The Saudis don’t wear “ice vests”, as far as i know. They mostly wear heavy robes that they fill with cool air before they leave the comfort of air conditioned spaces. Fwiw.
I did see air conditioned jackets in Japan last time i was there. They are very obvious, because when everyone else is wearing thin light clothing, a few people are wearing big puffy jackets. Fans pull air into the jacket, and something cools it, i think.
Of course, the temperatures outdoors were only in the 90s F.
I’m pretty sure that some cities will become underwater, and most of the inhabitants will leave. I guess I’m Venice and parts of the Netherlands, people adapted in other ways. But Venice isn’t tidal. And the Netherlands is worried about the next big flood, and that’s a very wealthy nation.
It probably won’t be all-or-nothing. The US population has been moving south since the invention of AC. With hotter weather, it may start moving back north without any city bring totally abandoned. But i think 130°F would lead to almost everyone leaving.
Pressures on the Great Lakes are not going to stay constant - the Ogallala aquifer is drying up, for instance and those areas are going to want to get water from somewhere. Nor will the inputs stay the same either. You may have heard input could likely increase with AGW - that’s not actually a good thing, as it means increased pollutants and nutrient load.
And current water agreements are nice and all, but the US has hardly been a shining beacon of good neighbourliness lately…
I wish I could say that about the Detroit metro water system. All this virtually free natural resource surrounding me and the water bill is still over $300 every two months, and I don’t even have pool. Yet they give it away to botteled water suppliers for free.
And when Flint tried to save money and tap into the local river they forgot that they let the auto industry use the river as a dumping ground and let them get away with doing a half assed cleanup. It was the auto companies that first noticed the water was bad when they started to see engines and radiators showing excessive wear due to high acidity in the Flint area dealerships. And then told no one.
They are probably going to have to start. That is why I started this thread, due to climate change wearing long robes won’t be enough to survive the heat. Things like ice vests, or a more nocturnal schedule, or setting up air conditioned insulated pop up shelters next to construction sites are going to be needed as the temperatures climb by 10-20F over the century.
You’re assuming that the temperature will be above 120F for months on end. Even if temperatures rise by 20F, it’s only going to be deadly hot for a few daylight hours during the summer. Nobody needs to wear an ice vest because they can just wait a few hours and venture outdoors when the temperature is less murderous. Air conditioning and adjusted schedules are how people currently deal with extreme heat. If it eventually becomes unfeasible it will be not because of technological limitations but economic ones.
So my impression is that during the afternoon in summer months, the temps will reach 130-140F in the middle east, and a little less in the southwest.
So yeah for the other 8 months of the year the temps won’t be so oppressive, and even during the summer months it will be much more bearable from 9pm to 9am.
But some stuff will still need to be done outdoors in those temperatures.
India is currently facing very high temperatures, but they aren’t economically developed enough to have widespread AC. Nations will need massive electrical grids to power all the AC units.
But certain physical activity will need to be performed outdoors in summer months. The question is can most of that activity be moved to the 9pm-9am shift, or would it need to be done during daylight hours. If it needs to be done during daylight hours, will things like ice vests, UV blocking umbrellas and clothes, etc be enough so people can do manual labor in 130-140F heat. Even if it is, the shifts would probably have to be limited to 30 minutes at a time, followed by half an hour in an air conditioned building to help people lower their core body temp.
To me thats what I wonder. How will they handle the activities that need to be done outdoors in summer months. A lot of it they can move to night time. Maybe they’ll do all the construction work, trash pickup, deliveries, etc at night.
By the year 2100, when none of us will be alive, temps could go up as much as 4 degrees. In most of our lifetimes, maybe 1.5 degrees.
This is without major advances in science, which have been occurring like clockwork. Cold Fusion, better solar, better batteries, satellites that reflect back sunlight, and so the weather can be controlled. Other things no one has thought of. It is not the tear 2100 I am worried about, Mankind will fix stuff by then- it is the 1.5 degree increase we will see before things get fixed.
