Our bodies won't be able to handle a temperature regime that hot overall. The factor to research is Wet Bulb Temperature Effect. Basically our bodies are like sports cars and keeping our body cool is a challange under high humidity with temperature near our body temp.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As climate change nudges the global temperature higher, there is rising interest in the maximum environmental conditions like heat and humidity to which humans can adapt. New Penn State research found that in humid climates, that temperature may be lower than previously thought.
It has been widely believed that a 35°C wet-bulb temperature (equal to 95°F at 100% humidity or 115°F at 50% humidity) was the maximum a human could endure before they could no longer adequately regulate their body temperature, which would potentially cause heat stroke or death over a prolonged exposure.
Wet-bulb temperature is read by a thermometer with a wet wick over its bulb and is affected by humidity and air movement. It represents a humid temperature at which the air is saturated and holds as much moisture as it can in the form of water vapor; a person’s sweat will not evaporate at that skin temperature.
But in their new study, the researchers found that the actual maximum wet-bulb temperature is lower — about 31°C wet-bulb or 87°F at 100% humidity — even for young, healthy subjects. The temperature for older populations, who are more vulnerable to heat, is likely even lower.
It's a problem anywhere that temperatures reach that high. Higher latitudes have colder climates. Hence, not a problem. If it becomes a problem, people move toward the poles. No longer a problem.
Earth would have to experience > +35 to +50C for the poles to be uninhabitable due to heat.
Yes, polar regions are reliably colder than equatorial regions. Lytton, BC hit the temperature you cite for one day on Tuesday, June 29, 2021. That's a sign of warming, and we should expect more warm days than in the past at any given lattitude. But it is not evidence against the general case that polar regions have colder climates than equatorial regions.
This explains something about why I haven't understood casually mentioning 40c+ temps, 34c in Hong Kong with no breeze is about as much as I can handle.
You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.
Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)
But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
Competent engineering isn't enough. You also need to never end up being in a war zone, and being able to commit to ongoing maintenance forever, or outlawing all construction far downstream (or finding the even more scarce type of locations where nobody wants to build downstream).
In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.
To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.
The issue is that many large dams will kill a huge number of people if they fail.
The Banqiao dam failure alone is the worst power plant failure in human history by several magnitudes.
Not many dams have the potential to kill that many, but there are thousands of damns with potential to make Chernobyl look like a minor little affair.
As for wars, you just need to go back to 2023 for the last major dam to be blown as part of war. It "only" made 60k people homeless and killed 200-300. Just last year another dam was hit by drones but didn't burst.
While "big dam failed, lots of people died" is a very clicky headline, you are overselling it.
Between the direct costs (at the plant), and still having a 1,000 sq. mile exclusion zone 40 years later, Chernobyl really isn't overshadowed by the potential of thousands of dams.
We could have a Chernobyl every year, and the environmental impact would still be a rounding error compared to hydro, if we're going to go to environmental impacts rather than lives.
That is the weakest aspect of hydro - it causes massive green house gas releases during and in the aftermath of construction, and destroys vast ecosystems.
If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.
I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?
> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.
The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.
The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".
Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:
There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.
German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.
Diplomacy is a fun parlor game, and was also played mail style where the moves get delivered and the results get posted. I've played both ways, though the Mail version we did was just having a ref who collected our next move and posted the results on a xerox. I think we did around three moves a week and included barbs (insults) to be published in the posting.
They mentioned Gary Gygax was inspired by their modification where they chose to play the board game Diplomacy while adding on acting in personas as they negotiated and played the game.
Here is a fun citation with a brief summary. They suggest regular caffine use lowers your baseline and it just returns you to where you'd be if you weren't dependent.
University of Bristol. "Coffee consumption unrelated to alertness: Stimulating effects may be illusion, study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 June 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm>.
I'm happy they shared it on a further request, but I feel not having it in GP or profile is consistent with and further strengthens what they wrote in the post.
Yes, I have been telling kids to make library use as part of their search for knowlege. First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics. And there is the serendipity of random encounters focused by the subconcious. Also reference librarians can help direct one to unkown resourses.
First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics.
Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.
This is a fun area, as the DMCA, for its flaws included a loophole for non-commercial distribution of live concert recordings. The only requirement is that it isn't an exact copy of a commercial release. I am not sure about the exact standards, as live albums often aren't the entire concert. Here are some other sites where people share these tapes.
Sugarmegs is up and running for 30+ years now. I knew the guy who started it back then and he was a Sony employee who "inherited" a T-1 connection that Sony forgot they were paying for... At least for the first few years, when content streams were now profoundly ancient real audio files.
I had a nightmare one night after studying Economic Philosophy. The Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis struck a subconscious fear. My dream was lightning bolts splitting things up.
I do recall the assistant at the store when I first showed up said wait for the upcoming Commodore 64 more stuff for much less money. But as a 14 year old I wasn't ready to wait after being exposed to Apple the summer before. That professor really advocated for the Atari 800 and I really considered it, but the Apple's easier to copy floppies along with a much larger user base won me over.
https://www.weather.gov/ict/WBGT
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/humans-cant-endure-t...
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As climate change nudges the global temperature higher, there is rising interest in the maximum environmental conditions like heat and humidity to which humans can adapt. New Penn State research found that in humid climates, that temperature may be lower than previously thought.
It has been widely believed that a 35°C wet-bulb temperature (equal to 95°F at 100% humidity or 115°F at 50% humidity) was the maximum a human could endure before they could no longer adequately regulate their body temperature, which would potentially cause heat stroke or death over a prolonged exposure.
Wet-bulb temperature is read by a thermometer with a wet wick over its bulb and is affected by humidity and air movement. It represents a humid temperature at which the air is saturated and holds as much moisture as it can in the form of water vapor; a person’s sweat will not evaporate at that skin temperature.
But in their new study, the researchers found that the actual maximum wet-bulb temperature is lower — about 31°C wet-bulb or 87°F at 100% humidity — even for young, healthy subjects. The temperature for older populations, who are more vulnerable to heat, is likely even lower.
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