Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Hurricanes and floods do far more infrastructure damage on large scales (tornado effects being more localized) than extreme heatwaves do, however - and decaying infrastructure is a huge problem across much of the United States.

Why exactly the USA has such a huge infrastructure problem is debatable. Maybe it's the concentration of wealth and political power in fewer locations, i.e. some regions of the West and East Coasts? Maybe it's too much money being earmarked by Congress to military-industrial projects in their home districts, leaving little for things like rebuilding water supply systems, railroads and bridges, improved electricity grids, etc.? A decreased overall tax base due to a steep reduction in tax rates (particularly on the wealthiest) since the 1960s? Financialization of the economy and a resulting lack of engineering expertise and interest in infrastructure development?

As far as infrastructure for heat waves, termite-mound-inspired architecture would be the way to go. Build bunkers with large capacity that people can retreat to, with built-in cooling mechanisms.

https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/termite-mounds-could-inspire-n...

> "The team’s observations show that thin, outer channels of the mound heat up rapidly during the day when compared to the deeper tunnels in the mound, which causes air to circulate in a closed-loop convection cell. During the day, air moves up along the outer channels and down the center. At night, the flow is reversed. This reversal flushes out the carbon dioxide from deep inside the mound, and the gas then diffuses through the porous walls."

Most regions have good infrastructure for their local endemic disasters. If you live in areas with relatively frequent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, etc there are plans and infrastructure in place to deal with them when they occur. Where I live in the US we have visible disaster plans for lahars[0] because there is a severe lahar risk; most Americans don't even know what a lahar is.

Parts of the US where heatwaves are endemic rarely have serious issues with heatwaves, they've learned how to live with them for a long time and the local customs and infrastructure reflect that. Like in Europe, much of the human hazard from heatwaves is in areas where extreme heat is rare such that appropriate infrastructure has never been needed. As an example from the US, the extreme heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021 was bad in part because it is a rare region of the US where few people have air-conditioning. It is a wealthy region with some of the cheapest electricity in the world so lack of air-conditioning was not a failure of infrastructure or spending, there was no good reason to invest in it.

If you live in a place that has regular heatwaves, no one needs to "retreat to bunkers". Almost all of the infrastructure is built with the assumption that heatwaves will occur at relatively low cost. The only implication for infrastructure is that it can stress power generation and distribution systems, but that isn't specific to heatwaves or natural disasters generally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahar

Interesting about lahars, thanks for the link

Heat waves do cause massive infrastructure damage, it’s simply less focused. You can model how much faster say a single streetlight fails when the temperature reaches 105f vs 95f, but it’s all abstract without the visceral impact of obviously broken stuff.

Further preparing for heat waves is also quite expensive, as you need more power generation capacity that sits unused 99% of the time etc.

only because you've built a society based on air conditioning.

Just the opposite, it’s equipment left outside that needs to deal with the heat.

You gotta have a better example than lightbulbs. Maybe rail lines buckling?

I was referring less obvious damage rather than just lightbulbs/LED’s etc. So yes stuff not designed for the heat may fail like sagging power lines, but the real damage is less obvious.

Even paint degrades faster with heat, as does just about everything else. Individual Solar panels don’t show any obvious issues, but multiply a little damage by 10’s of billions of dollars worth of panels and it adds up.

PS: Rust seems like a counter example because water and salt dramatically speed things up, but all things being equal heat does increase the rate stuff rusts.

My point was more that if there was really significant damage being done, then you’d be able to provide a better example than lightbulbs. For instance, a hurricane taking down a street light also destroys the bulb, and a whole lot more. Even if it’s true that lightbulbs burn out faster due to heat waves, it seems like it’d be hard to generate a lot of sympathy with a statement like “heatwaves are as bad as hurricanes because heatwaves cause light bulbs to burn out faster.”

Also, society generally designs things with the knowledge that light bulbs go bad, exposed metal rusts, etc. Unless a heatwave were to shorten the lifespan of things by an order of magnitude, it’s likely that a slightly shorter lifespan is within the designed limits of many things.

