Reminds me of the opening to "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In that book, a wet bulb event (high humidity and high temp) in India pushes infrastructure past the breaking point, the grid goes down, AC systems still running on generators are overloaded and overcrowded and fail, the water temp goes over body temp, and millions die.

The positive cultural/societal reaction to the disaster strained my suspension of disbelief pretty hard, as is typical of KSR novels in my experience, but the idea of a heat wave causing a massive catastrophe (and the poignant description of attempting to live through it) stuck with me.

I don't believe I have heard of KSR before, but I have been telling my friends that an incident like this is in our (the world's) future.

It is feeling more and more imminent with each passing year.

And then there will be cries of nobody saw this coming.

I was also going to mention wet bulb temperatures as well. As horrible as the conditions described in the article is, it describes a very dry heat. Which means sweating and water can still help.

The really scary thing will be when the wet bulb temperature goes above 35 degrees, and humans can only survive with AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

I stayed in a mongoloid home in Tunisia last year. It was lovely. It was a large, central, below-grade courtyard with dugout, underground rooms branching off it. The rooms were cool all day. By being below grade, the courtyard was in shade most of the day and didn't get too hot. Through clever tunneling, the rising heat generated a draft.

I also learned that mongoloid, at least in Tunisia, is not considered a derogatory term.

I believe you mean troglodyte homes. It's literal Greek for "hole-dweller" but become an insult by association.

Someone wrote a book about this, they called the people who went underground the Morlocks. It was a cautionary tale...

There are cautionary tails about everything humans do. Good leadership and the desire to survive can keep some of us around. If we have to stay down there for thousands of generations, well, it won't affect me or anyone I know. We can jump off the evolutionary bridge when we get to it. Ideally our automatons would be geoengineering the planet to make the surface hospitable once again prior to our becoming Trogs.

> Good leadership and the desire to survive can keep some of us around.

I would posit that good leadership and desire to survive could prevent humanity from retreating to the earth like naked mole rats.

I would posit that good leadership and desire to survive could prevent humanity from retreating to the earth like naked mole rats.

It very well could. I like having contingency plans and not letting my survival and the survival of our civilization solely depend on the promises of congress critters. I also want to learn earth bending from the giant badgermoles so I am biased.

You can live underground during extreme heat, you cannot build an underground shelter under extreme heat.

When the day comes do you think there will be room for everyone?

you cannot build an underground shelter under extreme heat.

Yup. That's why I said,

"but they would have had to start that project some time ago"

When the day comes do you think there will be room for everyone?

Depends when the project starts, how much money goes into it based on the nations priority. There are subway systems in some countries designed for this purpose that can hold entire cities. Not entire nations but enough that a nation or civilization could be restarted. It would be a very rough start.

If countries started putting a small percentage of their GDP into building underground cities a few decades ago they could probably save most people. They would have to store up massive amounts of freeze dried food and have water treatment facilities that can hold lakes of drinkable water.

> The really scary thing will be when the wet bulb temperature goes above 35 degrees, and humans can only survive with AC.

That's already an everyday reality in Singapore.

Depends on the season. "Everyday" was a poor choice of word, but 35+ wet bulb temperatures happen and are to some extent routine and expected.

I'm sweating as I read this in a non-air-conditioned room.

No, I'm already not comfortable indoors. It's much worse outdoors.

"But global warming is a hoax. And even if it wasn't it's not our fault. People couldn't be the cause. And even if it is our fault there's nothing we could do about it."

We have broken our world for the greed of a few. History will not be kind to us.

True that it’s a few in a global sense but it’s almost every user of this website surely, the vast majority of whom will continue to “break the world” so to speak which makes this less a lament and more a boast.

No. It's really a small few. It's largely Republican politicians, especially Trump, protecting coal and petrochemical companies.

Humanity is a blip in Earth's history. We'll be a historical curiosity to whatever comes next just like the dinosaurs are to us.

I hope some record of us stays so whoever comes next would be able to learn from our stupidity.

