That's the temperature at the weather station in shade.
The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).
Today, in May. I'm pretty sure its going to get much worse. How so do you think we'll find out why zuckerberg thinks he can hide away on an island when the civilization he's decided to manipulate can't sustain.
The weather in North India has been very weird this year. Normally it's pleasant in March and starts warming up in April all the way to end June. This year it got June-hot in April but then cooled down again in early May. From running ACs in April to even turning ceiling fans off for a few days in May is unheard of.
The weather is weird everywhere. Portugal now gets weird semi-tropical storms. Belgium had nonsensical heat earlier this year and then hail rains, now we’re up for another heat wave in May. We’ve been warned about climate change, but I’m glad we waited so long to act, it’s definitely been worth it -.-
Wonder how much the removal of trees and bitumening/concreting of surface areas contributes to radiative heating from the sun which then increases the temp of surrounding air, especially on still days.
The Houston metroplex might be one of the best domestic examples of the urban heat island effect. They've got their own entire website about it. If you overlay the daily temperature curve of 77002 with any zip outside the beltway, the difference is incredible. The increased HVAC demand further compounds everything. Downtown Houston is truly hell during the hottest summer months. It can be 4am and your ac condenser will still be throwing the high pressure cutout switch.
The sattelite feed I use has an infrared channel, and Houston's ring and web road structure stands out from geocyncronous orbit, whereas Mexico city is invisible, hot but not like the heat island effect of what must be one of the greatest amounts of concrete on the planet.
Humanity needs to be in a serious hurry to ramp down fossil fuel use and production to curb the megadeaths. Eg the US has been going in the opposite direction for a while, net exporter of oil since 2021.
Makes sense. Coal mining can be automated, and that has been partly done. If coal mining still would be done mostly manually, there would be way more coal miners, or, more likely, coal mining would be unprofitable, and be a thing of the past,
Yoga teaching hasn’t been automated yet, and may never (a startup using robots to give yoga classes likely would be a hit on social media, and might initially be successful, but I am not sure that would last)
Given the recent activity in the middle east, production is ramping down. There has never been clearer, both in terms of climate and national stability, that fossil fuels need to be removed from the grid and the transportation sector.
In term of politics however, that is a much harder sell. When EU got together and voted on green policies, two strategies emerged. One side wanted renewable energy that is supported by natural gas, and thus natural gas got defined as "green". From central to northern Europe it has also been a core strategy to combine renewable generation with thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels, and looking at party platforms (which obviously is public accessible to anyone who want to read them), thermal power plants are a described as critical in order to enable renewable energy. The other side calls for nuclear energy, which EU also defined as "green".
In the transport sector, we also have two main strategies, that being electric and bio fuel/green hydrogen. The green hydrogen has failed to become anywhere close to economical viable, and currently the stage of the struggle is for chemical processes to change from dirty hydrogen produced from natural gas towards green. So far the progress is slow and has costed billions in subsidies, and converting the transport sector is still multiple decades away from becoming economical viable. The electrification process is developing much better, but it too is struggling under both the constraint of the grid and the cost side. Currently the best example is Norway, which strategy was to have the government subsidize car purchases by around 50%, and more than that in terms of car ownership. The grid however is still the major bottleneck when transportation converts to electric.
On the bio fuel side, the way it get described is that by-products are the main ingredient, but in practice only a fraction come from that process and the rest is corn, soy and sugar beets, which in turn is produced using artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas (a common theme).
This all means there is a common shared resource in most of those strategies, which is natural gas. When prices of natural gas increases, the grid cost increase in places which has a high dependencies on renewable energy. The cost of farming increase, resulting in higher bio fuel costs (and food costs).
If we want to serious ramp down fossil fuel use we need to remove natural gas from the political strategies. No peaker plants and no bio fuels produced by farmers using artificial fertilizers. That generally only leaves a few very expensive options, for example nuclear, green hydrogen, massively expanded grid transmissions, and government pouring money to get people and companies to volunteer in the change toward non-fossil fueled options.
Far too late for that. It's going to take big industrial solutions, like the "L1 Space Parasol" (scary, better)[0] or the "Superdust Chemical Injection into the Upper Atmosphere" (less scary, dumber[1]). Or some scary bioengineering, which might be even dumber-er.
Other techbro geniuses have talked up giant pumpships just blasting water in the air, but these techbro geniuses couldn't teach a community college intro physics, much less attempt to thermodynamically balance a planet's gas exchange. It's a dumb idea on almost every level, which is impressive in its own way.
The investment upside here is basically limitless. If you make something livable, you can charge rent to everyone there. Wreck the planet, save some spots, charge rent. King of the world. Oh don't want to pay your rent? Oops now you're cooking in your own juices. I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing. But the masters of industry have a hard time doing big real things these days, so who knows. No no go ahead build your titanic ornamental fountain that'll work great.
It'll come down to war, and then hucking nukes, in the end.
[0] Something that stops working on its own when not maintained is probably a good design goal here.
[1] "Do you want Snowpiercer? Because that's how you get Snowpiercer"
Even if we completely stopped all fossil fuel use right now it would be too little too late. We will witness water wars and mass migrations on a scale never seen before. We are very close to the RCP8.5 worst case scenario (not fully there yet) but you better make sure you enjoy your life while its still possible within this and the next few decades.
