Heat Wave to Hit Two-Thirds of the U.S. Here’s What to Expect
nytimes.comSo I get that the infrastructure isn't as well in place to deal with things like this but where I live 100+ isn't that absurd, and that's nothing to say for places like Arizonia which is two blocks away from the sun and 90 is considered cool, with 100+ being a common occurrence. So what makes this particularly bad?
The humidity amplifies the effects of the heat. I remember the first time I travelled to Arizona and was expecting to suffer when I saw the forecast temperatures were 100+, but the dry heat was - I hesitate to say comfortable - but very different from a 90 degree day on the East Coast with high humidity. An extended period of extreme heat + humidity can be brutal on the body, particularly those already vulnerable or without adequate air conditioning.
Yeah humidity is no joke.
I'm in NY and when it's ~90f degrees out with high humidity, it's an unescapable heat unless you have an A/C.
I'm in ok shape I guess. I walk 3-5 miles a day in all types of weather ranging from about 10f to 100f degrees but when high temps hit with high humidity my skin immediately glazes over and I know to take it easy. My arms will be dripping wet in less than a minute just standing outside doing nothing with a ~60 BPM heart rate.
The reaction of someone who moved from a desert to Georgia is always interesting. Everyone has a unique way of processing the huge puddles of water under their car. Sometimes it's "oh yeah, humidity." Sometimes it's panic.
It's deceptively comfortable :) You can very quickly find yourself dehydrated and in a bad state.
If T is above body temperature anD there is high levels of humidity you can’t lower your temperature by sweating. Therefore, your body temperature will raise to match the environment T even if you don’t twitch a muscle.
On the other hand, if it’s dry the human body can sweat away prodigious amounts of heat
“infrastructure isn't as well in place to deal with things like this“ and people don’t know how to either. It’s similar to blizzards in Georgia. Minnesota is fine with 6” snow. In Georgia it’s lots more risk because of the lack of experience.
It’s bad because people (usually already frail) get heatstroke/overheated and die.
> people (usually already frail)
This always makes these sort of dire predictions sound exaggerated to me. There’s always a population of (usually older) people who are nearing the end and we seem irrationally unwilling to accept “old age” as a cause of death. Any slight disturbance is then blamed and we get dramatic headlines about “hundreds die in 35C heatwave.”
Infants and toddlers are also frail, and regularly die from heatstroke. The probability of this happening increases as temperatures rise.
True, although not to the same degree as seniors by far. I'm struggling to find much data, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950160/ claims +55% male infant mortality rate in Paris and +12% in the rest of the country (females were unaffected, which I guess ties in with male infants generally being more fragile than females) during the 2003 heat wave in France. They don't give baseline rates, though, so it's hard to tell what this means in real numbers.
Heat index is by far more useful than temperature when discussing this. At 90f at 90% humidity is more dangerous and feels hotter than 102 at 50% humidity. 100f at 65% humidity feels like 136f and higher humidity quickly turns deadly.
Or as the article puts it, extreme heat killed 108 people last year.
That's nothing.
A few years ago, in France, over 50,000 people died due to heat stroke and other extreme heat factors.
In the US, many places have this thing called "air conditioning". In France, and much of continental Europe, that's pretty rare.
Heck, in many of the poorer places over there, they don't even have fans.
It's more like 50k throughout Europe, but that is still awful.
Yep, and the effects are nonlinear. i.e. increasing marginal danger from every +1F or +5%. Here’s a helpful chart: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bncore/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/h...
The East and Midwest is a lot more humid than the West (especially the Southeast), and humid air transfers more heat. Thus, 100 degrees in Alabama's 90% humidity is a lot worse than 100 degrees in Arizona's 10% humidity.
The body takes 2-3 weeks to adjust to a significant increase in heat, and can lose that adjustment pretty quickly. So in places where it’s routinely hot (esp if it’s dry) the physiologic impact is far less severe than in locations where it’s uncommon enough to preclude sustained physiologic adaptation.
> So what makes this particularly bad?
humidity. (at least in the midwest).
The humidity in non-desert climates means sweating is ineffective, the air doesn't have much more ability to contain water vapor.
