95-Degree Days: How Extreme Heat Could Spread Across the World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It would be wise to promote passive solar design. Relying on AC just burns more fuel and this makes global warming worse. It winds up being a vicious cycle and it isn't actually necessary.
We also need to support more pedestrian and bike options. There are lots of little things that can help. These tend to not get counted and when things don't get as bad as people expected, this news tends to get swept under the rug. But if you are really concerned about this, you can make some modest lifestyle changes to help curb this trend. If you live in a first world country, your modest efforts will generally count for more than you think because we tend to consume so much more than people in less developed countries.
Some years back when I was taking environmental law classes, one American consumed something like 200 times as much as someone from India. So cutting back a few percent as an American is potentially about like outright eliminating the impact of several people from a less developed country. Even very modest cut backs can be about like someone from a less developed country cutting their consumption in half.
I think we really need to push for passive solar design. It is the answer that allows for high quality of life and lowered use of electricity. Most other answers involve doing without. This does not.
The upstairs gets a little warm during the day, but is tolerable by bedtime since the outside temperature has cooled by then. The downstairs stays comfortable all day long.
It helps that this is an attached condo with neighbors to each side, so there's effectively no heat coming in from the sides, just the roof, front and back of the condo.
The time lag of the building material and the decrement factor are also very important. Tge time lag should ideally be close to 10-12 hours in order to dampen day/night variations in temperature.
https://www.new-learn.info/packages/clear/thermal/buildings/...
This is why most of the time passive solar involves carefully planning before you build. Otherwise the best you can do is sunshades, insulation, landscaping and white roofs.
Night time temperatures dropped into the 60's, so by turning on the fan at night (which blew air out and upstairs window, bringing in the cool air in throughout the house), I think we would have been fine even in a longer heat wave. By morning, it was cool enough to need a blanket in bed.
If temps didn't drop so significantly at night, then we may have had more problems.
The house is standard wood-frame construction, so doesn't have a lot of thermal mass, though it is on a concrete slab, so that may have kept the downstairs cooler.
And yes, it can help on 35c / 95f days.
In Australia, even in a non aircon place I'm pretty much fine at 35c. Provided: I have a small fan, and I keep the place air tight. Having proper insulation would help a lot.
It's kind of a little known trick, on really hot days (95+) you want to open the windows but you really need to keep them closed to keep the cool air in and hot air out.
When done right, it is vastly more efficient and has far fewer side effects in terms of things like waste heat.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263514...
http://www.motherearthnews.com/green-homes/passive-solar-hom...
https://www.homepower.com/articles/home-efficiency/design-co...
Also, no reason you can't plant or prune existing trees/shrubbery such that they don't become a blocker for snow, we do it all the time out in Eastern Oregon. A little forethought goes a long way.
Isn't a huge part of it, that Americans outside of NYC basically have to have a car?
In the UK, my parents had snow every year where they lived. Now snow in the same area is getting extremely rare, happening only twice in large-ish amounts over the past 10 to 15 years (source: i lived there too for over 20 years). Over my (rather) short time on Earth, i swear that we never used to get so many heatwaves as a child.
It feels like we all collectively killing our children (or if not them, then their children), but nobody can do anything about it. The future of Earth's climate is one of those things that really gets people down it seems from a very anecdotal view of the people around me. The helplessness of it all.
I know we haven't been on the verge in this way, but I do really believe that we can overcome this with human innovation. Even if it means having to pummel some rich, greedy folks first.
I just don't believe we will.
In fact I would bet a significant dollar amount that by 2035 or so we will have done nothing and we might be debating risk mitigation strategies since, by then, the effects may finally be too profound to ignore (e.g. chunks of Miami Beach regularly under water).
What is depressing is that even when local benefits are present, it is challenging to enact policy. Case in point: the folks over at Citylab periodically write about the loss of urban forests.
Here is an article from May'17: McMansions Are Killing L.A.'s Urban Forest. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/05/as-officials-push-for...
Look at the attached map, even the liberal enclaves of Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan Beach, BelAir, Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills show tree cover loss.
Sad.
Realistically, we can't expect people to live peacefully in lands without food and water. This is going to kickstart the biggest migratory wave in history.