No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too.
From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.
Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.
Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.
Doomer position? You are aware that the climate catastrophe is a known fact since decades? People in the 70s knew about it, and what did humanity do about it? Spreading propaganda about how earth always had hot and cold periods. It's a narrative many still support today. Even +3C is a massive change resulting in many many catastrophes. As I wrote, we will witness water wars and mass migrations. You can call it a doomer position, I call it reality.
That there will be consequences either way isn't up for debate, I think you lot both agree on that.
The issue that is being taken is about "too little too late", which is being interpreted as "since even in the best case scenario we're going to have dramatic consequences, any action is going to be fruitless", the counterpoint being that the new best case scenario (which is not a good one because it is late to take action, and is mostly equivalent to what once was thought to be the worst case) is still much less worse than the new worst case one.
You're both correct. It's too late to stop dire effects like wars and global mass migration, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. It means we should start doing everything we can right now to prevent it from getting even worse.
It won't be too little, it's still saving more people than died in wars and famines in the last 100 years.
I don't really understand this "too late" failure of judgement unless you're assuming there's some end of the world style event coming no matter what we do.
No, it's just enormous amounts of death and suffering proportional to the amount of oil and gas and coal we keep burning and digging up every day.
This is a severely outdated view. Based on current policies, we're heading for something like 2.6 degrees of warming which I think is somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP6.0. It's still bad but nowhere close to RCP8.5 so your comment is indeed unhelpful doomerism. (RCP scenarios themselves are outdated and have been replaced by "socio-economic pathways" - SSP).
Water wars? Desalination plants cost hundreds of millions. Wars cost trillions. We'll get water violence and water tyranny, but water wars are an idiotic idea. Most wars are idiotic ideas so we might still get one, but water will be just an invalid excuse.
If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear and only make things worse, i.e. germany now using huge amounts of coal.
The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale.
We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.
Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph.
Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.
> And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem
For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible.
You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.
You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.
Other replies think you're taking about baseload fallacy.
I think you are talking about the reduction in total electricity generation.
This (and similar stats) get tied to the "environmentalists are killing industry/civilization" arguments.
Except, since the nuclear phase out started in 2000 the electricity generation has only dropped about 70TWh. And about 50 TWh of that was exported. And it's not clear if those numbers include the 12TWh of German behind-the-meter solar, which would leave electricity use flat at a time when LED lighting was reducing demand, similar to many Western nations.
They became a net electricity importer (once again the sign of total civilizational collapse to some) and then returned to being a net exporter this year.
But even when importing they had gas and coal capacity they could have used, they just got cleaner energy cheap from other countries to meet their demand.
So why is cheaper energy than gas or coal a problem?
A real problem they have is that their current elected leader hates wind power. If you want to be angry at Germans protesting cheap, clean energy I'd start there.
The strategy of using renewable energy when the weather is optimal and fossil fuels when it is not is one that Germany promoted to the point of getting EU to define natural gas as "green". To a degree it does work to make a country that heavily used fossil fuels to reduce consumption, which Germany itself has shown.
If it is cheaper is less clear case. Having all those peaker plants at standby is expensive and require a lot of subsidizes, and there need to be transmission both from the peaker plants and wind farms, which is also paid mostly through subsidies. German subsidies to both fossil fueled power plants and renewable energy producers has only increased by time. The owners of peaker plants can also recover most of losses from periods of optimal weather, not only by subsidies, but also by increasing prices during non-optimal weather as there is very little competition during periods of high demand and low supply.
Not everyone agree with this strategy. EU has no plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the energy grid, despite having a clear plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the transport sector. With the war in Ukraine and war in Iran, the strategy of peaker plants are also looking to be poor in terms of economic and national security.
EU need to issue a full phase out of all fossil fuels in the energy grid by banning any construction of new power plants that burn fossil fuels by 2030 and a final decommission date by 2040. The solution to non-optimal weather has to be done through some other way. The discussion of renewables vs nuclear will then be mostly irrelevant.
The world needs to phase out carbon emissions generally and unreliable suppliers of goods.
We should start with phasing out the mostly costly and harmful emissions first.
Artificial lines drawn between electriciy and other areas are unhelpful.
Once you get below about 500 g per kWh of CO2, which the EU is generally well under, then electrification should be used to offset gas and oil usage in other sectors.
It is fine if you use 1 unit of gas for electricity if you save 9 units elsewhere (roughly accurate figures for home heating with heat pumps in the EU)
And people getting obsessive about nuclear without acknowledging the use of gas peakers and interconnects to balance those grids is just annoying.
Support nuclear by pointing out we can shift cars, trucks, busses, heating and industry to use electricity. A car run on electricity even from the most expensive plants in Europe is cheaper than running on imported fuel.
> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels
This is a myth, you just need to overbuild the renewables like solar, add some storage, and then have _some_ capacity from other sources to handle the dips.
> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels
This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.
Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
This is my favourite objection to nuclear energy. Why wouldn't we just burn the nuclear waste and vent it to the atmosphere? That's acceptable for the fossil fuel industry, so why not for nuclear?
The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.
Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on.
Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.
>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget
As much as any large scale energy project.
Per kW it is quite effective.
The implication of GP's reasoning is that were Green not yelling about nuclear these would already be built because the projects would have started long ago.
