This is such a weird take - “Oh man, it’s hot and getting hotter”. I mean - yeah so where’s the, y’know, point? Of the article? It’s not like we didn’t know that, so
An interesting take would be about living underground on renewable energy. But that’s just too far for Wired. And they predicted The Zippies.
The outdated power grids will be next.
Full article:
Humanity’s superpower is sweating—but rising heat could be our kryptonite, and an average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels could bring regular, fatal heat waves to large parts of the planet, says Tom Matthews, a senior lecturer in environmental geography at King’s College London.
“We have evolved to cope with the most extreme heat and humidity the planet can throw at us,” he explains. But when our core temperature gets to about 42 degrees Celsius (around 107.5 degrees Fahrenheit), people face heat stroke and probable death as the body strains to keep cool and the heart works harder, inducing heart attacks.
Matthews cites an example from his home country, the UK. In the summer of 2022, the UK broke its high temperature record, surpassing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists estimate there were roughly 3,500 heat-associated deaths that summer in the UK. Across Europe, they estimate high heat caused more than 60,000 deaths.
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“At 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the likes of Lagos, Karachi, [and] Shanghai start to experience heat waves exceeding our limit. At 2 degrees Celsius, the events increase at least 10 times more often, and if we get to 8 degrees Celsius, a large fraction of the Earth’s surface would be too hot for our physiology and would not be habitable,” he says.
Air conditioning and heat-escape rooms would help, but we might need to abandon intense outdoor work such as rice farming in hotter regions. And these solutions will need to be able to meet demand. “The infrastructure must be able to withstand the surges when everyone turns on the air conditioning, and must be able to withstand hurricanes or floods,” he says.
Our best hope in the face of inevitable rises in heat? Cooperation. “We’ve built forecasting systems that will warn us when disasters are incoming by working together at enormous scale. We must continue to do the same.”
Our best hope in the face of inevitable rises in heat? Cooperation.
Yeah, we’re fucked
104?
Laughs in South West American.
But seriously. Can we just not? I’d like to actually have a retirement. Or nanobot immortality. Why can’t we live in the cool timeline?
What if this is the best timeline humanity could ever archive?
I don’t believe that. If this is the best timeline then we deserve everything mother nature is going to give us.
We haven’t exactly reached this state because of some big, singular fluke nobody could have predicted, there hasn’t been some asteroid impact or super volcano eruption that suddenly messed the planet up.
Humanity as has known about the issues of pollution and climate change for over a hundred years, known how dire the situation has been for decades, and has still done mostly nothing productive to end up here.It would have taken a few generations of people all making massive changes willingly to fix this, but almost none of us did. I think we just can’t care enough about the future when there is now and here to experience, and it’s just finally the “find out” phase after the “fuck around”.
Yeah, just one thing though. We could have avoided it through regulating emissions better. The idea that the people all had to make the individual choice is corporate propaganda.
You just have to live somewhere with humidity. It doesn’t get over 100F, it just gets soupier. It’s like living in a hot armpit but at least it doesn’t cook your insides.
Nothing about this comment is accurate. Maybe where you’re at doesn’t get above 100f currently, but it can absolutely go above 100f in other areas. As for the humidity, the higher that is the worse people are at regulating temp because sweating stops doing anything. High enough humidity and the temp doesn’t even need to hit 100f to kill people readily. The best place to handle high heat is somewhere dry and windy because you can keep chugging water and sweating buckets to maximize evaporative cooling
