Just screaming
95 degrees? You don’t fucking die in 95 degrees.
Yes, and I thought the same thing too, but please understand… They’re taking about wet-bulb temperature, which I had to look up.
Here’s a YouTube video that explains it too…
So from my limited understanding it would have to be really hot and humid to get a wet-bulb reading of 95°. On the National Weather Service Heat Index, at 80% humidity 95° feels like 136°
Not to panic though. We still have time but I really think it’s up to our youth to take control. Politically and environmentally. Trump just proposed to cut billions of dollars to NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, AND the National Cancer Institute. These old rich bastards probably won’t even be alive when it goes down so they don’t care.
I live in Texas. Temperatures above 100-101°F (i.e. 38°C) aren’t uncommon in summer but our humidity is often below 40%. In 2009 I was very habituated to the heat, young, fit, and healthy, and I saw forecasts for Taipei, where I’d be traveling, were going to be not higher than 99°F (37°C).
What I did not count on was a typhoon (Morakot) keeping humidity in the 95-99% range.
I had to sit down every minute I walked, even under a cloudy sky. It’s like trying to suck air through a towel soaked in bathwater. I was pouring sweat and it wasn’t evaporating at all because the air was saturated, which is the point of wet bulb temperature readings: if there’s no evaporation, sweating doesn’t cool you. At that temperature, neither does water; everything you drink is the same temperature you are. Staying still, not exerting yourself at all, only keeps it from getting worse; it does not get better. And the environment I was in only went to body temperature and cooled off to the high eighties (30°C) at night: as long as I didn’t move I’d be fine. We also had the privilege of functional technology, iced drinks: in a brownout that’s not an option.
You should absolutely be afraid of this. We must absolutely prevent this happening. We must move now, because humans will assuredly die, are already dying, and because we aren’t the only ones on this planet with the right to live.
Wet bulb temperatures (which are basically combined humidity and temperature conditions) over body temperature can be thought of as the point where the methods mammals use to regulate body heat just Stop Working. Every motion you make, every breath, every heartbeat, every nerve impulse heats you up and there’s nowhere in your environment you can dump that heat, so you just get hotter and hotter until you reach a temperature where your organs can’t function and you die. There’s nothing you can do to survive that other than ‘get colder’. And as the article pointed out, that may not be possible when heat impacts the power grid.
THIS IS FUCKING TERRIFYING
Bad news: much of our populace and most of our leaders won’t believe this can happen until it does happen.
Worse news: even after “our leaders” believe it is happening they still won’t do anything about it as long as the billionaire class is still making money.
As a fun addition to this fun post: turns out extreme heat kills our kidneys. So far, 20 000 people already died because of kidney problems caused by unusually high temperatures.
It took a while to understand there was a problem, and at first researchers drew a connection with the use of pesticides and called it ‘Mesoamerican nephropathy’, because it seemed to be most common among agricultural workers in Central America. Then it emerged in the Southern States of the US, and in Sri Lanka, and in India - all regions that have seen an important rise in temperatures over the last few years. The new theory is: the hotter the climate, the more likely you’re dehydrated, especially if you work outside or if you don’t have access to clean water. And kidneys don’t deal so well with dehydration - with time, they stop working, all of your other organs fail, and you die.
Yay.
[source]
We had TROPICAL SUMMER with TROPICAL NIGHTS and 90-98% HUMIDITY last summer in Finland. In a country where a fucking Arctic Circle runs through! A fucking country next to a fucking shore of The Arctic Ocean! Our neighbor country is North Pole! Draw a line on a map from Finland towards USA and you see we are in the same level with Canada.
It was fucking 3 months 37C with 90-98% humidity. The sun shines for 20h. During night it was 28C with same humidity. There was not enough time for the air to cool down because the sun doesn’t set properly. From May to August, it didn’t rain at all. Not a single drop. Just 37C constant degrees with 90-98% humidity 24/7 from May to August.
Finland was the hottest place in Europe for many weeks.
Our houses and infrastructure is built against as harsh winters as North Canada gets. Houses are insulated, they do not cool down. No one owns AC. All fans were sold out in whole country the whole summer.
And what do the Finns generally do? They rejoice! “”Yay, finally it is warm! It is so cold and dark most of the time! Yay!”
Fuck. This is not a matter of joy and pleasure when our planet is boiling. Go and move to a warmer country. Summers here should never be like rain forests with inhuman humidity and Sahara temperatures.