>> where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)
People don't want solar farms, windmills, or oil rigs in their backyard either. Fun fact, coal emits orders of magnitude more toxic waste (including nuclear!) than nuclear itself; it's just stored in the atmosphere.
Also people largely don't want to cook themselves to death because the atmosphere has turned into a literal oven.
Instead they read the news, yap "oh my god 50degC shadowside that is horrible", turn the newspaper page and Gell-Mann-amnesia-forget about it because it's happening at the other side of the world, comfortably sitting on their couch with their HVAC pumping heat outside further contributing to the problem.
>> contributes little to global energy mix atm
Catch-22. Because there's not enough nuclear reactors.
France has a ~ 70% nuclear 10% renewable 10% fossil 10% hydro mix.
> France generates roughly two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, well above the global average of just under 10%. This heavy reliance on nuclear energy allows France to have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity in the world at 85 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the global average of 438 grams
The problem is enrichment, and it is not even a technical
problem. We're doing more difficult things producing nanometer scale compute wafers by the millions.
Nuclear has drawbacks. I don't think it is the endgame. I'm still waiting for anyone to come up with a less bad solution that actually a) addresses nuclear drawbacks and b) works, because all I see is yelling at nuclear and the proposed alternatives are either unobtainium or nothing at all, both equivalent to the status quo that turns the planet into a death trap.
>Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.
Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either.
I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.
Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.
There’s an ‘interesting’ dichotomy, echoing the original sentiment:
On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.
On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.
Existential threats, paper challenges.
Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.
Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.
… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.
China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.
They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.
The data is very public for their time spend and verifiably so because they're huge projects and it's quite noticeable when they produce power.
In fact they're one of the main countries pulling the average build time down well below the few notable fuckups in europe recently.
They've also built a number of experimental/new designs and done well.
We did too. And when i read of our fuckups and look at the heaps of nonsensical underlying stories of management and construction in the UK, finland, etc it just seems wild how it can be done like that and be gotten away with.
I've heard of similar in the renewables space (stuff build in contexts/places where it didn't make sense and cost overruns purely for government subsidies) but at least those where individually small fuckups.
Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.
Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
> It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.
> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?
> It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.
The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.
That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.
Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.
And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.
Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.
And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.
You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.
First of all I never said these things you claim.
I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.
However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.
> However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
The only "recent" one I can think of is Fukushima Daiichi, a little more than fifteen years ago. That one definitely had a couple-dozen injuries at and around the time of the disaster and maybe one death four years later. Compare that to the tens of thousands killed and many thousands injured because of the tsunami and earthquake that damaged the fission plant.
What other ones do you consider to be recent? Do make sure to mention the year in which they happened as well as reasonable guesses at the death and injury numbers for each incident.
(I'll refrain from more than a brief mention of the century+-long ongoing disaster that is fossil-fuel-fired [0] power generation.)
> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in.
A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck.
> ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl.
[0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
German scientist had a list with possible locations for the "endlager" final location. But politicians did not listen and on purpose chose a location not on the list, but one that was close too east Germany to mess with them. They overruled the scientist.
Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.
>>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste
I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.
Nah, needs to be in a hurry to develop much more efficient and cheaper ac and food crops that handle extremes better perhaps, but no hurry to curb oil use until an actually better product comes along. It is uncertain if actually better product will be much cheaper batteries to make renewables actually work or government getting out of the way so nuclear can actually innovate a cheaper default design but i hope its both and quickly.
I wonder what the wet bulb temperature is, it feels like the day when we have our first true mass casualty event (as opposed to the longer, slower crisies caused by say european heatwaves in the last decade) caused by the climate crisis is getting close.
I plugged in the "now" (11am there) numbers for Banda from a weather site (since the humidity is higher than in the afternoon) of 37C, 52% RH, 1001 MB of pressure into the US gov's calculator: https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_rh It says 28C for wet bulb. According to wikipedia 35C is where even young and healthy people die, but 70,000 people died in Europe in 2003 from a heat wave that topped out at 28C as well.
People die in Thailand from the cold at 10°C. There's a strong physiological acclimatization factor, plus the way dwellings are set up to handle the heat. Which is to say wet bulb temperatures of 28°C in Europe are incomparable in terms of fatality rates to the same temperatures in central India -- perhaps that was your point.
As someone who lives in Phoenix, the 48C mark doesn't matter unless we know the humidity...
115C with 10% humidity (71.66F wet bulb) here is hot, but as long as you have water, you're better off here than in Florida with 85F at 90% humidity (87.46F wet bulb).
Because air conditioning in homes is so rare in Europe and so widespread in the US, the gap between the number of Europeans and (North) Americans that die each year from heat waves is already larger than the total number of Americans that die from guns. <https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...>
> the number of Europeans and (North) Americans that die each year from heat waves is already larger than the total number of Americans that die from guns.
This doesn't mean much on its own. People have to die from something eventually, if someone is living a longer life due to not dying for other reasons, they get older and are more susceptible to heat.
A lot of Europe rarely has a need for air conditioning. I'm in Norway, so I'm an exception - I generally only want it a couple weeks per year, if that. It'll be more widespread here, I think, but that is more because of the popularity of heat pumps, which come with some cooling.
