My greatest fear with the chaos and challenges that are going to happen over the next few decades in terms of environmental change is not the weather, not the heat, not the cold, not the tornadoes or hurricanes … the thing that scares me the most are people.
As the environment becomes more extreme and we experience more and more emergencies, people are going to start panicking … panicked people are going to do some crazy things … the worse conditions get, the worse people will become.
The whole pandemic experience eroded my faith in humanity. There’s no doubt that when humanity works together, we can accomplish much. There is also no doubt in my mind that there’s somebody whose first thought is to hoard toilet paper.
I suppose if we could all work together on enlightened harmony, the Kyoto Protocol would have fixed the climate back even it could have saved lots of people.
Psychologist Craig Anderson used archival sources from cities across the United States to gather data on the rates of murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. He confirmed that violent crime increases with temperature but that nonviolent crime does not. In such field studies, hotter regions of the world and hotter years, seasons, months, and days are all linked with more aggression. Some studies even suggest that baseball pitchers throw more aggressively in hot weather, as there is an increase in the number of batters hit by pitches on hot days.
So through other comments I understand what it is, but can someone explain why you couldn’t just sit in a bath of cold water, and keep filling it with new cold water as it heats up from your body?
In order to produce cold water, you’ll need power of some kind.
Ain’t your ground/city/well water cold enough though?
It depends. If you’re on a system like I used to manage, gravity will get you water. We had no pumps for delivery. But the rest of the system required power, including pumps to get the water from the source into the water treatment plant. That means even the untreated water would eventually run out.
Do your cities not have backups? I’m in Canada and we have mandatory generator systems in all our water plants to ensure continued operation even with power outages - more meant for winter storms than summer blackouts, but same effect. They have a decently long minimum time they need to be able to operate for - a few days at the minimum. And summer brownouts typically (at least up here) are rolling, so they can just keep the water plant fully supplied while residential/commerical power is cut
Heh, I’m in Canada, too. “Deep” rural Saskatchewan, where the nearest city is 200 km away. The water treatment plant I operated serves a community of 280 people. The treated water holding cisterns hold about 3 days of water and are on a hill above the village for gravity feed. There are no distribution pumps, so power outages have no effect on the ability to distribute water.
The water source is a rural pipeline that serves several communities and many ranchers and farmers. You cannot connect to that pipeline without having your own 3-day storage capacity. That is to deal with pipeline faults, pump station faults and widespread power outages. There is no long term backup power at the pump stations.
When the treatment plant experiences a power failure, the valve controlling incoming water shuts off to prevent the possibility of untreated water entering the cisterns. This is why there is no local power backup. There has never been a local power failure that took longer than 24 hours to restore. There has only ever been one widespread outage that took longer than 24 hours to repair and it was still short of that 3 day window.
That is not to say longer outages are impossible, but it’s tough to get funding for something that is seen as “not gonna happen.”
As far as I know, the cities do have some kind of backups, but given that a common recommendation is to keep a personal 3-day supply of water, I’m not sure what those backups are.
Ha, that’s funny. Nice to meet you! Just had a buddy get back from a backcountry hiking trip where he had to carry in his water - said the potash is so pervasive that you can’t filter out the water easily. I imagine for anyone in that area there’d be a number of other problems or considerations up there.
Yeah, your treatment plant is far smaller than the ones I’ve been in or worked on. I’m a civil engineer and have helped design and commission a few water treatment plants, but I’m in a small city in the Golden Horseshoe, so we’re numbering tens of thousands treated for each treatment plant. They recommend three days water here too, but the treatment plants are designed to continue operating for a while after that.
It’s an interesting view into the smaller system, especially the onus of 3-day supply being on ranchers/farmers. Most of those over here are on their own well water, and are SOL if they didn’t plan properly in power outages.
Our rural pipeline system was put in to replace all the bad wells. The village used to run on well water, but even after treatment, water heaters typically lasted only 3-5 years and people typically bought their drinking water in jugs. Now the water comes from Lake Diefenbaker and requires only filtering and disinfection. When I was operating the plant, I worked with the Water Security Agency to put in an activated carbon injector to deal with occasional colour problems. We typically only had to run it a few months every few years. Nobody ever figured out what was introducing the colour, that I know of.
Every few years someone at the WSA tries to shut down the pipeline because it doesn’t meet modern spec. In the absence of funding for a replacement, that would put everyone back onto those nasty wells that are usually untreatable by residential systems. I’ve participated in keeping that pipeline in service as the much lesser of two evils.
Not all the wells are bad. There is one near my home (I don’t live in town) that is of such a quality that there are people in their 90s who’ve been drinking it raw their whole lives. I’m not that brave! I haul it to our cistern, then run it through a “base camp filter” (10 liter gravity filter with 3 ceramic filters rated for wild waters). The turbidity is so low that the filters last several years.
You’re the first water treatment person I’ve ever met online!
I’m sure that works if you have access to cold water. But I could imagine someone living in a large building where the ‘cold water’ is just room temperature due to the water not coming straight from the cooler ground.