No, we don't. Large-scale geoengineering proposals have already been made and they are like <$1B each. Many have been calculated to reduce global average temperature by multiple degrees for hundreds of years. It's completely ridiculous that everyone is still complaining about climate change. $1B is significantly less than the total cost spent worrying about these things so far, not to mention the cost of actual damage already incurred and predicted to occur.
EDIT: for starters, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_climate_engineering_to... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Proposed_s...
Um, Source please?
"Stop cutting down trees goddammit" doesn't seem all that hard.
And trees can make a big difference -- just think about the temperature drop when you step into a dense forest from an open meadow.
All animadversion aside, though, your suggestion of "a few hundred people [switching] from driving to walking commutes", merely upon the erection of a new highrise with good transit access, strikes me as idealistic unto sheer fantasy, at least in the context of current United States culture. I switched back to transit myself a year and a half ago, and remain very glad that I did - but it's not something that's happening on any kind of scale, nor does this situation seem likely to change soon. Getting to work via public transit and shanks' mare? That's something poor people do - poor people, a few goobers trying to make some kind of political point, and weirdos like me who grew up in nowheresville Mississippi and still sound like it after twenty years on the East Coast, and of whom it's therefore not surprising to see deviant, if harmless, behavior such as taking trains to work and following deer trails just to see where they go.
(Okay, maybe that wasn't quite all animadversion aside, and I fear I more hardly treat those whom I here sidewise describe than is quite properly their due - certainly they mean no harm, and had I not the experience that I do, I'm sure I would share the same sort of attitude I describe. But I'm having a hard time being evenhanded at the moment, because just last weekend I found one of my favorite verges had been torn up for shitty rich people condos to be defecated upon the place where it was, and this being baseball season, I'm getting a constant gutful of people slumming on my goddam trains. I suppose I should apologize for unburdening myself as I seem to have done, but what the hell? Perhaps it will elicit responses more worthwhile than the comment which inspired their origin.)
More people living that kind of lifestyle necessarily means filling in open space within cities and building tall buildings that cast shadows. When you successfully conserve open space and protect existing residents from shadow, the rest of us stay out (as you intended), and keep driving around the sprawl we currently live in.
Do you seriously think anyone who moves to New York or San Francisco drives to work? Hell no! It would cost $1000/mo in parking alone, which would be idiotic when your home and work are connected by a few blocks or a few subway stops.
Reducing driving requires shifting the population onto land that's already occupied. There's no shortage of will to do this: that much is obvious from the market-rate rents in such places. There's a shortage of will to permit it. Everyone you successfully prevent from ruining your city's aesthetics goes on to ruin the world by staying in a place that's built around, and requires, driving everywhere all the time.
How are you simultaneously upset that rich people think public transit is beneath them, and upset that rich people are adopting transit-oriented lifestyles?
These developments aren't close enough to transit to entice its use - a mile, more or less, which is nothing to me but quite a bit to many. And they're not close to the kinds of jobs that you need to have in order to afford most of a half million in mortgage paper. So the built-in two-car garages will see heavy use, because the eventual inhabitants of these eyesores will drive everywhere, and one more piece of land that's been de facto commons for decades will belong to people who contribute nothing to the communities they parasitize, but for example think nothing of installing ultra-bright motion-sensing lights, at what for everyone else in eyeshot is bedroom-window level, because they harbor an unreasoning and unreasonable fear of their surroundings. And because this neighborhood is white and working class, rather than black and poor, no one will even pretend to give a damn. (Not that anyone who matters gives a damn when rich people ruin a poor black neighborhood, either. But it's fashionable in that case to pretend.)
If we were talking about downtown, or even about someplace that's within what people who do not enjoy walking for its own sake might regard as reasonable walking distance of transit, then I'd have to concede the point. But we aren't. And even if we were - those more monied types who do live near transit mostly won't use it except maybe for sporting events, which they regard as half not having to fight for parking, and half safari trip - an occasional convenience, or an exotic indulgence, rather than a commonplace worthy of investment. What do you see any of this solving?
> And even if we were - those more monied types who do live near transit mostly won't use it except maybe for sporting events
I don't know if you count tech workers as "monied types," but we are a huge component of the urbanization and gentrification of the Bay Area, and this absolutely isn't true for us. If anyone in my office drives to work, they hide it well. Walking is a little higher status than transit, but almost everyone uses transit.