Further south - England and Poland and all those coastal areas - are tempered by the ocean. Summers just aren't as hot.
Even further south - Italy and Greece - air conditioning is common. You know, because it is hot there. Further south = hotter summers = air conditioning. Further north = moderate summers = little cool air needed.
I'm in Scotland and I've never wanted air conditioning at home and I'm someone who really doesn't like warm temperatures. Mind you - it doesn't get that cold here as we are next to the sea but it also never gets unpleasantly warm.
Except that source article doesn't make that claim, only number of gun deaths. The best source[1] I could find on heatwave related deaths on short notice has the following summary:
> Asia observed the highest heatwave-related mortality, accounting for 47.97% (85,611 deaths) of the global excess death, followed by Europe (37.23%, 66,443 deaths), the Americas (13.15%, 23,467deaths), Africa (1.61%, 2,881 deaths), and Oceania (0.05%, 83 deaths).
That of course muddles the picture by combining both American continents, though further down it quotes 9,666 for "Northern America" in table 1; though the Europe number also includes all of Russia. Those numbers are from 2023. Additionally, Europe has more than twice the population of North America. Without doing the maths, the gap claim sound about right; however, that doesn't necessarily mean it's due to a lack of air conditioning in Europe.
Just an opinion. There is more AC in Asia and South Asia and more heat waves related deaths.
You number, approximately right but means nothing and the link AC => Less deaths by Heat Wave isn't supported by any fact.
Others factors like percent of the population > 70y, difference between usual temp / mean temperature in an heat wave and access to fresh and clean water should be more correlated than "AC implantation per hundred inhab".
I'm in the UK and we have AC. I do indeed see it popping up everywhere around where I live. You see more and more homes getting fitted with minisplits.
I expect at some point in my lifetime there will be places near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable by climate change. There will be a climate refugee crisis. The future is looking bleak.
It won't stop if it's ventilated with outdoor ambient air:
40C air can hold 51 g of water per m3 of air. 60C air can hold 130 g of water per m3 of air [1]. The curve is exponential.
So, it works as long as the transformer is hotter than ambient air, even at the most humidest (100% RH). The transformer's heat will drop the relative humidity of the air near its surface, and the heated air can absorb more water again.
If the humidity is below 100% RH, what changes is that the evaporating water could cool it to below ambient air temperature, same effect as in swamp coolers.
I still think it's crazy that the heat wave in Portland, OR (116 deg in 2021) had higher temps than places like Austin, Dallas, Miami, etc have ever had in recorded history. An area of BC recorded over 121.
I had just moved into the home we bought a week before that event, about 30 miles south of Maple Valley. The AC was old (original unit from when the home was built in the early 1980s) and we knew it had to be replaced. But with everything (new appliances, etc.) we decided "we'll take care of that before next summer". And then four days of 105+ temperature, and of course, the AC died forever[1] a couple of hours in. We had a portable AC, but an elderly dog with a double coat, and my partner and our dog and I ended up hunkering down in the living room with the portable AC running 24/7 (took the edge off, but still got to mid 80s inside) and us periodically running towels under water, putting them in the freezer and using them as a "blanket" for the dog.
We thought about hotels, but anything in our town was booked. That was not a fun time.
[1] Miraculously we managed to find an AC tech who would come out to look at it. "It's dead." I don't know what he did then, but he did something else (maybe removed a cutout valve?) and said "Here, this will keep it working but might only be for a couple of hours or a couple of days and is absolutely not warrantied or guaranteed or anything". It did keep working for about four more hours before giving up completely.
That's the temperature at the weather station in shade.
The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).
Today, in May. I'm pretty sure its going to get much worse. How so do you think we'll find out why zuckerberg thinks he can hide away on an island when the civilization he's decided to manipulate can't sustain.
The weather in North India has been very weird this year. Normally it's pleasant in March and starts warming up in April all the way to end June. This year it got June-hot in April but then cooled down again in early May. From running ACs in April to even turning ceiling fans off for a few days in May is unheard of.
The weather is weird everywhere. Portugal now gets weird semi-tropical storms. Belgium had nonsensical heat earlier this year and then hail rains, now we’re up for another heat wave in May. We’ve been warned about climate change, but I’m glad we waited so long to act, it’s definitely been worth it -.-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
There's some interesting, sad, but hopeful science fiction about where this is headed.
Ministry for the Future: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...
Excerpt here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-ministry-for-the-futur...
The only good bit of the book is that first chapter
Extended read: A Super El Niño Is Increasingly Likely, And It Could Be Record Strong (https://weather.com/news/climate/news/2026-05-07-super-el-ni...)
If true, this summer and maybe winter maybe brutal.
Wonder how much the removal of trees and bitumening/concreting of surface areas contributes to radiative heating from the sun which then increases the temp of surrounding air, especially on still days.
The Houston metroplex might be one of the best domestic examples of the urban heat island effect. They've got their own entire website about it. If you overlay the daily temperature curve of 77002 with any zip outside the beltway, the difference is incredible. The increased HVAC demand further compounds everything. Downtown Houston is truly hell during the hottest summer months. It can be 4am and your ac condenser will still be throwing the high pressure cutout switch.
https://www.h3at.org/
The sattelite feed I use has an infrared channel, and Houston's ring and web road structure stands out from geocyncronous orbit, whereas Mexico city is invisible, hot but not like the heat island effect of what must be one of the greatest amounts of concrete on the planet.
https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/
In this specific case, the city is essentially bordering a desert.
