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...
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).
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.
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...
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.
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 we keep burning and digging up every day.
This has nothing to do with that.
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.
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.
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
> where would you store nuclear waste
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.
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.
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?
Its not a solved issue. The plant still is in a state of emergency. It just shows that these plants are easy targets.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
"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 theoretically 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.