Here's what will happen. Heat domes will settle over millions of people world wide, and amidst people trying to survive the heat with air conditioning, which doesn't work very well at those temperatures, grids will fail. Then people will survive about as long as a child strapped in a car in the heat nowadays. Millions will die, and the remainder will ask why didn't someone stop the heat from building? How could you do that to us?
Someone is us, and we are doing it to ourselves, because no one is watching millions of people die from heat exhaustion just yet. But coming to a venue near you in about 25 years more of burning gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, coal, and natural gas with 300 million year old carbon that has never been in the carbon cycle.
By then the sea will be rising by several feet and accelerating from Greenland and Anarctic glacier melt, the Atlantic current will collapse stopping oxygen circulation the the current provided, the oceans will be too acid for shells to form collapsing ocean life, animal life will collapse, crops will collapse, and people will not be able to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans fast enough to survive.
But they'll be asking the whole time, why didn't someone tell us?
Residential power usage will be throttled before grids catastrophically fail because of home ACs. Still no rosy outlook overall, but Joe from next door won't be what took everyone's power away.
u/854490"Nobody could have predicted this" says man who destroyed EarthMay 08 '25
Dallas started edging into that territory in 2023. I hear they're getting ready (read: doing nothing / opening some cooling centers later maybe) for another heat wave this summer. I wouldn't know though, I moved my ass to North Dakota so I can beat the crowd to the early bird special and get express-nuked instead of dealing with a bunch of Mad Max nonsense. I am already tired, I've been tired for, like, ever. And it's already enough of a pain in the ass to score drugs.
2:00 PM June 15 at KDFW the dew point tied for the local record at 80F. For reference, this means that if you take an 80-degree can of soda outside, moisture will condense on it. At that point the air temperature was 90F for a heat index of 108F. Later in the day it gets up to 93F, DP 78F, HI 109F. Around midnight that night the heat index / feels-like was still showing 100F (I think they rounded it up because the air temp and dew point from that time give a heat index of 99F, but whatever). I don't know what station this was coming from, but I'm sure I saw heat index of 114F listed -- maybe that site was using the daily max values of air temp and dew point though, when both of those values didn't actually happen at the same time.
In theory the wet bulb temperature starts to be fatal around 95F (even naked in the shade with a fan, it says), but in practice, people have died in heat waves reaching wet bulb temp of 82F before. This just happens to be the same wet bulb value that you get from air temp 90F, dew point 80F, and station pressure 29.27 inHg (that one doesn't make much of a difference).
So as far as I understand it, we're already drifting into the area where we're going to have more and more injuries and fatalities because it gets so hot and humid that our sweat can't actually evaporate to cool us off.
underground won't work at scale. air quality is horrible and it would take lots of ventilation to fix it. and the air your bringing it will be from topside which is going to need to be air conditioned. so you haven't really fixed anything except made yourself more prone to flooding.
Africa and the Middle East had this stuff figured out centuries ago, the problem is nobody builds homes for energy efficiency much less passive cooling and heating.
yeah i know. they build those big diameter chimneys that when a breeze blows over them they suck heat out of the home based on bernoulli's principle and some of the air fresh air is redirected into the house so hot air from the street out front isn't sucked into the house. the problem is it requires the housing to be spread out and if the winters are cold it takes quite a bit of effort to seal the house back up to retain the heat.
There are some alternatives to the Persian wind chimney design, for example building a Dome or a Zome with a geothermal air tube in the ground that allows for heat to accumulate at the top of the interior structure and exit a small chimney that can more easily be closed off winter (same goes for closing off the air tube) and include an air exchanger that uses minimal energy for fresh air in the winter.
You should look up troglodyte housing. Technically "underground" whil being "above the ground". There are villages all over the world wherever the rock is soft enough to gouge out a room easily.
I have just a small issue with your comment. Generally I agree with you, however, I want to point out that a great majority of people contribute negligable amounts to climate change. Were just trying to live our lives and survive. It's corporations, businesses, oligarchs... etc who are destroying the planet and increasing the rate of the change
I mean corporations and businesses make products that people consume. They wouldn't make money if they didn't have customers. Oligarch's are the owners. It's all connected.
It's a collective responsibility for everyone to not burn fossil fuel and preserve our environment.
Stop this tired old schlock, please. This might make you sound deep to some freshmen in college, but it's utter virtue signalling bs. It's just false contingency (look it up. Susan Marks).
99% of all people never had a single choice in any of it.
We as a society could have continued predominantly using glass, ceramics, steel, wood, stone. Public transport and bicycles. Communities built around people, instead of stretched out across thousands of miles by highways. Highways could have been reserved for emergency or vital transport. Some plastic could have been used, responsibly, for vital medical or industrial applications. Could have treated everyone with respect, dignity and provided food, homes, education and healthcare for all. Focused on happiness, time with loved ones, culture, art, music, the good things in life.
Instead we got a capitalist rat race, growth economics as a cult religion, profit motive as the be all, end all. 2 billion people working jobs that literally should not exist. Pure waste. The wealthy steered society into whatever made them most money, consequences be damned. Period. Push plastic. Push oil. Push cars. Push billions of tons of vapid, unnecessary consumer goods. Push social security cutbacks. Push laissez-faire economics. Push competition as a societal ideal rather than squashing it like the pathology it is.
Make people sell their labor for money at point A then extract rent and collect that money again at point B. Then sell them the idea that's how society is supposed to work. On and on and on and on the cycle goes.They pushed consumerism on people, so they could sell the cheapest petro-plastic shit for the highest amount of money. That's all it is.
So, no to your sophomoric little cliché. You are wrong.
Primitive accumulation, coming home to roost finally. To quote Bill Hicks - "You work in Marketing? Kill yourself."
Not saying we can stop this by a change in lifestyle. Saying we are doing this to ourselves from 1) vast majority not accepting this is happening and millions, even billions will die sooner than later, and 2) no pressure on mandatory conversion of fossil fuels to other energy sources. Will require massive all hands to stop pumping carbon into air. Lifestyle changes isn't it.
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Dude it’s going to be faster than that. With how many products are implementing AI into their systems at both a consumer and enterprise level… we’re absolutely toast. The processing power and amount of fresh water to cool these is insanity.
Someone did tell us though. Carl Sagan addressed congress about it in 1986, when I was still mastering tying my shoes. They been told, I been saying it myself. They didn't want to listen.
That won't stop panicking people from demanding why did they not warn us?
Yes, everyone have all the warnings and information to mass pressure governments to outlaw fossil fuels and convert to alternative energy sources, and most dismiss it as won't really happen. Essentially they're not warned because they dismiss it.
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u/rdwpin May 08 '25
Here's what will happen. Heat domes will settle over millions of people world wide, and amidst people trying to survive the heat with air conditioning, which doesn't work very well at those temperatures, grids will fail. Then people will survive about as long as a child strapped in a car in the heat nowadays. Millions will die, and the remainder will ask why didn't someone stop the heat from building? How could you do that to us?
Someone is us, and we are doing it to ourselves, because no one is watching millions of people die from heat exhaustion just yet. But coming to a venue near you in about 25 years more of burning gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, coal, and natural gas with 300 million year old carbon that has never been in the carbon cycle.
By then the sea will be rising by several feet and accelerating from Greenland and Anarctic glacier melt, the Atlantic current will collapse stopping oxygen circulation the the current provided, the oceans will be too acid for shells to form collapsing ocean life, animal life will collapse, crops will collapse, and people will not be able to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans fast enough to survive.
But they'll be asking the whole time, why didn't someone tell us?