which a person is guaranteed to die if they are outside for six hours in the shade (or at night).

    Previously climate scientists said this would happen at a wet bulb temperature^1^ of 35 Celsius, theoretically enough to prevent a sweat-drenched human body from overheating. However, research has demonstrated the threshold is lower and doesn't perfectly follow a single wet bulb temperature. And the scientific article that the news article is about shows these conditions have already occurred several times, when it was previously thought this threshold had not been breached yet.

    Of course people can find shelter in an air conditioned buildings, underground, or under a forest canopy. But billions of people do not have access to these options. At some point they can either die or migrate, and this research shows that point requires less climate change than previously predicted. Combined with climate change occurring at a faster rate than the median expectation, mass climate migration is coming a lot sooner than expected.


    ^1^: the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is wet. If the air is dry, evaporation will cause this temperature to be lower than the air temperature, which is also the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is dry.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    What we have gotten here have killed double digit folks. usually elderly or homeless. won't take much higher to move this into triple digits I think. Just going to get worse form there and this is a good place. Remember when where to go to avoid climate change was all the rage and then the pacific northwest went on fire.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Remember how they solved this in that one book that starts with the sole survivor of a massive heat dome?

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    That book was The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson and the solution involved assassinations at scale of oil and gas industry executives as well as destruction by drone of all fossil fuel tankers and egregiously polluting cargo ships. Also, massive releases of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, aggressive immobilization of Antarctic glaciers via water pumps, and the onboarding of all central banks to rebase currency according to how much CO₂ you can fix into the ground instead of capitalism's belief in endless future growth. It is a very optimistic story, but one we'll have to carry out eventually in some form to at least the degree described in the book.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That was a surprisingly grisly start to an otherwise extremely disappointing book.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Kim Stanley Robinson is elderly now, time for him to put down the quill and pick up gardening. I'm constantly surprised that the people who are the most pro-tech and colonize space and "explore that" are never for the #1 most important thing: anti-aging and life extension research.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Careful, when I mention this I get downvotes and called a Doomer.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Look back on this moment fondly: the time before "wet bulb" became widely known...

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  • [+] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)
  • 4 comments in c/collapse@sopuli.xyz view that post
    [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I know I will be sent to work at that temperature anyway. Adapt or die.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    How about we adapt by organizing to force governments to pass genuinely good workplace regulations around limits to working in the heat?

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    Ok, deal!

    I just need 250k drones, and about 20 million grenades.

    Or we can do things the economic way, which won't get us bombed. Those are the only ways you can reliably change anything. They are all different forms of force. I prefer economic for obvious reasons.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    Human raisins.

    Hahahaha

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