It wouldn’t be a tidal wave of emigration from those cities, but a gradual erosion as more and more people find it too unpleasant, then property values will go down and more people will leave or not come there, and at some point the city becomes unviable. Such cities might stabilize at a much smaller population, where they might use some of those tactics you describe, but if there is somewhere else to go where living is easier, people will try to go there instead of staying put.
And those workers will gradually develop larger and more sensitive eyes, and their skin will be more sensitive to sunlight, and after a few generations they’ll start looking like Gollum.
Will the women start finding themselves attracted to the 10% of men with the most Gollum-esqe characteristics? that’s a pretty big part of evolution, female selection.
Maybe women will find ice vests unsexy and refuse to mate with men who wear them, leaving only the men whose bodies are better at temperature regulation w/o ice cooling vests to have children.
C’mon, people! We’re going to have a moon base and a colony on Mars soon! Living in hot areas on this planet is going to be easy-peasy with all that technology - it’ll be here in time. Right? Right??
This discussion is a primary reason I am not supportive of these space program boondoggles - we have much more pressing problems to solve here, that require innovative solutions, and soon, and a lot of energy, resources, and brainpower is distracted by space travel fantasy.
Advances on all these are not “occurring like clockwork”: cold fusion is a pipe dream infused with fraud, and weather controlled by satellites is usually brought up by those who claim that “certain people” already have this technology and are supposedly using it to destroy their enemies.
I think you’re far too optimistic about the ability of scientific advances to “fix” climate change. The best that we can reasonably hope for is that technology will enable us to drastically reduce emissions, and also help with the necessary adaptation to the damage already done and already inevitably in the pipeline for the future. Continuing feedbacks from ice cover reduction and methane emissions from thawing permafrost make further warming inevitable even if we stopped all net CO2 emissions today.
Excessively high temperatures in many areas will definitely be a problem, and not just in the Middle East. There was scorching heat in many parts of the US just this past spring. But high temperatures alone are not the only problem, and probably not even the greatest one. Heat and climate instability contribute more energy to storms and hurricanes. They may not necessarily be more frequent, but will be more energetic and destructive when they do occur.
Even worse, regional climate changes like droughts or floods are likely to cause large-scale crop failures and food and water crises, some of which we’re already seeing, even in the resource-rich US. Imagine how that will affect poor countries in the vulnerable tropics. Indeed, one of the big risks of climate change is mass migration from the most affected areas, not because it’s too hot, but because people are starving. We had better get our act together before climate change leads to global war.
I’m not intending to send a message of gloom and doom, but about the urgency for meaningful, strong mitigation of carbon emissions. The fact that some parts of the US are still operating coal-fired power plants is absolutely appalling and almost unbelievable in the level of reckless irresponsibility.
As I understand it, heat pumps, which can be used as air conditioners, are in very common use in the tropical developing world, including India. They mostly use window units, not central. Now the grids in those countries tend to be less than robust, so if everyone is running their heat pumps at full blast, grid failures will become even more common than they are today.
Which leads to another effect: widespread adaption of rooftop solar panels in those countries. Pakistan has already done this, due to the very flaky grid there. And not just for residential power, but also commercial and industrial use. Other countries are no doubt going the same route.
Upthread there was discussion of water shortages and energy-intensive desalination. There was a recent development for a solar-powered desalination that also separates out the dissolved minerals rather than leaving them in concentrated brine (which must be disposed of).
Now that tech is going to be expensive, since the panels have to be etched with femto-second lasers. Whether it can replace current desalination tech depends on how expensive the panels are as well as how long they last in the field. But it’s a promising development.
You can doubt cold fusion or satellite weather control, but yes, Science marches on.
Maybe not at the climate level. But better batteries and alternate power generation have improved decade after decade. Resistant crops also, Malthus was wrong.