There have been so many of these stories I'm just numb to the whole idea now
Honestly… usually I just tune out these climate stories because they are nothing but the same shitty news over and over and over and over and over again, and (almost) nobody doing anything about the situation.
Yes, I get it: the earth keeps getting shittier. What do you want me to do about it, hang a bunch of fossil fuel executives and bulldoze their factories?
I'm just waiting for the first "wet bulb" event.
I'm not sure what else it'll take for people to take climate change seriously, but by then it'll probably be too late...
In 2021, southern British Columbia was exposed to temperatures of 40C and above for a week straight - June 25 to July 1st, and a reportedly 719 people died.
What's a wet bulb event? (I know I can search it, but I wanted to engage here)
When water evaporates, it has a cooling effect - this is why your body produces sweat. As the sweat evaporates, it causes your body to cool down.
The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached as a result of water evaporating.
When this wet-bulb temperature approaches human body temperature, then the human body cannot reduce its temperature via sweating. This causes your body to overheat and will eventually lead to death. This is true even in the shade, even with unlimited water to drink.
At some point in the near future, it will be so hot somewhere that the wet bulb temperature will reach 35C (95F). Once this is reached, anyone exposed to that temperature will die after a few hours. The only way to avoid it is air conditioning, and if the power fails due to the heat then that won't work either.
This is most likely to happen somewhere tropical first, but it will slowly happen in more and more places as the Earth warms.
Pretty sure they mean an event where temperature and humidity combine to the point that the human body is unable to cool itself. So your body temperature would rise and if it got high enough would kill you.
You would need some external source of cooling like cool water or air conditioning. Fans wouldn't do any good.
The current crisis definitely puts human civilization at risk. Agricultural societies came into existence at roughly the current average temperature and were stable for thousands of years. Now, runaway capitalist industrialization is making a mess out of the climate and causing a mass extinction. I am confident humanity can survive, but will agricultural civilization? Last time the climate wasn't stable, we relied on hunting and gathering for food.
Personally, I think there is hope even if large-scale agriculture becomes unfeasible. Proteins, starches, etc. can be grown in bioreactors. There are also non-bioreactor solutions such as mycoproteins and indoor farms. The productivity of these methods are higher than traditional agriculture and don't rely on a stable climate. However, they will all rely on maintained supply chains and electricity production that is resilient to heat waves, droughts, floods, etc. as well as having a high enough energy return on investment.
Even my hopium has me worried. 😰