Why would you assume significant damage must be obvious at the time? You don’t notice the specific genetic damage that actually caused cancer, and it’s killed vastly more people than bullets.

Hurricanes are infrequent and don’t inflict devastation over nearly as much area as heat waves can. Hurricanes are obvious like bullets, but add up the numbers globally and average over a decade and they’re not that big a deal.

> You don’t notice the specific genetic damage that actually caused cancer

Actually we do notice stuff like that. Which is why it is advised that you don't inhale asbestos particles, wear sunscreen, avoid smoking, etc.

My point still stands: it's understandable that heatwaves aren't considered as serious as hurricanes if the only impact of a heatwave you can point to is that lightbulbs theoretically burn out more quickly during a heat wave.

If there are enough lightbulbs impacted then why not. We should measure these things and then compare them.

I also mentioned paint and everything that rusts, not just lightbulbs. Let’s add all electronics exposed to the elements, tires, and just about every structure outside.

> Actually we do notice stuff like that. Which is why it is advised that you don't inhale asbestos particles, wear sunscreen, avoid smoking, etc.

No we don’t. Asbestos and others became such an issue because people didn’t notice the damage they inferred it after the fact based on exposure. It’s easy to correlate unusual symptoms with workplace hazards after the fact, but by then it’s too late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

> No we don’t. Asbestos and others became such an issue because people didn’t notice the damage they inferred it after the fact based on exposure.

Isn’t every observation just a causal inference after the fact?

Look, you’re free to attempt to quantify the impact. Either via direct measurement or a theoretical calculation. However, a baseless opination without any data backing it up isn’t that convincing or interesting.

> Isn’t every observation just a causal inference after the fact?

No, instinctive reflex for example is a response to a stimulus without inference.

If uranium had a horrific taste the radium girls wouldn’t have licked their uranium paint brushes thus avoiding Radium jaw. Horrific taste doesn’t always mean something is harmful, but it generally causes people to limit ingestion.

How is “I licked my paint brush and then my mouth tasted bad” not causal inference?

Bad taste is simply a perception, you’re making an inference that the bad taste was caused by something but the perception precedes the inference.

Further the perception and response to that taste isn’t a inference that something is physically harmful. You can dislike perfectly healthy food. That said, if uranium had a bad taste people wouldn’t have been as harmed demonstrating the lack of perception of the initial minute harm resulted in greater long term harm.

Termite mounds may be overkill, but you are right that design matters.

There’s lots of problems, but imo a big one is just like the “low fat” crisis of the 80s and 90s… we changed building codes to make buildings like envelopes and pursued HVAC efficiency over everything else.

I live in 1920s frame home. We have at minimum 2 windows per room, often more. Every side of the house has windows, allowing for cross-drafts and adjusting for the sun through the day.

The average modern development typically skips windows on the sides, and builders put the smallest windows possible in the rear and ceilings are lower. Modern construction techniques designed to slow fire often reduce airflow to the second floor of houses as well.

We live in the northeast, and we use window ac units for probably less than 30 days a year, in our bedrooms only. The key is to manage the windows/blinds and have an attic exhaust fan. My sister lives a few miles away in a circa 1999 home, and totally different story… they use the AC from May to October.

> Why exactly the USA has such a huge infrastructure problem is debatable.

I thought it's because we didn't build it nearly from scratch about 70 yers ago.

Most of the infrastructure in the US was built after WWII, including the entire interstate Highway system and almost all of suburbia.

A substantial amount of housing, especially on East and West Coast, was built prewar or only just postwar. That housing has the potential to have toxic chemicals like lead and asbestos, poor plumbing, lack of insulation, and poor ventilation. It almost certainly doesn't have AC/central heating in places that don't require it year-round to be livable.

>Maybe it's the concentration of wealth and political power in fewer locations, i.e. some regions of the West and East Coasts?

Well here in Boston our transit infrastructure is falling apart . . . and we don't lack for political influence especially among elites.

I am not certain of the cause, but cost disease seems to be a related phenomenon.

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