Climate Change and Heat

Life will thrive, yes. Humanity will have a tough go of it though over the next hundred or so years. We are living in an extinction event, and while I don’t really think humanity will be among those species lost, I do think the question remains: how many billion are going to be lost before equalibriam is found?

I more or less share Greer’s view of the future. I think he’s unnecessarily pessimistic on some modern tech (computers, etc), but that’s a small quibble.

If you have a timescale of millions of years and you wait long enough, certainly life will adapt. It will not include humans, though.

Civilization depends on stable conditions and abundant water to support certain fundamentals like agriculture. (Fruit trees require a certain number of cold days per year in order to bear fruit, etc.) Over a timeline of million years species have time to adjust to a changed climate. If that change happens in a hundred years, the cycle of life breaks down. We’ve already lost thousands of species due to nothing more than overhunting and habitat destruction. Once key species are gone we’ll be left with oceans filled with jellyfish. Much of the US will become desert. The same conditions that produce mass migration also produce war.

The future is a junkheap piled high with skulls… and a commenter here is more worried about glaciers. A great argument against whatever education system and mass media produced him, a system created by and for human elites. Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Oof. Looks like it’s fixed now.

I spent a year in south Asia about 35 years ago when I was young. The travel books said never to travel in India in May. Being an ignorant American and from the upper south (Virginia) (I hope that is not redundant), I thought, I have experienced hot summers, so India in May could be a bit warmer than I was accustomed to, but not a big deal. Like a hot day at the beach.

Well, Hell Realm, is about all I can say. Heat stroke, sun poisoning, I might not survive this. I was in Calcutta which was intolerable, so I headed to a beach south of there, near Puri. At least the water should be cooling. Wrong!

I decided to head to Kashmir, which require numerous days of train and bus travel at that time. The 2nd class reserved metal oven train car rolling stock kept the temperature just short of lethal on the 36hr ride from Calcutta to Delhi.

I finally made it to Kashmir and remained in the relatively cooler mountains until autumn.
Breed, you have no idea.

And the Himalayan glaciers are melting, which is their water supply, except for the monsoon deluge.

The disturbing thing about all this: Pakistan is introducing tactical nukes on the Indian border…under control of local commanders.http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176123/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro,_flashpoint_for_the_planet/

People do crazy shit when it gets hot enough.

In the Pakistan-India context, all nuclear weapons are strategic weapons. This is because you can not use one without starting a chain reaction, a “use’m or lose’m” cycle, that will quickly lead to a fullblown nuclear exchange.

Pakistan is a failing state, the largest one on the planet, completely corrupt, riven by sectarian and tribal divisions, unable to control its own borders, with a very large but relatively ineffective military, and with intelligence services which promote chaos often at the expense of that military. The ability of the Pakistani government to secure its nuclear weapons has always been dubious. Devolving that mission and transferring their use to local commanders increases the danger of their use and also “loose nukes” exponentially.

While corruption in India has expanded to the point where it compromises ordinary governance and Hindu chauvinism threatens the integrity of the state, the centrifugal processes are less advanced than in Pakistan. Climate disruption could change all that and quickly, creating a failing state in India as well.

I have often thought that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan was not so much a case of “if” but “when”. The most likely scenario was that the Pakistanis would engage in some provocation that would cross some red line in Indian strategic thinking and end with an Indian preempitve nuclear strike. Pakistan’s current policy of greatly expanding its nuclear arsenal and disseminating the command and control of those nukes much further down the command chain can be seen both as a means to survive an Indian first strike and something that could provoke such a strike. The continuing destabilizing of both countries also increases the likelihood of bumbling into a nuclear conflict. Finally, the possibility of loose nukes, that one or more could end up in the hands of terrorists, is a serious concern to other large nuclear powers, like the US, Russia, and China, all of whom could see such weapons used against them.

