13th Bee
Worker
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No, the solution is flabbier humans.
There are ways to increase surface area greatly. Elephant ears, for instance, are basically giant combinations of radiators and fans.
On Methods To Weather a Transition To A Hothouse Earth
- Thread starter We Just Write
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- Science Discussion
There are ways to increase surface area greatly. Elephant ears, for instance, are basically giant combinations of radiators and fans.
We Just Write
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Actually, on a lower-tech note, a nocturnal lifestyle coupled with shallow underground structures would probably allow continued habitation of the equatorial regions. It's not ideal, but it's low-tech, and it would work.
RRoan
Technogaianist
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Surface area doesn't help for what he's talking about. Your body's ability to reject heat plummets towards zero as the wet-bulb temperature approaches your body temperature. Above that the temperature differential is the wrong way around and more surface area just means you die faster.
We Just Write
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Yeah, the only way around that would be some sort of ridiculous biological heat pump, and humans just aren't equipped for that sort of thing.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
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Then why was there evident-in-the-fossil-record within-species selection pressure for small size last time?
Paleocene-Eocene was a substantial extinction event. Maybe a lot of the big animals died?
Though it's worth noting more surface area helps a little bit. After all as you get closer to your bodies wet bulb temperature your ability to reject heat declines. And more surface area means you can get closer to that temperature as you need a less large difference to still get rid of all your heat. It probably doesn't make a very large difference, but it's something.
Still as said, if you reach the wet bulb temperature of your body, you can't so far I know cool down via evaporation cooling any more.
Though it's worth noting more surface area helps a little bit. After all as you get closer to your bodies wet bulb temperature your ability to reject heat declines. And more surface area means you can get closer to that temperature as you need a less large difference to still get rid of all your heat. It probably doesn't make a very large difference, but it's something.
Still as said, if you reach the wet bulb temperature of your body, you can't so far I know cool down via evaporation cooling any more.
RRoan
Technogaianist
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It absolutely does let you stave it off some. More surface area means that you can reject the same amount of heat with a smaller temperature differential. But you can be two or ten or a thousand times better at losing heat and it just doesn't matter if the environmental conditions don't allow heat to move at all.
Vindictus
XENO
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I wonder how many of those species were burrowing, nocturnal type creatures.
Kind of hard to burrow into the climate-controlled depths of the earth when you're of elephantine proportions.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
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Well, I mean, of the two I mentioned, Eohippus had a niche at least vaguely similar to its horsey descendants, and Eosimias was arboreal, so...
We Just Write
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At the extreme ridiculous end, maybe it could be possible to genetically engineer a creature with an integrated Magnetic Refrigeration system? From what I'm aware it's a really efficient type of heat pump, even if it would result in the creature in question needing Gadolinium in their diet.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
This is leaving the realms of useful discussion... Even if it is possible to engineer people so they can live in higher temperatures I don't believe this can actually solve the problem since it couldn't be implemented on the scale needed to protect existing populations. And that is assuming you even can change existing populations to this degree.
I suggest we for the purposes of this discussion assume humans will remain humans physiologically for the foreseeable future.
I suggest we for the purposes of this discussion assume humans will remain humans physiologically for the foreseeable future.
We Just Write
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Fair enough. In that case, the only real way to make the Equatorial regions stay habitable is either ubiquitous Air Conditioning, or a nocturnal lifestyle coupled with shallow subterranean settlements.
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Smaller size would help if there was also enough not-evident-in-the-fossil-record selection for higher survivable body temperature to stay ahead of rising wet-bulb temperatures.
The PETM was relatively fast, but still 10x or 100x slower than modern warming, plus most animal generations are much shorter than human generations, and evolution was driven by death rates that could be far higher than we could accept in human populations.
xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
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If we go that way, then we can also reengineer that bloody inefficient baby delivery system. That's the least we can do for our descendents after fucking up the planet
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Short of geoengineering (e.g, putting up a semi-reflective mirror between us and the Sun) becoming practical and accepted, there's not a lot we can do to STOP anthropogenic climate change. We'll have to adapt.