Yeah, and eternal shame is all we deserve.

I certainly agree that the powerful elites bear a disproportionate share of the guilt for the harm they have caused.

But I also believe that much of what's going on in the world isn't solely their fault and is also in many ways an emergent behavior. We are all like ants in an ant mill. Each of us is doing the things that locally make sense for us (even taking into account our desires to take care of the earth!), but our interactions with the economy and the market build a sort of giant super-organism out of us all whose behavior is to fuck up the climate.

> We are all like ants in an ant mill. Each of us is doing the things that locally make sense for us

Easily lead by chemtrails, yes - but it is a fact that some individuals have disproportionately more influence over "local zeitgeist" than others.

As a brief recap; the atmosphere become a greater and greater insulating blanket as a direct result of human use of fossil fuels was solid science as far back as 1967 [0] and the larger more influential nations of the world accepted that finding and discussed actions in the 1970s [1].

Since that time there's been a near non stop flood of FUD about the inevitable effect of rising CO2 that has been pushed out by the likes of the Koch brothers (now just one), Christopher Monckton, and many others directly benefitting from fossil fuel industry.

People in middle North America rolling coal and spitting on public transport projects have had their worldview been shaped by media crafted by think tanks with a mandate to obscure cold(?) reality and that lifestyle has set as aspirational to the world.

[0] Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity - Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences Volume 24 Issue 3 (1967) https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

[1] eg: United Nations Conference on the Human Environment Stockholm, Sweden, June 1972.

The last part is just true. Once technology, military, and energy intersect, there's pretty much nothing you can do but slowly march over the cliff. If it's not climate its nuclear winter.

See I could agree with the first part. But then you add We have broken our world for the greed of a few. After that I sort of understand why so many folks reject the former – they're rejecting the empty moralizing.

If you truly believe climate change is real then also admit that "We all have broken the world", except perhaps some uncontacted peoples in the Amazon.

Anyone who has ridden in an automobile, a train, a plane, a powered boat has contributed. Anyone who has used or purchased goods transported with any of the above has as well. Anyone who's eaten crops grown with large amounts of industrial fertilizers has contributed (e.g. most of the world).

The oil companies just produce what everyone in the world wants and wants cheap.

Not everyone's footprint is the same, though.

If I cut down my plane flight in half that means I'll take a plane every two years, meaning I'll also see my family half as much. You'd also have to include that, since I travel economy, you'd divide my contribution by ~350.

If Taylor Swift cuts her plane travel by half she'd "only" make 51 trips a year [1] on a plane that carries 12 and would still make more money in a year than what I'll see in my lifetime.

IMO, saying that both of us are contributing equally as much to global warming is just unfair.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-spent-160-hours...

I didn't say we're all equally culpable. We're not. Yet en masse we're all guilty to some degree.

There's only what 10's of thousands Taylor Swifts in the world. Yet there's billions of everyone else. The majority of greenhouse gasses likely come from the aggregate of everyone.

It doesn't always work that way.

A personal example: I don't drive. I use public transit a couple of times a year. I am in private cars maybe once every two year. I haven't flown in about 15 years. Clearly this is a contrived example. My energy use patterns are much more typical when using other metrics. That said, it is also the flip side of being a Taylor Swift of the world. There is a point in the developed world where the millions are using much more energy than the thousands.

I said developed world because there are also parts of the world that simply don't have access to my gratuitous level of energy use. To say that they are guilty of contributing based upon the technicality that they are directly or indirectly using a disproportionately small amount of energy is beyond insulting. It is also a blatant way to paper over our responsibility.

> Globally, the poorest 50% emit roughly 4.4 billion tons to 4.7 billion tons equivalent annually, accounting for about 11% to 12% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

The “less-developed” bottom half of the world population still produces about a tenth of the annual co2 production annually.

That means instead of potential climate catastrophe in 10 years it’d take 100 years if the top half disappeared tomorrow. Obviously an overly simplistic argument but its meant to show that the problem would just be slower but not gone if we got rid of the “wealthy”.