Going underground is best bet. Not feasible for most people though.
Or go near big bodies of water, big lakes or ocean. Then you can cool cause there is temperature difference. If closer to mountain, then just go up to avoid heat build up(reduce 0.65 Celsius per 100 meters altitude)
Underground might not be feasible without AC if you don’t have good insulation. During BC, Canada’s heat dome 2 years ago, you lose ambient cooling slowly, and then everything starts to feel warmer even in the basement parking.
For urban area, just prep the shopping center into cooling centres(including local stadiums ) that can help cool many people with emergency AC/resting place.
I was going to say that heat map looks like a 1:1 for swamp or close-to-sea level areas that might not be able to dig in any economical way
Especially in Florida!
What is wet bulb? I’m from the dry Canadian prairies
Essentially, your body cools you down by sweating, but if you reach a combination of sweat and heat above a certain degree, your body is unable to cool you down by sweating, as the air already has enough moisture and its hotter than your sweat.
Then you lose the ability to regulate your heat and you rapidly head towards a heat stroke.
Ok I found this I think I get it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
It’s the temperature a thermometer will get to through evaporative cooling. You measure it by putting a wet cloth on the bulb of a thermometer and letting the water evaporate.
So this is a measure of how cool someone can get through perspiration?
Yes
This sounds false. Aren’t there places in Africa where it gets to like 120⁰f and few have AC?
It isn’t the temperature, it’s the humidity.
Wet bulb is a way measure how much evaporative cooling you can have. Once wet bulb gets to 95°F even a healthy fit individual will die given enough time even in the shade with a fan. It might be 112 but as long as the wet bulb stays below 95°F your body can cool with sweat. Any higher wet bulb the human body only heats up from the environment and can no longer cool, eventually leading to fatal hyperthermia (heat exhaustion and heat stroke).
Interesting. Thanks for explaining
“It’s a dry heat” isn’t just a cliche.
That is exactly the conditions humans are adapted for: high arid heat. We are the world champions of sweating to stay cool, but that does nothing in humid weather. At high humidity, the temperature only needs to be near body temperature to kill you.
That’s likely dry bulb temperature. Wet bulb temperature is lower except at 100% humidity
Maybe I’m ignorant, but couldn’t you dig?
I know that here (Canada) if you dig 6ft, temperature goes down to the year average, so here like 6c.
You would do your outside activities in the night or at sunrise.
But at that point the problem would probably be crops and wildlife dying en masse. So food would be the issue.
If you want to survive, invest in fungus and cyanobacteria
I do my own building, construction and renovation … did some commercial work but never enough to want to do it for a living … I know enough to do my own but not enough to call myself a pro.
From what I’ve learned about underground building is that it is very dangerous and a health hazard. You have to constantly monitor and create safety measures for gases and oxygen levels. Even with the best setups … actually with super sealed setups … it can be very dangerous without active monitoring. Carbon dioxide, monoxide, and many gases will naturally want to drift to lower levels and displace oxygen which wants to move up … if you happen to be unlucky to have a generator or car running next to your exit/entry hole … your underground space quickly loses oxygen and without monitoring equipment or alarms, you just get dizzy, fall asleep and die … very gentle death because you will never know what happened.
There was a news story a year or two ago … in Australia I think? … of a farmer that crawled into an underground reservoir that was empty to repair it … his generator or vehicle was running nearby and he lost consciousness inside and died … it’s actually a common enough occurrence for farmers and industrial workers and construction workers
Anyone who is even thinking of building anything underground has to know and understand this dangerous fact
And the problem with pumping out the bad air is that you are now introducing the very warm air into the system that you were trying to escape from.
Uh! Makes you think. So the idea would be to have a lower underground room which you could “pump” out the gas?
Assuming energy is an issue, a passive pump might be able to be built through usage of a copper pipe by creating a thermosiphon (the exposed copper pipe outside would heat up creating hot air which would “siphon” the bottom air).
I guess the issue with living underground sre many: moisture, possible radon, water infiltration, pest, no good way of making a fire, etc…
a supply of chemical ice packs could work as a short term/emergency response. Use them to survive short term (hours/days) while you leave the area / get the power restored / AC fixed / or the heat breaks?
They have a shelf life, but it’s 1-2 years, so you would have to stay on top of expiration.
Thanks for the reminder to buy a generator.
One option, if you live somewhere where this is a likely event, is to prep an ice room - an underground room that is small, with thick well insulated walls. That alone will keep it ~5c which is good, but it can be lowered further by freezing blocks of ice and stocking the room up when the power goes out/heat waves hit.
Note this requires a number of things - a large Chest freezer to freeze big blocks in (small blocks melt quicker. Bigger the block, the longer the room lasts). It also requires a basement you can modify, and a floor drain for when the ice slowly melts.
It’s a lot of work and likely not worth it unless you Need to use it regularly, though with climate change it may become more useful. As always, consider radon readings in your basements, as well as a CO monitor. Bad air sinks, and the whole point of this is you don’t want to die
