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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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/
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.
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.
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.
They’re referring to your attitude around reducing fossil fuel usage. “We’re screwed anyway so there’s no point”.
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/
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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 tim 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".
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
You won’t have to imagine much longer.
"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…