Now I don’t believe they’re equally as culpable. Yet I also firmly believe the vast majority would choose the same as us in developed world have if they could.

Ultimately that’s more of my point. What’s happening isn’t due to some evil plot by the ultra wealthy. It’s the result of human nature.

Some unscrupulous ultra wealthy might hasten it by a few years or a decade, but the core problem is human nature and an abundance of fossil fuels.

The “wealthy” are also the most likely to prevent catastrophe by developing renewables, etc.

There are only about 1.6 billion cars in the world. Only about 20% of the world population has access to a personal car. Less than that have ever ridden a plane, and less than 10% fly with any regularity.

A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.

Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.

The biggest hope at this point honestly is that fewer people are having kids and we're on track to halve the world population in another couple generations. Greenhouse emissions cut by half.

The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.

Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.

Not all participants are equal.

You are conflating participation from equality, yes everyone participates in the system, it takes a lot of privileged to be able to disassociate ones self from the system itself. The power dynamic within the system favors the wealthy, whom have decided that this is the path we are going down.

Writing about "the wealthy" on a site like HN is always interesting.

Who do you mean?

The vast majority of HN commenters are 10%ers and very many are 1%ers.

But there's always someone richer to complain about.

HN loves to nit-pick about what "the wealthy" actually means, but in most contexts, when someone complains "the wealthy" did this or "the wealthy" did that, what they mean are a very, very tiny number of people who are not on HN, not in anyone on HN's family, and not intimately known by anyone on HN.

When someone says "the wealthy" are getting rich to everyone's detriment, they are almost never talking about the doctor who lives three doors down the street from you who drives a nice new 911 or the guy who owns 20 laundromats in your city. I think we all know who we're talking about.

Broadly speaking, when anyone says the rich or the wealthy, they mean people richer than themselves. I’ve seen everyone from line workers to multimillionaires do it.

Are they guiding policy and making decisions at corporations or just living within the existing framework? He's talking about the people shaping the world and future.

Not all people have equal culpability. It's absurd to be like, well you havent successfully waged an eco-terroristic war to overturn the system so you're just as bad as someone actively leading a lobby group to cast doubt on the science, or bribing politicians not to act on it, or even just as someone who votes in favor of people who resist action. In fact it's just another tactic of denialism to say "if you can't personally solve this problem just give up and caring is ineffective so you shouldn't care"

That comic is popular only because it absolves people of personal responsibility, not because it makes a great point.

If it weren't for oil companies going out of their way to sabotage alternative fuels through politicians, misinformation, and a myriad of other abuses I'd be more inclined to believe you. Not everyone is equally culpable in this, there are many who have been trying to get rid of oil as the main fuel source for a long time.

Hell, even Greenpeace had a huge campaign against nuclear, ensuring we burn coal for decades more than we should have.

two things can be true at the same time. oil and coal before it pulled billions of people out of extreme poverty, but the debt taken on in terms of CO2 will come due. if the gulf stream stops, we're all in for a ride - or worse, our grandchildren.

I'm personally in the 'drill and burn as fast as possible in a mad rush to fusion power' camp so we get a way to fix this shit rather than the 'stop civilization from doing its thing overnight' camp. alas, neither is happening.

But then why not "mad rush to build battery banks everywhere" instead of "mad rush to fusion power"?

It can't very well be any more expensive.

Batteries give returns right now, fusion only in the future. Maybe.

I worked at a warehouse last year. Managers always breathing down my neck to work faster. Constant stress for 9 hours straight. (Okay, we got a lunch break at least. There are worse jobs!)

It got me wondering. Alright, what's his problem. Well, his manager is breathing down his neck too. It's literally his job to make my day as stressful as possible. Okay, why? You trace that chain and where does it end up? Fat capitalist?

Well, something something mutual funds. Okay, that's beyond me.