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Humanity needs to be in a serious hurry to ramp down fossil fuel use and production to curb the megadeaths. Eg the US has been going in the opposite direction for a while, net exporter of oil since 2021.
Drill baby drill.
And to lighten the mood, the US has more yoga teachers than coal miners:
https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...
Makes sense. Coal mining can be automated, and that has been partly done. If coal mining still would be done mostly manually, there would be way more coal miners, or, more likely, coal mining would be unprofitable, and be a thing of the past,
Yoga teaching hasn’t been automated yet, and may never (a startup using robots to give yoga classes likely would be a hit on social media, and might initially be successful, but I am not sure that would last)
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Given the recent activity in the middle east, production is ramping down. There has never been clearer, both in terms of climate and national stability, that fossil fuels need to be removed from the grid and the transportation sector.
In term of politics however, that is a much harder sell. When EU got together and voted on green policies, two strategies emerged. One side wanted renewable energy that is supported by natural gas, and thus natural gas got defined as "green". From central to northern Europe it has also been a core strategy to combine renewable generation with thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels, and looking at party platforms (which obviously is public accessible to anyone who want to read them), thermal power plants are a described as critical in order to enable renewable energy. The other side calls for nuclear energy, which EU also defined as "green".
In the transport sector, we also have two main strategies, that being electric and bio fuel/green hydrogen. The green hydrogen has failed to become anywhere close to economical viable, and currently the stage of the struggle is for chemical processes to change from dirty hydrogen produced from natural gas towards green. So far the progress is slow and has costed billions in subsidies, and converting the transport sector is still multiple decades away from becoming economical viable. The electrification process is developing much better, but it too is struggling under both the constraint of the grid and the cost side. Currently the best example is Norway, which strategy was to have the government subsidize car purchases by around 50%, and more than that in terms of car ownership. The grid however is still the major bottleneck when transportation converts to electric.
On the bio fuel side, the way it get described is that by-products are the main ingredient, but in practice only a fraction come from that process and the rest is corn, soy and sugar beets, which in turn is produced using artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas (a common theme).
This all means there is a common shared resource in most of those strategies, which is natural gas. When prices of natural gas increases, the grid cost increase in places which has a high dependencies on renewable energy. The cost of farming increase, resulting in higher bio fuel costs (and food costs).
If we want to serious ramp down fossil fuel use we need to remove natural gas from the political strategies. No peaker plants and no bio fuels produced by farmers using artificial fertilizers. That generally only leaves a few very expensive options, for example nuclear, green hydrogen, massively expanded grid transmissions, and government pouring money to get people and companies to volunteer in the change toward non-fossil fueled options.
Far too late for that. It's going to take big industrial solutions, like the "L1 Space Parasol" (scary, better)[0] or the "Superdust Chemical Injection into the Upper Atmosphere" (less scary, dumber[1]). Or some scary bioengineering, which might be even dumber-er.
Other techbro geniuses have talked up giant pumpships just blasting water in the air, but these techbro geniuses couldn't teach a community college intro physics, much less attempt to thermodynamically balance a planet's gas exchange. It's a dumb idea on almost every level, which is impressive in its own way.
The investment upside here is basically limitless. If you make something livable, you can charge rent to everyone there. Wreck the planet, save some spots, charge rent. King of the world. Oh don't want to pay your rent? Oops now you're cooking in your own juices. I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing. But the masters of industry have a hard time doing big real things these days, so who knows. No no go ahead build your titanic ornamental fountain that'll work great.
It'll come down to war, and then hucking nukes, in the end.
[0] Something that stops working on its own when not maintained is probably a good design goal here.
[1] "Do you want Snowpiercer? Because that's how you get Snowpiercer"
Even if we completely stopped all fossil fuel use right now it would be too little too late. We will witness water wars and mass migrations on a scale never seen before. We are very close to the RCP8.5 worst case scenario (not fully there yet) but you better make sure you enjoy your life while its still possible within this and the next few decades.
No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too.
From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.
Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.
Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.
Doomer position? You are aware that the climate catastrophe is a known fact since decades? People in the 70s knew about it, and what did humanity do about it? Spreading propaganda about how earth always had hot and cold periods. It's a narrative many still support today. Even +3C is a massive change resulting in many many catastrophes. As I wrote, we will witness water wars and mass migrations. You can call it a doomer position, I call it reality.
That there will be consequences either way isn't up for debate, I think you lot both agree on that.
The issue that is being taken is about "too little too late", which is being interpreted as "since even in the best case scenario we're going to have dramatic consequences, any action is going to be fruitless", the counterpoint being that the new best case scenario (which is not a good one because it is late to take action, and is mostly equivalent to what once was thought to be the worst case) is still much less worse than the new worst case one.
You're both correct. It's too late to stop dire effects like wars and global mass migration, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. It means we should start doing everything we can right now to prevent it from getting even worse.
They’re referring to your attitude around reducing fossil fuel usage. “We’re screwed anyway so there’s no point”.
Do-nothing doomerism and do-something extreme pessimism are qualitatively different.
We have overpopulation anyway.