The biggest problem of anthropogenic climate change is definitely the changing climate. Once, I would have said that it made sense for people to focus on the rising sea levels since that's easier to visualize than soaring temperatures, more extreme humidity/dryness, stronger storms, and other broad climatological trends...but a couple of years back, India's roads were literally melting, and I feel that should probably be a stronger symbol of how climate change is going to screw us over.
If that kind of thing becomes more common in coming decades (and evidence strongly suggests it will), chances are we'll either see an exodus out of the tropical regions or unsustainable death tolls from heat exhaustion and the like. It's not insoluble; we could absolutely hook up every building people in the tropics spend time in to AC, or maybe even create arcologies there. But the thing is, those solutions are expensive, and (to generalize) most of the people with the money to help fix things don't care much about the places that need fixing.
But it's not just that the tropics are going to become less habitable for humans, oh no. Every single corner of the globe received a selection of crops and livestock from Europe and places Europe colonized by the 18th century or so, perfectly chosen as the most economical crops to grow, considering the local conditions. But now those conditions are changing. Not only are places getting hotter, wet places are getting wetter, dry places are getting dryer, and weather everywhere is becoming more volatile. That last one doesn't just mean more and bigger storms, it also means that the weather is going to vary more from year to year.
What does this mean? Well, first off, everywhere is going to have agricultural issues; the crops they're growing now, that they're used to growing, are no longer growing as well as they did in yesteryear's conditions. There's no easy solution to this; some places can try switching to crops which thrive in (or tolerate better) warmer and more extreme climates, others will switch to genetically-engineered versions of their current crops, still others might try building greenhouses or the like to control conditions precisely. Either way, the world's food supply is at risk, and that's kind of important.
That last bit touched on something that I feel is important. With the possible exceptions of geoengineering or arcologies, there's no one solution that would solve all problems in all places. There will be a number of different, complementary solutions for each problem, used in places where that solution is most effective at solving the problem.
Though if you want a simple solution...if we get fusion power and decent construction automation, arcologies aren't completely out of the question. They're plausible enough for a sci-fi story, at least. Imagine: In a semi-dystopian future where denying climate change has allowed it to ruin humanity, India/Brazil/other tropical country has pooled together the resources to begin Project Exodus—a grand venture to move nearly the entire population into self-sustaining arcologies, built as quickly and cheaply as possible. You could build entire stories just exploring the concept of such last-ditch arcologies, let alone the process of executing on the idea, the culture which would form from putting so many people into hyperurban environments,
The biggest problem of anthropogenic climate change is definitely the changing climate. Once, I would have said that it made sense for people to focus on the rising sea levels since that's easier to visualize than soaring temperatures, more extreme humidity/dryness, stronger storms, and other broad climatological trends...but a couple of years back, India's roads were literally melting, and I feel that should probably be a stronger symbol of how climate change is going to screw us over.
If that kind of thing becomes more common in coming decades (and evidence strongly suggests it will), chances are we'll either see an exodus out of the tropical regions or unsustainable death tolls from heat exhaustion and the like. It's not insoluble; we could absolutely hook up every building people in the tropics spend time in to AC, or maybe even create arcologies there. But the thing is, those solutions are expensive, and (to generalize) most of the people with the money to help fix things don't care much about the places that need fixing.
But it's not just that the tropics are going to become less habitable for humans, oh no. Every single corner of the globe received a selection of crops and livestock from Europe and places Europe colonized by the 18th century or so, perfectly chosen as the most economical crops to grow, considering the local conditions. But now those conditions are changing. Not only are places getting hotter, wet places are getting wetter, dry places are getting dryer, and weather everywhere is becoming more volatile. That last one doesn't just mean more and bigger storms, it also means that the weather is going to vary more from year to year.
What does this mean? Well, first off, everywhere is going to have agricultural issues; the crops they're growing now, that they're used to growing, are no longer growing as well as they did in yesteryear's conditions. There's no easy solution to this; some places can try switching to crops which thrive in (or tolerate better) warmer and more extreme climates, others will switch to genetically-engineered versions of their current crops, still others might try building greenhouses or the like to control conditions precisely. Either way, the world's food supply is at risk, and that's kind of important.
That last bit touched on something that I feel is important. With the possible exceptions of geoengineering or arcologies, there's no one solution that would solve all problems in all places. There will be a number of different, complementary solutions for each problem, used in places where that solution is most effective at solving the problem.
