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Well Putin can put an end to Silicon Valley in half an hour, he has that power. Taiwan is critical to the H100 production line. Neolib normies buying the latest Iphones are soaking up a great deal of top-tier silicon.
Many of the storylines are connected!
Though we've also got climate change as a red herring, a lot of strangeness is circulating on that front:
Lethal humidity? Really?
It's a real thing. When temperature and relative humidity get high enough at the same time, homeostasis breaks down. Sweating can no longer bring your body temperature low enough to prevent heat stroke, you brain starts to cook, your kidneys stop working, etc.
Eg, when the wet bulb temp. is above homeostasis and you have 100% relative humidity, you physically can't cool down even in the shade and you are guaranteed to die pretty quickly if you can't get inside or in a cave or something.
This is an unusual condition in the modern history of the planet and even in the BAD climate change timeline will be seasonal and local, but it has already started to happened in short bursts in eg. pakistan and the punjab region of india; where you get just extraordinarily shitty weather even in good times.
Wet bulb only guarantees mass casualties if all power fails because there’s no electricity. Energy is becoming more plentiful and may well become significantly cheaper in the coming years and decades.
True, but ehhhhhhh.
This assumes a level of robustness to the power grid that is not present, and will never be present under market conditions.
I mean, one kinda bad but not unknown or unknowable snow storm knocked out the grid for one of the richest areas in the richest country in the world.
Re. cheap energy: again, yes but. The only source of energy I know of that is dropping price is renewables, which I would not stake my life or even my extreme discomfort on.
Again, this could be solved easily with sufficient investment. I just don't believe that investment will ever come from any market driven source.
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Do you believe renewables will be improved sufficiently and in time to offset the declining EROEI of oil and gas?
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Link to quote source?
It's paywalled, so I didn't give the source: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/andrew-forrest-in-grim-warning-on-climate/news-story/8ef0bf2d852da37b88132cf0d6f8b6e9
I mean, wet-bulb exceeding 30-35 degrees is a thing and it does mean mass casualties if people are stuck in it.
And I'd generally expect fatalities from a USA-PRC nuclear exchange to be ~1 billion or somewhat less (I'm a pessimist on cities' ability to survive state/infrastructure failure, but consider nuclear winter to be essentially a hoax), so "something else can give higher casualties" isn't exactly a contradiction in terms. West-Russia would probably be a bit lower; West-Russia-PRC would be a fair bit higher, but still far short of "everyone".
But I think that in practice wet-bulb events will not wind up killing 1 billion+, if only because people will abandon areas prone to them.
How many wet bulb mass casualty events have there been so far? Now increase the temperature by 1 degree Celsius. How many will there be?
To say this is a near term threat comparable to AI is ridiculous.
Let's keep in mind that it's also a solvable problem but we CHOOSE not to solve it. We could use nuclear power, we could increase the reflectivity of clouds, we could fertilize the oceans. The same people who catastrophize about climate change refuse to consider those solutions. Therefore, the risks to climate change must be LESS than the risks of those things, which are minimal on a world historical scale.
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There's tons of places in south east Asia that get very hot and very humid. Yet they are absolutely packed with people. It heavily suggests to me that this idea - which let me remind you is being pushed by a billionaire heavily invested in green tech - is not actually a real problem.
"People will die at 35 degrees wet-bulb" is very much a real problem. The questions are the degree to which this will actually start happening (probably not a lot; we're looking at something like 3 degrees warming of GMST and the tropics/subtropics will get less than that) and the degree to which people will actually stay there to get killed.
The tropics don't normally get to 35 wet-bulb, which is not a coincidence - if they did, humans would have evolved with a higher body temperature to allow survival there. The highest Singapore's ever gotten, for instance, is something like 33.6, and it's usually much lower.
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They won't, because states will just start geoengineering.
Or even install air conditioning
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I'll be overly generous and attribute it to a failure of the climate control in an OAI data center causing a short circuit that makes the AI run amok.
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That just sounds like Twiggy being Twiggy.
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