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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 a

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.

HumblyTossed 3y ago
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.
hiatus 3y ago
What exactly is a "wet bulb event"?
- irdc 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Earnest question: what makes you doubt the depiction? Trust in infrastructure or institutions?
    - irdc 3y ago
      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_recorded_wet-bulb_temperatures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_r...) and we didn't see bodies piled up in the street back then.
      - RetroTechie 3y ago
        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.
- lukevp 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - gaulish 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - wonderwonder 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I assume parent means a period of time where the ambient temperature is at or above the wet bulb temperature.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Thanks for the correction, I need to revisit the subject in full I think.
- Zaskoda 3y ago
  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"
- jcranmer 3y ago
  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"
whycome 3y ago
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_heat_wave 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-1896-and-the-rise-of-roosevelt?ft=1&f=1022 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...
- gaulish 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - truculent 3y ago
    Wouldn’t the rain today spit in the idea of so-called “summer”?
  - __alexs 3y ago
    If a thing that used to be a 1 in 100 year event starts happening every 10 years and all the science says it's because of man made climate change then yeah we can totally do things to make it go back to happening once every 100 years again.
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  > 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.
mrjaeger 3y ago
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.
hkpack 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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-are-most-at-risk-of-dying-in-european-heatwaves https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    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.
  - aeternum 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      And think of all the money we'll save on jackets
- dahwolf 3y ago
  As is the case with the new social media meme where "Europoors" don't have ACs and should be ridiculed for it.
nonethewiser 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    [dead]
- gopher_space 3y ago
  I too see nationalizing our power grid as inevitable.
losvedir 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
thworp 3y ago
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.
- jmcqk6 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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.
jncfhnb 3y ago
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.
- falcolas 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        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.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

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.

hiatus 3y ago

What exactly is a "wet bulb event"?

irdc 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Earnest question: what makes you doubt the depiction? Trust in infrastructure or institutions?
  - irdc 3y ago
    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_recorded_wet-bulb_temperatures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Highest_r...) and we didn't see bodies piled up in the street back then.
    - RetroTechie 3y ago
      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.
lukevp 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - gaulish 3y ago
    [flagged]
- wonderwonder 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
makeitdouble 3y ago
I assume parent means a period of time where the ambient temperature is at or above the wet bulb temperature.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Thanks for the correction, I need to revisit the subject in full I think.
Zaskoda 3y ago
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"
jcranmer 3y ago
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"

whycome 3y ago

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_heat_wave 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-1896-and-the-rise-of-roosevelt?ft=1&f=1022 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...

gaulish 3y ago
[flagged]
- truculent 3y ago
  Wouldn’t the rain today spit in the idea of so-called “summer”?
- __alexs 3y ago
  If a thing that used to be a 1 in 100 year event starts happening every 10 years and all the science says it's because of man made climate change then yeah we can totally do things to make it go back to happening once every 100 years again.
calgarymicro 3y ago
> 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.

mrjaeger 3y ago

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.

hkpack 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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-are-most-at-risk-of-dying-in-european-heatwaves https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
- HPsquared 3y ago
  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.
- aeternum 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    And think of all the money we'll save on jackets
dahwolf 3y ago
As is the case with the new social media meme where "Europoors" don't have ACs and should be ridiculed for it.

nonethewiser 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
gopher_space 3y ago
I too see nationalizing our power grid as inevitable.

losvedir 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

thworp 3y ago

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.

jmcqk6 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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.

jncfhnb 3y ago

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.

falcolas 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      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.