Just screaming
95 degrees? You donāt fucking die in 95 degrees.
Yes, and I thought the same thing too, but please understandā¦ Theyāre taking about wet-bulb temperature, which I had to look up.
Hereās a YouTube video that explains it tooā¦
So from my limited understanding it would have to be really hot and humid to get a wet-bulb reading of 95Ā°. On the National Weather Service Heat Index, at 80% humidity 95Ā° feels like 136Ā°
Not to panic though. We still have time but I really think itās 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 wonāt even be alive when it goes down so they donāt care.
I live in Texas. Temperatures above 100-101Ā°F (i.e. 38Ā°C) arenāt 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 Iād be traveling, were going to be not higher than 99Ā°F (37Ā°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. Itās like trying to suck air through a towel soaked in bathwater. I was pouring sweat and it wasnāt evaporating at all because the air was saturated, which is the point of wet bulb temperature readings: if thereās no evaporation, sweating doesnāt 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 (30Ā°C) at night: as long as I didnāt move Iād be fine. We also had the privilege of functional technology, iced drinks: in a brownout thatās 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 arenāt 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 thereās nowhere in your environment you can dump that heat, so you just get hotter and hotter until you reach a temperature where your organs canāt function and you die. Thereās nothing you can do to survive that other than āget colderā. 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 wonāt believe this can happen until it does happen.
Fuckā¦
To point out one thing, this does not completely eliminate our ability to cool our bodies, but it makes it much, much more difficult.
Sweating is in and of itself a form of heat exhaust, but itās not very fast and requires a lot of water. Which is why we also rely on evaporative cooling, in which the sweat evaporates and carries even more heat away. IIRC, when you get upwards of 100 degrees evaporative cooling stops working very well and it gets much harder to keep cool with nothing more than air flow. And when you hit wet bulb temperature, it stops working all together.
We arenāt quite as fragile as you might think, but itās absolutely true that this effect can kill you.