The solution starts very, very close to home.
It won't be too little, it's still saving more people than died in wars and famines in the last 100 years.
I don't really understand this "too late" failure of judgement unless you're assuming there's some end of the world style event coming no matter what we do.
No, it's just enormous amounts of death and suffering proportional to the amount of oil and gas and coal we keep burning and digging up every day.
This is a severely outdated view. Based on current policies, we're heading for something like 2.6 degrees of warming which I think is somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP6.0. It's still bad but nowhere close to RCP8.5 so your comment is indeed unhelpful doomerism. (RCP scenarios themselves are outdated and have been replaced by "socio-economic pathways" - SSP).
https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/
I'm already hiding under the bed.
Water wars? Desalination plants cost hundreds of millions. Wars cost trillions. We'll get water violence and water tyranny, but water wars are an idiotic idea. Most wars are idiotic ideas so we might still get one, but water will be just an invalid excuse.
If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear and only make things worse, i.e. germany now using huge amounts of coal.
The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale.
We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.
> germany now using huge amounts of coal.
I tried to look that up, but all I could find is that it trends downwards: https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/...
Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph.
Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.
> And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem
For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible.
Current plans are to take the waste out and store it in a more responsible manner. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_clos...
Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output.
They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.
You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.
Other replies think you're taking about baseload fallacy.
I think you are talking about the reduction in total electricity generation.
This (and similar stats) get tied to the "environmentalists are killing industry/civilization" arguments.
Except, since the nuclear phase out started in 2000 the electricity generation has only dropped about 70TWh. And about 50 TWh of that was exported. And it's not clear if those numbers include the 12TWh of German behind-the-meter solar, which would leave electricity use flat at a time when LED lighting was reducing demand, similar to many Western nations.
They became a net electricity importer (once again the sign of total civilizational collapse to some) and then returned to being a net exporter this year.
But even when importing they had gas and coal capacity they could have used, they just got cleaner energy cheap from other countries to meet their demand.
So why is cheaper energy than gas or coal a problem?
A real problem they have is that their current elected leader hates wind power. If you want to be angry at Germans protesting cheap, clean energy I'd start there.
The strategy of using renewable energy when the weather is optimal and fossil fuels when it is not is one that Germany promoted to the point of getting EU to define natural gas as "green". To a degree it does work to make a country that heavily used fossil fuels to reduce consumption, which Germany itself has shown.
If it is cheaper is less clear case. Having all those peaker plants at standby is expensive and require a lot of subsidizes, and there need to be transmission both from the peaker plants and wind farms, which is also paid mostly through subsidies. German subsidies to both fossil fueled power plants and renewable energy producers has only increased by time. The owners of peaker plants can also recover most of losses from periods of optimal weather, not only by subsidies, but also by increasing prices during non-optimal weather as there is very little competition during periods of high demand and low supply.
Not everyone agree with this strategy. EU has no plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the energy grid, despite having a clear plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the transport sector. With the war in Ukraine and war in Iran, the strategy of peaker plants are also looking to be poor in terms of economic and national security.
EU need to issue a full phase out of all fossil fuels in the energy grid by banning any construction of new power plants that burn fossil fuels by 2030 and a final decommission date by 2040. The solution to non-optimal weather has to be done through some other way. The discussion of renewables vs nuclear will then be mostly irrelevant.
The world needs to phase out carbon emissions generally and unreliable suppliers of goods.
We should start with phasing out the mostly costly and harmful emissions first.
Artificial lines drawn between electriciy and other areas are unhelpful.
Once you get below about 500 g per kWh of CO2, which the EU is generally well under, then electrification should be used to offset gas and oil usage in other sectors.
It is fine if you use 1 unit of gas for electricity if you save 9 units elsewhere (roughly accurate figures for home heating with heat pumps in the EU)
And people getting obsessive about nuclear without acknowledging the use of gas peakers and interconnects to balance those grids is just annoying.
Support nuclear by pointing out we can shift cars, trucks, busses, heating and industry to use electricity. A car run on electricity even from the most expensive plants in Europe is cheaper than running on imported fuel.
> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels
This is a myth, you just need to overbuild the renewables like solar, add some storage, and then have _some_ capacity from other sources to handle the dips.
And then watch your industry collapse due to high energy prices like germany.
> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels
This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
And in the meantime you've been putting out insane amounts of co2 for decades.
If we so choose. If we want to move faster than we can mange to balance things, we can also reduce energy use. It's all just political decisions.
Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.
The thread is about the world moving off fossil fuels.
No.
Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.
Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on.
Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.
>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget
As much as any large scale energy project.
Per kW it is quite effective.
The implication of GP's reasoning is that were Green not yelling about nuclear these would already be built because the projects would have started long ago.
>> where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)
People don't want solar farms, windmills, or oil rigs in their backyard either. Fun fact, coal emits orders of magnitude more toxic waste (including nuclear!) than nuclear itself; it's just stored in the atmosphere.
Also people largely don't want to cook themselves to death because the atmosphere has turned into a literal oven.
Instead they read the news, yap "oh my god 50degC shadowside that is horrible", turn the newspaper page and Gell-Mann-amnesia-forget about it because it's happening at the other side of the world, comfortably sitting on their couch with their HVAC pumping heat outside further contributing to the problem.