Just finished reading Hot Earth Dreams. It’s a worst-case view (8°C) over the next few hundred years and it doesn’t look encouraging.Personally, I don’t think we’ll hit 8° because the economies that drive GW will crash and stop making it worse. Modern humans were once ‘endangered’, probably reduced to a few thousand adults and certainly other primate ‘cousins’ have gone extinct. It could happen to us., although I do think we may survive – in much smaller numbers. But billions are going to die in the next 100 years. And getting from here to there is going to be very unpleasant.

S.E. Asia is not escaping the onslaught of heat. Here at 13°N. latitude, the last week (plus a few days) has been 39°c – 41°c and no break coming for at least another week. I’ve been here for 13 years and this summer is setting records, historical records.
Up until today, we went without any air conditioning; relying on strategically planted shade trees. This is the first year since I’ve been here, we’ve had such sustained high temperatures.

Yes, we humans can adapt to most anything; but our survival depends on more than ourselves. We are dependent on many other life forms for our lives and it is precisely those other life forms which cannot adapt quickly enough to keep us alive.
Even at the age of 71, I expect to see the beginnings of the end game for humans; at least most of us are not going to survive, IMCO…

@anonone
No they are not. Coal plants push more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear even has. While I believe the dangers of radiation have been underestimated, nuclear power plants won’t have a noteworthy effect on humans.

@John
India is one place where wet bulb temperatures might go over 35 Celsius. That is a combination of heat and moisture where you will die of heat while sitting in the shadow wearing a wet T-shirt. Meaning heatwaves might get hot enough to kill all human life in large swathes of the country in one go.

India will crash long before Pakistan does which will last as long as China lasts. Banegladesh will be the start of the chain reaction in the Indian Subcontinent though.

Below sea level and with completely corrupt governance, it will start flooding. India will close its borders and shit happens.

As the heat hits India people start fleeing. Pakistan will take Muslims but bar Hindus.

The Various insurgencies in India will explode far worse than they already are and be fanned by China and Pakistan, causing India to internally collapse.

China will keep Pakistan afloat till it starts going down hill at which point the Taliban or whatever group replaces it will start rising and filling the gap simply by not being corrupt and part of the old way and keep relative order during the die off.

The main thing though is does China say fuck it and invade Siberia?

Tony is right when he says:

@anonone
No they are not. Coal plants push more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear even has. While I believe the dangers of radiation have been underestimated, nuclear power plants won’t have a noteworthy effect on humans.

I’d add, that in addition to “Coal plants push more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear” that they also push most of the Mercury into the atmosphere, most mercury found in our food chain arrives this way…from coal plants.

As for unattended fuel rods somehow putting themselves together to go critical…sheesh. Yes they decay more slowly than than containment causing local contamination,, but you know what anonone? 50,000 years to humans seems long, but to mother earth, it’s a blink of an eye.

The good news is low temperature super-conduction magnets is already changing the energy in/out ratio of Fusion, real progress has been made in 2015-16. But in a way that is tragic, because the existing technology LFTR had several important beneficial spin-offs in terminating nuclear waste stream and processing rare earths and will not be “commercially” developed because the end of the tunnel in Nuclear Fusion is now in sight…it’s no longer “just 25 years away”.

Anonone is talking about the nuclear destruction which would happen after civilization and human populations have decayed below the point where anyone is able to secure and maintain or even cleanly decomission the plants. At that point they will all go Chernobyl/Fukushima/Kyshtim. He is not talking about the use of nuclear power in the meantime.

More links about the uranium and thorium present in fly ash from coal power plants:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

@ S Brennan wrote:
“What utter nonsense, all nuclear plants can be brought into shutdown by pushing a few buttons and in a matter of hours they go cold the big building you see is for steam containment, each will last longer than the Pantheon in Rome.”

Yes, just like Fukushima was.

Plutonium half-life is between 24,110 years and 80.8 million years. How old is the Pantheon in Rome? About 1,900 years.

Furthermore, you also assume that there will be humans around who know what buttons to push, and that unattended nuclear reactors in cold shutdown will stay cool indefinitely for millennia without maintenance and they will be invulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Good luck with all that.

