Last week I was in a thread where someone wondered about heat, human survivability/habitability, and climate change. I've done some technical work on this specific question, so, quick thread on basics, and what to worry about.
Key term to know: The "wet bulb" temperature.
"Wet bulb" temperature is the temperature + relative humidity at which water stops evaporating off a "wet" thermometer bulb. If air is sufficiently humid (saturated w/ water vapor), evaporation will no longer cool the bulb, and it gets continuously hotter.
This matters for humans, because our bodies regulate heat via evaporation: sweat glands carry heat from body to the skin surface, where it evaporates, dissipating heat into the air. As long as you stay hydrated (and take salts! salt is important), you can stay cool at high temps
However, key interaction here is evaporation, which is controlled in part by a) amount of energy in the sweat (how much heat it is carrying) and b) how much moisture is already in the air. E.g., when people tell you "it's a dry heat" as if it's "more tolerable," they are correct.
Dry air has essentially infinite capacity to absorb moisture, so, humans can survive in very high temps if the air is dry - though when you get up into the high 120's and above, you'll start seeing hyperthermia death among children, the elderly, and infirm.
But, the wet bulb.
Wet bulb takes a minute to grok because it's not about *heat,* per se. It's about the absorptive capacity of air. A wet bulb temperature in the mid-80s F can, and does, kill humans. Heat waves in the EU & Russia in 2003 and 2010 killed over a hundred thousand people at ~ 82 F.
Reason: While body temp is ~ 97-99 F, we maintain temp by sweating. If sweat won't evaporate, our body temp rises, continuously. And when body temp hits ~108, we're dead.
For a vulnerable person in wet bulb temp, this takes much less than an hour. Naked. In the shade.
(Side note: Weather forecasters should announce the wet bulb temperature or Human Heat Index as a matter of public service)
So, what does this have to do with you? Well, up until last ~ 40 years, wet bulb temperatures were *extremely rare* on this planet.
But that's over, now. We're already seeing multiple wet bulb temperatures per year in multiple locations. By mid-century, parts of the Southeastern U.S will see *weeks* of wet bulbs *every year.*
This is quite bad. Thousands of people will die on each of those days.
This has ... implications. Human habitations get very difficult to manage when thousands and thousands of people are dying every day, for weeks, every year.
So, the moral of the story: Many of the places humans currently live on the planet are on their way to being functionally uninhabitable by humans. They will have to move. Some may try to "adapt," and some may pull it off. But this will be exceptionally difficult.
If we do everything right, starting now, there's a chance we could return some of those places to habitability for future generations, in the 3rd millenium or so. But as of today, we've already roasted most of them. Carbon emissions have a very long life in the atmosphere.
So please, help your city prepare for the refugees. Depose the NIMBYs in your city government. Defeat the car-stans who deny that all of this is happening.
Because the heat is coming. It's already here.
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Trump's call for price controls on cars -- which came right after he effectively put the US Government in charge of car production quotas -- is interesting if you unpack the politics of it.
Yes, it is a transparently communist policy. But so is everything about cars in the US.
American drivers now have multiple generations of acculturation to price controls, quotas, and mandates when it comes to cars; they are fully adapted to communism, even though they still laugh when you point it out.
And this is not a Republican thing. It's bipartisan.
Multiple US Presidents have made taxpayers bail out domestic carmakers after poor management drove them to bankruptcy. That's not something capitalists do -- if you run an unprofitable enterprise that fails, you close.
We've never let capitalism anywhere near the car industry.
For folks new to Abundance discourse you may notice that its critics are, almost to a person, the same people who, about 10 years ago, started opposing YIMBYism because YIMBYs want more homes.
A thread about what's happening 🧵
For the last ~ 40 years, housing policy in US cities has been largely determined by a coalition of NIMBY homeowners and left-leaning non-profits that lean pretty socialist. NIMBYs got what they wanted -- little to no housing -- and leftie non-profits got what they wanted: grift.
So when YIMBYs showed up it was natural for that coalition to not just hang together, but go to war:
YIMBYs are a threat to their ideology. YIMBYs properly diagnosed the problem -- a housing shortage -- that they mutually caused, and maintain for their profit and enjoyment.
The current meltdown in California insurance market — which is one of the major factors behind the number of homes built in extreme high fire hazard zones — dates to 1988.
That’s the year California voters passed Prop 103.
A political 🧵
Initially proposed by California drivers angry over having to pay cost of crashing their cars, Prop 103 was written broadly enough to cover all insurance:
It made it illegal for insurance premiums to adjust based on risk, banned the use of forecast models…
… and instituted price controls on premiums, requiring insurers to petition state every time they wanted to raise rates.
It essentially killed the primary purpose of insurance, which is to signal to market the degree of financial risk someone was taking with a house or car.
… they explained that most of the local bandwidth that provided communities with local news and programming was about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
It wiped local radio off the map.
In those days, same as today, the highest bidders were right-wing nut jobs.
For reasons I still do not understand, the major progressive/left/Democratic donor class simply do not care about owned media.
And so, rather than robust ecosystem of media supporting a broad, progressive, Democratic agenda, we have small outposts of lefty shitposters, whose …
The thing that most autonomous vehicle advocates get simply wrong, and seem to have created an ideological barrier against understanding, is the intractable relationship between mobility mode (car, bus, walk, bicycle) and land use (where homes are located, at what density).
Autonomous vehicles, at root, are still just cars. There is talk about expanding to vans/jitneys — and this is, from a mobility perspective, by far the most interesting possible application.
But they still only work in cities.
US land use is designed to maximize sales of cars.
IOW, the *current* spatial pattern of suburbs is such that you can’t live in most of them unless every adult in that home has their own car. Otherwise it’s just about physically impossible for them to go anywhere.
There are huge exceptions: “Inner ring” suburbs built …
In January of 2023, these protestors destroyed $1 million worth of construction equipment.
Their argument was that the student housing and supportive housing for the homeless would cause gentrification and displacement (I am not making this up.) . berkeleyside.org/2023/01/09/uc-…
That didn’t work. While vandalism delayed progress, entire city of Berkeley wants housing built.
So what did protesters do? Well, after October 7, 2023 they changed to make it about Palestine.
Now they oppose student/homeless housing “in solidarity with colonized peoples.”