On a separate note. Doing a presentation on my course this morning. Here’s some fun stats.
It would cost approx $500 billion Aussie Dollar to completely replace the australian energy system with wind, solar and pumped hydro storage over 10 years. And could be done at a price per mwh competitive with current energy costs.
That compares to
$300 billion we spent on covid.
$171 we are spending building nuclear submarines
$69 billion we spend on the road networks every year.
The issue is not money. It’s a question of a) political will to act and b) the ability to scale everything up fast enough in terms of manufacturing, building, transporting, importing, etc.
It depends on what you mean by affecting other people. Sure, most of us will be hotter and less comfortable in the summer. None of us is going to die, though.
As with everything else, though, it starts to affect people around the edges first. For example, even in affluent areas that otherwise weather it okay, folks in their 70s+ are gonna randomly drop dead doing stuff outside in the summer they thought they could handle. You’ll start to see effects on life expectancy for sure.
It’s also a question of redistribution of spending. The oil and gas industry has incredible influence in American politics, so even if we’re spending less money overall and it’s good for the economy overall, if it’s bad for them it’s a non starter. Same goes for coal, see: Manchin, Joseph.
For starters, it means that most of the fastest growing metro regions in the US are going to start being very undesirable places to live in the next couple decades. Large parts of the southwest are already on the verge of running out of water. How hip and desirable is Austin going to be when it keeps setting new heat records every single year? How many people are going to retire to Florida when a couple CAT 3’s every decade becomes a CAT 5 every other year? The US should expect huge changes to internal migration patterns starting pretty soon.
Also, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s not just going to get hotter. Everything is going to get more extreme, everywhere. It’s going to be overall higher average temperatures, but also much greater variance within that average. Whatever parts of climate and weather negatively affect your life, you should expect more of it in the future.
And all of this is going to be happening on top of all the other shit going on in the world. It’s going to be a global stress multiplier. So ok, you probably aren’t going to die from heat exhaustion. I’d still bet big that climate change is going to have a significant effect on your life, almost certainly for the negative.
We might not die but at my work we are getting very close to conditions in our offices and therapy rooms where its not an acceptable working condition anymore. We dont have air conditioning and investments into the buildings take so fkn long to get approved or you will need to find the money first. If I get to work at 7 am I have maybe 30 to 60 minutes where i can open the windows and cool my room down. My winfows aee facing east. So by 8 I cant see much on my screens anymore without closing everything. And by 10 I am sweaty. Often I bring a 2nd shirt nowadays because its getting disgusting when everything is sticky on your skin.
Dont get me wrong. Thats nothing compared to working outdoors in extreme heat but I doubt its helpful if the output goes down all over the board because deteriorating conditions.
It’s not just the elderly. Agricultural and construction workers are absolutely going to take it in the teeth. Tradespeople that work in attics especially.
we had cloud issues all weekend related to the UK’s heatwave. there’s secondary and tertiary effects all over the place that are gonna suck ass. brace yourselves
Take a sample of 300-400 people who are supposed to live to 80-85 years old, apply climate change. Someone is dying early. Could be a hurricane, flood, power outage, pandemic, tornado, wildfire, heat wave, drought, war over water, something currently unforeseen. Seems pretty likely to me.
Yeah you could make a strong argument that people will die from treatable normal medical conditions or accidents as a result of overflowing hospitals caused by pandemics that were caused by climate change.
Monument protection. I have a ventilator but if the air is already warmed up it will only circulate the hot air. There is an offer for redoing the windows but nobody wants to pay for that. We only rent the rooms from the hospital which is also the parent company.
I may be misunderstanding, but something like one of these: 5 Best Dual-Hose Portable AC Units In 2023 (Comparison, Reviews) would be easy to install and totally non-destructive. They require nothing to be fastened to the existing space, you’d just have to fashion a blockout that fits into the window opening.
