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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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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.

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.

They won't, because states will just start geoengineering.

Or even install air conditioning

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