But what else? Well, where's that pressure coming from? It's the customer. If the company stopped whipping us, and let us work at a normal pace, they'd need 40% more employees to cover the work. Delivery costs would increase proportionally, and suddenly grandma would stop buying from us. She'd go to the company that whips their employees. The whole place would go under.

Something something, Moloch is my nan?

I wonder if the government might consider reversing the circadian cycle and tell people to work in the night and sleep in the day. At this point its better because IIUC many animal's reproductive system shuts down at such high temperatures.

And I would not discount this govt considering it given that far less rational, crazier, things have happened in the past like for instance randomly cancelling high denomination cash notes.

> Poor people don't have the luxury of worrying about the heat

Just.. damn man

> For eight or nine days, temperatures of 47-48C continued without a break

Wasn't sure if the night time temps stayed that hot due to some factor but it appears that's the daytime high.

> Overnight temperatures remain around 30C.

In India even middle class people can't afford AC. However, Indian government and musk is worried about falling birth rate.

We know that cutting down trees increases heat and intensifies drought but we continue to do it, how bad do things need to get before we reverse course?

Part of the reason USA is clean is because it has exported factories to asia. The US did clean up a lot through regulation too, so it’s not just outsourcing, but global supply chains definitely move some of the environmental cost around. Not pointing any fingers and the asian countries did accept those industries of their own free will because there's money in it but it isn't as simple as you say it is. Earth is a giant room. Other countries don't exist in a different universe. Same thing is happening with data centres now. They're being criticised in the USA because of environmental concerns but india is welcoming them. It's the cost of being poor. You gotta choose between two bad options and pick the one that is less bad.

... when we find that it also affects us - sat on our fat backsides in our air conditioned gold plated ballrooms.

Human land use is incredibly inefficient. As a simple example, in the US the vast majority of corn production is ethanol or animal feed (which is incredibly inneficient on a calorie basis). Then when you take into account low density residential and their endless lawns (turf grass has by far the most acres of any crop in the US) and a million other poor uses of land and there's a lot we can do, even at 8 billion people, without destroying every forest.

The issue isn't that the problem isn't solvable, there are tons of things that have huge environmental benefits. The problem is that these generally require some sacrifice (e.g. denser housing with much smaller lawns, eating more resource efficient foods like lentils, moving away from fossil fuels) but there's not sufficient collective will for actually doing these things.

I think such problem are unsolvable. In America, people can't live without meat and they will always justify it by bringing pasture raised cattle farm :/

Pretty sure there’s a middle ground between “forced sterilisation” and “boil humans to death in 50°C heat,” don’t you?

Cutoff petroleum-derived fertilizer except for those who can afford carbon credits.

Lots of chatter about global warming / climate change in the thread, but that's not what the piece is actually about per se?

> They have lived with heat for generations. What worries researchers is not that the district is hot, but that it is becoming hotter, for longer, in a landscape losing the trees and water that once helped keep temperatures in check.

So there are two base claims, and then another building on top:

- the pattern in which the heat exhibits has changed / is changing, not the "amount of heat" so to speak (temperatures have always been about this miserably hot there)

- the developments in the area have changed the landscape significantly over the years (a change in vegetation coverage and infrastructure)

- that the latter is causing the former (and implying that if it was undone, this phenomenon would also resolve)

A half-hearted "search" "confirmed" to me the developments and the change in landscape plenty convincingly enough, but not the heat pattern changes (data access troubles). It'd seem to me that just like the locals report, this year is exceptional. The correlation between the amount of overall landscape change and the heat pattern changes further seem rather loose, although I'm sure the relationship is nonlinear.

Even aside from that though, the conclusion doesn't automatically hold up. It's entirely believable, as the phenomenon itself is well established afaik, but that's not the same as it being correct in this case. I guess such an analysis would be research paper material though, not a BBC news article, so maybe my expectations are a bit misplaced.

What I find bizarre is the word "siesta" doesn't appear in this article.

People have been working around the hot summer hours in Southern Europe for centuries. Until recent times it was part of the culture.