Though if you want a simple solution...if we get fusion power and decent construction automation, arcologies aren't completely out of the question. They're plausible enough for a sci-fi story, at least. Imagine: In a semi-dystopian future where denying climate change has allowed it to ruin humanity, India/Brazil/other tropical country has pooled together the resources to begin Project Exodus—a grand venture to move nearly the entire population into self-sustaining arcologies, built as quickly and cheaply as possible. You could build entire stories just exploring the concept of such last-ditch arcologies, let alone the process of executing on the idea, the culture which would form from putting so many people into hyperurban environments,
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Problem is that arcologies aren't naturally cooler than their environment, they would need large scale AC. And when it comes to AC and global warming you need to keep in mind that it is kinda like the old "robbing Peter to pay Paul" saying. AC doesn't remove heat, it makes heat moving heat from place A to place B. Setting up enormous amounts of AC will make your problem worse sooner or later.
Only if your AC is powered by CO2 generating power systems or some such. Otherwise the heat is radiated off in to space fairly quickly.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
I'm not sure it radiates that quickly... But that aside massive amounts of AC make our energy issues worse. We are already going to have to expend a massive amount of resources in retooling to green power... Adding large new expenditures is exactly what we don't need right now.
Obviously, but if it were your only choice to survive...
You could potentially offset this to an extent if you had some kind of heatsink though, then you could store heat up over day and dump it at night. Or for the right climate zones, collect heat in summer that is released in winter. Stuff like that. At the least that would greatly cut power spent on cooling and heating.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
I expect people leaving will happen more than them building very expensive superstructures.
A traditional way to deal with heat yes... But I'm not sure how much heating is needed in the regions where these issues would occur.
Depends on how the local climate zone develops I guess, if it becomes desert like or is a desert already, it might get pretty cold at night.
Jonen C
F.M.D.G.
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The big issue with AC right now (and right now it is practically necessary to have AC to make some regions livable in a modern style) is the fact that their refrigerants tend to (CFC having been phased out tonsave the ozone layer) be massive greenhouse gasses.
And with the scale of AC infrastructure, a lot of small leaky units add up to a lot.
(And then there's always the possibility of someone picking up CFC again when no one is looking.)
Research is being done on alternatives, but the problem isn't the new stuff - its the old stuff in circulation. And the waste.
And with the scale of AC infrastructure, a lot of small leaky units add up to a lot.
(And then there's always the possibility of someone picking up CFC again when no one is looking.)
Research is being done on alternatives, but the problem isn't the new stuff - its the old stuff in circulation. And the waste.
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I'm not saying it would be a perfect solution, but I'd argue that adding more heat to the Earth in general is worth reducing heat in some areas to levels which let people not die.
Well, yes. But I wouldn't call that a simple solution; you need transport infrastructure, you need vehicles transporting people (and someone paying the vehicle operators, buying fuel/energy, etc), and above all, you need somewhere to put them. I'll freely admit that the engineering problems of making 100-story, 800-foot-wide buildings are not inconsequential, nor are problems associated with building a whole lot of them at the same time, but I'd argue that the problems with arcologies (once you have the aforementioned technology, ie fusion and automated construction) are relatively simple compared to the problems associated with transporting billions of people out of the tropics. Finding somewhere to put all of those people is going to be tough enough if we don't build non-tropical megastructures.
I'd also like to note that I was deliberately trying not to conflate "simple" with "good". There are plenty of problems with arcologies, but they're conceptually pretty simple. If you're writing policy, don't bet it all on "Arcologies" (especially since we don't have practical fusion and our automated construction techniques are still pretty rudimentary)...but I'm guessing more people here are wannabe authors than wannabe politicians, so an easily-comprehensible solution which works well for a sci-fi story is potentially worth bringing up. Hence me bringing up how such arcologies could make an interesting sci-fi setting.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Outrunning global warming doesn't require you move people particularly fast... People can probably just walk north. That isn't a great solution and alternatives will be used wherever possible but if push comes to shove people will walk.
Having somewhere for them to go is a bit more complicated true. But if no alternatives present themselves they are likely to just bring guns and take a place to go to.