>> contributes little to global energy mix atm
Catch-22. Because there's not enough nuclear reactors.
France has a ~ 70% nuclear 10% renewable 10% fossil 10% hydro mix.
> France generates roughly two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, well above the global average of just under 10%. This heavy reliance on nuclear energy allows France to have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity in the world at 85 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the global average of 438 grams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
>> uranium is limited.
Uranium is aplenty.
> more than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver [~40x!], and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence
The problem is enrichment, and it is not even a technical problem. We're doing more difficult things producing nanometer scale compute wafers by the millions.
Nuclear has drawbacks. I don't think it is the endgame. I'm still waiting for anyone to come up with a less bad solution that actually a) addresses nuclear drawbacks and b) works, because all I see is yelling at nuclear and the proposed alternatives are either unobtainium or nothing at all, both equivalent to the status quo that turns the planet into a death trap.
>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget
> As much as any large scale energy project.
We have data on this. Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.
Right up there with big IT and Defence projects, "Nuclear waste storage sites" and "the Olympics".
>Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.
Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either. I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.
Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.
There’s an ‘interesting’ dichotomy, echoing the original sentiment:
On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.
On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.
Existential threats, paper challenges.
Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.
Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.
… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.
China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.
They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.
But done even better on wind and solar.
The data is very public for their time spend and verifiably so because they're huge projects and it's quite noticeable when they produce power.
In fact they're one of the main countries pulling the average build time down well below the few notable fuckups in europe recently.
They've also built a number of experimental/new designs and done well.
We did too. And when i read of our fuckups and look at the heaps of nonsensical underlying stories of management and construction in the UK, finland, etc it just seems wild how it can be done like that and be gotten away with.
I've heard of similar in the renewables space (stuff build in contexts/places where it didn't make sense and cost overruns purely for government subsidies) but at least those where individually small fuckups.
> As much as any large scale energy project
Solar projects are more likely to be under budget than over.
Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.
Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
> It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.
> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?
> It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.
The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.
That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.
Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.
And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.
Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.
And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.
You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.
First of all I never said these things you claim. I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.
However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.
> However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
The only "recent" one I can think of is Fukushima Daiichi, a little more than fifteen years ago. That one definitely had a couple-dozen injuries at and around the time of the disaster and maybe one death four years later. Compare that to the tens of thousands killed and many thousands injured because of the tsunami and earthquake that damaged the fission plant.
What other ones do you consider to be recent? Do make sure to mention the year in which they happened as well as reasonable guesses at the death and injury numbers for each incident.
(I'll refrain from more than a brief mention of the century+-long ongoing disaster that is fossil-fuel-fired [0] power generation.)
> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in.
A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck.
Finland did it well though.
Its not a solved issue. The plant still is in a state of emergency. It just shows that these plants are easy targets.
> ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl.
[0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
>>Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak.
Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly?
And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.
German scientist had a list with possible locations for the "endlager" final location. But politicians did not listen and on purpose chose a location not on the list, but one that was close too east Germany to mess with them. They overruled the scientist.
Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.
Nobody is arguing we should store nuclear waste haphazardly in barrels.
Right, nobody is arguing for the negative consequences we've had from nuclear reactors, except perhaps atom bombs, but they happened anyway.
I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?
>>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste
I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.
2008: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long...
2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management...
2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-...
Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf
Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion.
Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...
This has nothing to do with that.
Nah, needs to be in a hurry to develop much more efficient and cheaper ac and food crops that handle extremes better perhaps, but no hurry to curb oil use until an actually better product comes along. It is uncertain if actually better product will be much cheaper batteries to make renewables actually work or government getting out of the way so nuclear can actually innovate a cheaper default design but i hope its both and quickly.
I wonder what the wet bulb temperature is, it feels like the day when we have our first true mass casualty event (as opposed to the longer, slower crisies caused by say european heatwaves in the last decade) caused by the climate crisis is getting close.
I plugged in the "now" (11am there) numbers for Banda from a weather site (since the humidity is higher than in the afternoon) of 37C, 52% RH, 1001 MB of pressure into the US gov's calculator: https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_rh It says 28C for wet bulb. According to wikipedia 35C is where even young and healthy people die, but 70,000 people died in Europe in 2003 from a heat wave that topped out at 28C as well.
> but 70,000 people died in Europe in 2003
People die in Thailand from the cold at 10°C. There's a strong physiological acclimatization factor, plus the way dwellings are set up to handle the heat. Which is to say wet bulb temperatures of 28°C in Europe are incomparable in terms of fatality rates to the same temperatures in central India -- perhaps that was your point.
We’re looking at an unprecedented El Niño this year - the event may be closer than we think.
such an underrated concern.
As someone who lives in Phoenix, the 48C mark doesn't matter unless we know the humidity...
115C with 10% humidity (71.66F wet bulb) here is hot, but as long as you have water, you're better off here than in Florida with 85F at 90% humidity (87.46F wet bulb).
Currently living in Southern India. The heat is unbearable.
In the UK we don’t get temperatures like this, but it doesn’t take much heat before parts of the country start feeling completely unprepared for it
The biggest problem is not how the heat affects people -- that can be partially mitigated with AC, etc. -- it's how it affects crops and livestock.