It's part of the culture where I live, but the heat keeps increasing. 45 in dry heat (unless you work outside) is fine if you get cooler nights to recover, but when you don't get a break, it's lethal. Also aircon helps you but adds significantly to the heat outside in urban areas, causing what feels like a vicious circle. Anyway, where I live aircon is not common and electricity costs are high.

Why is there a billion people in India if these conditions exist?

It has less space than USA and almost triple the population.

Its never made sense to me why the birthrate was so high in countries with deadly living conditions, meanwhile the population in the United States with excellent conditions is declining.

> Why is there a billion people in India if these conditions exist?

Not to be crude, but this should be obvious. Similar to many poor areas anywhere in the world, but what else do you do all day hiding indoors (due to violence, poverty, et al) for entertainment, with very limited income? Physical intimacy is fun.

It's also partly because the society is agrarian by population, culture, and education. This is born out by behavioral signals "Despite high awareness (over 99%), access and choice remain challenges, with only 56.5% of married women using modern contraception according to NFHS-5 (2019-21)" - Children are a support system and a labor font. Growing wealth by growing a family is a historically successful pattern (albeit not a guarantee).

> Its never made sense to me why the birthrate was so high in countries with these hostile conditions, meanwhile the population in the United States with excellent conditions is declining.

What do humans do all day with all the creature comforts and an expectation they will always have them to some degree? They have less children in trade for better income, investment, and comfort. Industrial nations have been tracking this for decades.

Pulp's Common People had a line for me that summed up the working-class existence:

# And you dance and drink and screw. Because there's nothing else to do.

It's about the level of education, especially around family planning/birth control, how easily women can refuse, what other avenues there are for people to keep themselves satisfied besides sex, and what people can afford.

The well off, well educated city dwelling portion of the Indian population is approaching similar standards to the West, couples have maybe 1 or 2 children, women have more freedom to refuse, while the cost of raising a child to have a better life than they had is still low enough.

The poorer segments are gradually getting there, but it takes time.

I hope that the case isn't that you're not actually curious and are trying to imply that the population needs to be made to decline by force.

If you are reading this in your climate controlled northern hemisphere room, be reminded that the people suffering this are not just going to disappear, and they will need to live somewhere, somehow, and they will be more motivated than you will ever be. If you love your "western comfort" so much, the best thing you can do is to make sure other people than yourselves can also have a bare minimum of living conditions.

There needs to be a population decline in these places where living conditions are not amenable to human existence.

Yet somehow theres over a billion people.

That's beside the point. Fact is, there are a billion people there now.

We can either make them want to stay there, away from our "western comforts" (blegh), or force them to stay there at the cost of the very comforts we wanted to keep for ourselves.

"If you let your neighbor's house burn, expect to breathe smoke"

> But what made this summer's episode unusual was its persistence.

But, but—it's not summer in the Nothern Hemisphere yet.

I know people who insist that the seasons start on the first of March/June/September/December. It makes no sense from the perspective of the Earth's orientation toward the sun (astronomical seasons), but apparently "meteorological seasons" are a thing, and people go by them.

The physical footprint of a data center is far smaller than a city, so that would limit heat island effects that arise from things like surface albedo (which are only material over large areas). In terms of raw heat dissipation though, an exceptionally large data center could compete with a small city.

Yeah, but I’m wondering if they are hotter or more consistently hotter than a city which while hotter than a forest still has trees and parks etc.

AI (Compute/GPU) has always been first citizen on this planet. Cradle to Grave in AC environment. Humans, yeah, they'll live in the heat. Or not.

We must spend trillions of dollars on AI as if we are going to be extinct. Meanwhile, nobody has any money for massively increasing clean energy, which is possible now, just deploy solar (dirt cheap) everywhere, use EVs to dump excess production during the day.

Datacenters are subsidized everywhere (just like fossil fuels), and they get the best and first cuts of everything. Google is building a mega DC in Vizag, India, with massive incentives from Govt.