I live in one of those new 5-story mixed-use mid-rises that everyone loves to hate, with rents that do seem to signal "monied types." In fact my neighbors are mostly young families, students, and few single yuppies like me. People with ordinary incomes absolutely live here, just with more adults per household than they'd probably like. Most of us have cars, but the garage is completely packed at noon on a weekday. They come out almost exclusively on the weekends, particularly when it's nice outside.
The actual tophat-and-monocole owner-of-land-and-means-of-production capitalists are content in their $2m single family homes, but those are authentic neighborhood character and not problematic symbols of wealth at all. The public discourse has no problem with them, but it would be political suicide to come out in favor of housing for mere high wage workers. Only the destitute (who qualify for BMR) and the oligarchy (who can afford neighborhood-character-respecting single family houses) are welcome here.
In a prior comment in this thread, I mentioned a verge about which I later had more to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14666944 - tl;dr: the plot went for a song, the developer's going to make a killing, and neither the city nor its populace is going to see any meaningful part of that killing - but, this being the city it is, I'm sure whoever sold the developer a sweetheart deal will get a tidy little kickback out of it.
I could handle 115 in a pool... probably couldn't handle the walk to/from the vehicle.
You can't dress for 120°F. You can only avoid it.
https://www.wired.com/story/phoenix-flights-canceled-heat/ https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/20/15837804/phoenix-extreme-...
Anything above 118°F is beyond the current design limits of some planes, so those planes are grounded. That's going to become a frequent event at the rate things are going. It's also scary hot.
Frankly, 80 degrees in Florida can easily be significantly more unpleasant than 115 in the southwest.
When it was topping the high 110s where I was last summer, it really wasn't that bad. I spent 4 years living in the middle of Georgia, and 95 degrees with 95% humidity was a much more unpleasant feeling than a dry 118 was, at least for me.
Now when some freak traffic accident takes out a power line to your neighborhood and you have no power for hours during that heat, then you're in for some real pain! But other than that we're pretty used to it, just stay inside during daylight hours.
Generally the temperatures stayed below 110 but it was pretty easy to know that the temperature was "over 100" or "under 100". Once the temperature got to 110 it started to feel oppressive. Out by Lake Mead where we would sail and play on the 'beaches'[1] when it occasionally crossed 120 it actually started feeling threatening. Even in the water I always felt "You must get out of this heat" when it was over 120. Sort of an existential threat to health and safety.
The interesting bit is the water carrying capacity of air when it is warmer. As global temperatures rise, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere goes up. If that turns into clouds in the stratosphere it continues to get hotter, if it turns into clouds in the troposphere it gets colder.
[1] We called them beaches but really its just the desert running into the water that is backed up behind Hoover dam.
Anyway, the officially measured temperature tends to never exceed 49C, even when anyone could measure with their own thermometer that it's really hotter.
But I went to around death valley with minimal humidity and it was barely worth registering in comparison.
Regardless of what is the cause, it's nut that we are only 17 years in a new century and we already had that many heatwaves.
Not talking about how dry it has been the last couple of months in a rainy country like ours. It's the first time in my lifetime that I'm confronted with water shortages.
Not everyone is opposed to climate change action. Those that are are loud and fight hard for power. We need to remember that. At one point it felt hopeless to take on the tobacco industry.
The primary solution (emissions trading) is a conservative solution, not a liberal one. Reagan and Thatcher introduced the Montreal protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) to limit CFC emissions. Bush senior introduced the Acid Rain Program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program) to limit sulfur emissions.
Aside from that, if the conservatives would like to propose a new solution then I and most other people are all ears, but all we seem to get is denial that the problem exists.
We don't know what will work. Liberal solutions like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accords, probably won't: https://www.ecowatch.com/james-hansen-climate-change-2030724....
As usual, anything but suggesting people change their behavior to reduce global warming.
We want laws to force us to do things, but won't do them otherwise. Where is the call for us to change our behavior?
I think that rural life is more enjoyable than urban life, but feelings don't change the facts.
So I'm not sure what you're advocating. It is almost as if you are changing the argument in order to feel as if you won.