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.
Fuck…
So give up on democracy. Ask for no more permission, make no more demands for change. Act, with your own body, with your own bonds between the people already in your life and where you live. Stop hoping and start doing. Anything, without limits, to make it all just stop. Break it to brake it.