@different clue:
Exactly

In the late 1990s, three additional backup generators for Units 2 and 4 were placed in new buildings located higher on the hillside, to comply with new regulatory requirements. All six units were given access to these generators, {but the switching stations that sent power from these backup generators to the reactors’ cooling systems for Units 1 through 5 were still in the poorly protected turbine buildings.} All three of the generators added in the late 1990s were operational after the tsunami. {If the switching stations had been moved to inside the reactor buildings or to other flood-proof locations, power would have been provided by these generators to the reactors’ cooling systems.}[59]

The reactor’s emergency diesel generators and DC batteries, crucial components in powering cooling systems after a power loss, were located in the basements of the reactor turbine buildings, in accordance with GE’s specifications. Mid-level engineers expressed concerns that this left them vulnerable to flooding.[60]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

The problem with the uninitiated Nuke Lovers is that they seem to believe and demand others believe that they have discovered an exemption from Murphy’s Law that can be applied to their source of power.

A glaring example of this problem with humans and their complex systems was demonstrated last year at the WIPP facility in southern NM where kitty litter, actually Green kitty litter, used by Los Alamos Labs caused a barrel containing plutonium waste to explode and the supposed ten thousand year LLNW storage facility lasted ten years, is largely contaminated and even spewed plutonium into the atmosphere.

Another interesting and apparently unsolvable problem is how to warn people in the distant future to not dig up this deadly trash, it seems that any permanent warning system will attract curious humans so they can experience their future version of Murphy’s Law.

Seamus, the “kitty litter” incident in WIPP which took place on February 14th 2014 is very very well known to the point of notoriety, parenthetically there were several incidents in February of that year, however to get back to the “kitty litter” incident:

Briefly they switched from using a clay based absorbent to a wheat based one a reaction between leaking nitrate salts and cellulose (well DUH!) caused a drum to rupture with sufficient violence – and yes that is an explosion, to cause radioactive ejecta to be released into the atmosphere. The ejecta in question cconsisted of plutonium and americium particles from materiel which had been used in the production of nuclear weapons.

I remember at the time that WIPP put out a wholly self-serving press release to the effect of “oooh aren’t we good our HEPA filters caught nearly all of it” but of course a little plutonium and a little americium got out and contaminated both the atmosphere and the ground around the facility. I did some research at the time into how long unmaintained HEPA filters survive and invite you to do the same, the answer will not please you.

Now I’ll grant you that an explosion that blows the lid of what should have been a massively heavy sealed outer drum isn’t very big. But it was big enough to contaminate the facility where the drum was stored and the external environment. That coupled with the fact that as the Nature report I link to below put it:

The WIPP has come under fire since the accident for progressively watering down safety standards and allowing a lax security culture to develop

Should give everyone resident in continental North America pause for thought.

This story from Nature.com gives details:

http://www.nature.com/news/nuclear-waste-facility-on-high-alert-over-risk-of-new-explosions-1.15290

The three linked stories in the sidebar of that report

Call for better oversight of nuclear-waste storage
An accident waiting to happen
US seeks waste-research revival

are well worth reading also.

The point Peter was making anent Murphy’s law is entirely valid the systems for disposing of Nuclear waste are very complex and subject to human error including an all too casual attititude to safety. That point applies equally to the waste products of C and B legs of the NCB triad.

mfi

@markfromireland Unless that can be linked to at least a few million deaths of young people, it still does not indicate any sort of human extinction threat or whatever these hysterical people are screaming about.

@S Brennan

Human beings don’t have to be completely extinct before the nightmare of melting down nuclear power plants starts to destroy terrestrial life on this plant. They only have to be of insufficient number and/or lacking the skills and/or technology and/or equipment to maintain a nuclear power plant.

But, since you asked, Fukushima may already be enough to start it. Google “what if Fukushima is hit by a another tsunami.” Say bye-bye to Japan, the Pacific Ocean, and the U.S. West Coast, just for starters.

Mark;

For your review. Now granted Sorensen is an unapologetic LFTR proponent, but scientifically, his arguments are correct.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3EGOL4J6yI