Because air conditioning in homes is so rare in Europe and so widespread in the US, the gap between the number of Europeans and (North) Americans that die each year from heat waves is already larger than the total number of Americans that die from guns. <https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...>
> the number of Europeans and (North) Americans that die each year from heat waves is already larger than the total number of Americans that die from guns.
This doesn't mean much on its own. People have to die from something eventually, if someone is living a longer life due to not dying for other reasons, they get older and are more susceptible to heat.
On a long enough timeline, a piano could fall on your head
A lot of Europe rarely has a need for air conditioning. I'm in Norway, so I'm an exception - I generally only want it a couple weeks per year, if that. It'll be more widespread here, I think, but that is more because of the popularity of heat pumps, which come with some cooling.
Further south - England and Poland and all those coastal areas - are tempered by the ocean. Summers just aren't as hot.
Even further south - Italy and Greece - air conditioning is common. You know, because it is hot there. Further south = hotter summers = air conditioning. Further north = moderate summers = little cool air needed.
I'm in Scotland and I've never wanted air conditioning at home and I'm someone who really doesn't like warm temperatures. Mind you - it doesn't get that cold here as we are next to the sea but it also never gets unpleasantly warm.
Except that source article doesn't make that claim, only number of gun deaths. The best source[1] I could find on heatwave related deaths on short notice has the following summary:
> Asia observed the highest heatwave-related mortality, accounting for 47.97% (85,611 deaths) of the global excess death, followed by Europe (37.23%, 66,443 deaths), the Americas (13.15%, 23,467deaths), Africa (1.61%, 2,881 deaths), and Oceania (0.05%, 83 deaths).
That of course muddles the picture by combining both American continents, though further down it quotes 9,666 for "Northern America" in table 1; though the Europe number also includes all of Russia. Those numbers are from 2023. Additionally, Europe has more than twice the population of North America. Without doing the maths, the gap claim sound about right; however, that doesn't necessarily mean it's due to a lack of air conditioning in Europe.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582...
Just an opinion. There is more AC in Asia and South Asia and more heat waves related deaths.
You number, approximately right but means nothing and the link AC => Less deaths by Heat Wave isn't supported by any fact.
Others factors like percent of the population > 70y, difference between usual temp / mean temperature in an heat wave and access to fresh and clean water should be more correlated than "AC implantation per hundred inhab".
Yeah but it's mostly old people who are near death anyway.
It is no longer rare. You can see the AC units popping up almost everywhere nowadays, usually together with solar panels.
I'm in the UK and we have AC. I do indeed see it popping up everywhere around where I live. You see more and more homes getting fitted with minisplits.
Imagine how hot it would be if everyone in Europe did have AC. The few that can't afford it would have to suffer even more.
Can't afford? It's not about that, it's cultural. AC is cheap.
You won’t have to imagine much longer.
I expect at some point in my lifetime there will be places near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable by climate change. There will be a climate refugee crisis. The future is looking bleak.
"Pouring water over transformers". Does this actually do anything?
Depending on the humidity, yes. The evaporation will cool them down, but if it gets humid enough it stops
> if it gets humid enough it stops
It won't stop if it's ventilated with outdoor ambient air:
40C air can hold 51 g of water per m3 of air. 60C air can hold 130 g of water per m3 of air [1]. The curve is exponential.
So, it works as long as the transformer is hotter than ambient air, even at the most humidest (100% RH). The transformer's heat will drop the relative humidity of the air near its surface, and the heated air can absorb more water again.
If the humidity is below 100% RH, what changes is that the evaporating water could cool it to below ambient air temperature, same effect as in swamp coolers.
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/maximum-moisture-content-...
Ah interesting!! I knew there was some relevant interaction with temperature, but was too lazy to look it up. Thanks for clarifying it!
Yes I mean besides the risk of arcing and getting people shocked yes it should help cooling them down (through evaporative cooling)
They hit 119 degrees in freedom units, for those in the US
I saw 118 in Austin. 119 is hot.
Record temp in austin is 112, and that was during that 2011 heat wave.
I still think it's crazy that the heat wave in Portland, OR (116 deg in 2021) had higher temps than places like Austin, Dallas, Miami, etc have ever had in recorded history. An area of BC recorded over 121.
Maple Valley in Washington was allegedly 118 too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea...
Super fun considering relatively few homes in western Washington have AC…
I had just moved into the home we bought a week before that event, about 30 miles south of Maple Valley. The AC was old (original unit from when the home was built in the early 1980s) and we knew it had to be replaced. But with everything (new appliances, etc.) we decided "we'll take care of that before next summer". And then four days of 105+ temperature, and of course, the AC died forever[1] a couple of hours in. We had a portable AC, but an elderly dog with a double coat, and my partner and our dog and I ended up hunkering down in the living room with the portable AC running 24/7 (took the edge off, but still got to mid 80s inside) and us periodically running towels under water, putting them in the freezer and using them as a "blanket" for the dog.
We thought about hotels, but anything in our town was booked. That was not a fun time.
[1] Miraculously we managed to find an AC tech who would come out to look at it. "It's dead." I don't know what he did then, but he did something else (maybe removed a cutout valve?) and said "Here, this will keep it working but might only be for a couple of hours or a couple of days and is absolutely not warrantied or guaranteed or anything". It did keep working for about four more hours before giving up completely.
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