We see a lot more weather hype in the news than we used to. Winter storms have names. We get "arctic vortexes". And normal summer temps are flogged as a massive heat wave.
Someone in the biz was telling me that the reason is that many 'news' orgs would rather have an article about the weather than about a lot of other subjects, so they've steadily increased the number of weather related coverage.
Also extreme weather events are increasing in both quantity and severity. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/...
Well that and the increase of frequency of once-in-a-century weather extremes. And it will get more.
It takes the same amount of energy to melt 1L of ice as it takes to heat 1L of water up to 80 degree celsius. This means currently we have massive amounts of energy beeing absorbed by the melting ice. After that, we will see. Breakdown of the Jetstream? Gulf stream? who knows.
...also, climate change is leading to an increase in extreme weather events. Feels a little unfair to blame the media for clickbait hype when this is a heatwave.
I'd always heard that news organisations love weather stories because they're cheap to produce and readers want to read them and find them useful. There's a reason the morning news has a weather update every fifteen minutes, after all.
It serves a purpose, though, since weather is more relevant to day-to-day experience than most news stories. E.g., Boston is going to hit just about 100F this Saturday; that’s enough to potentially hurt someone not expecting it, and there’s probably people who wouldn’t hear about a heatwave if it wasn’t in something like the NYT.
Now NYT disables reading from incognito. Lame.
Turn off JS and open in either private/regular window:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/disable-javas...
WaPo has been doing that for a few months. LATimes started doing that this week as well.
Use Firefox's reader mode. You might need to refresh once or twice to get the full NYT article in reader mode.
How do these work anyway? Guess they're running some feature checks as the (probably aged to hell) webview in the HN or reddit app I use always hits that wall.
Logging in sort of defeats the point of private mode.
Most people were using private mode to read more articles than they paywall allows without paying for a subscription.
And incognito mode sort of defeats the point of a paywall.
Not defending it, but the motivations are pretty clear here.
Anecdotally, I've also found this link helpful if you find yourself hitting NYT paywalls in the future: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription
This is an off-topic comment that is distracting from the topic-at-hand.
For a "hacker," one just disables scripts from running from that domain.
They've been lame every since implementing article limits. It's the freaking news. Who wants to pay to read the news, especially when the articles are shared all over the web?
I pay to read the news because I prefer to get information from high-quality organizations that I trust to hire skilled, relatively objective journalists who will work hard to accurately report a story.
So much of unpaid journalism is bloggers re-hashing the work of these big(ger)-budget news agencies, often with less clarity and more partisan slant. Not to say NYT, WaPo, WSJ and other high-quality paid sources are perfect but they are far better than the free competition.
The NY Times doesn't exactly have a consistent record of skilled, relatively objective reporting.
Are there specific instances you have in mind? I actually think they do pretty good job on the whole.
Sure. Two of the most egregious examples are the early coverage of the Vietnam war and basically all of the coverage of the U.S. meddling in Latin American politics. There's also its long track record of uncritical coverage of the so-called "war on terror", especially during Obama's tenure. When not busy toeing the military-industrial line, the Times is happy to report that there's still a genuine debate about whether climate change is real [1] and that people who have flatly been accused of rape are simply having "#metoo problems."
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+"debate+o...
All true but most people don't want all their news from one outlet any more.
Yeah. It sucks that there's not a great solution here (at least not one that I know of; I haven't looked to closely at the various buffet-style options). Currently I pay for three subscriptions: one local (Long Beach Press-Telegram) one regional (LA Times) and one national (NY Times).
Because it costs money to pay the professionals who report and write the articles?
I thought that they got most of that money from the companies and influencers paying them to write stories and passing it as news?
Such as?
Slow news day? Not like this is the first heat wave to ever hit more than a couple states. Drink lots of water, move slow, go to work early and leave late (its cooler and less people to get edgy with!)
No clue why the angry downvotes - from the subheadline of the story: "Dangerously hot temperatures are predicted from Oklahoma to New England. Here’s the forecast, with some tips on staying safe." I add to their list of things that can help, get downvoted, but people complaining about blocked incognito mode, all ok?