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Heat and Humidity Are Already Reaching the Limits of Human Tolerance (2020)

31 points by ColinWright 6y ago

_rpd 6y ago
Published May 8, 2020
le-mark 6y ago
Edit nm Didn’t read the article.
- fallingfrog 6y ago
  Yes but the Mojave desert is dry. I think the article is pointing out that if both the heat and the humidity rise to a certain level, drinking water no longer helps and you get heatstroke.
- f6v 6y ago
  At some humidity point sweating just doesn’t help.
- xoa 6y ago
  >if you drink enough water it’s no problem If you learned such a thing you learned incorrectly. Mojave is dry. The article mentions this, but the relevant measure is the "wet-bulb temperature", which combines heat and humidity. The name comes from the technique of wrapping a thermometer in a water soaked cloth and passing air over it, so that it takes into account evaporation. Thus the wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached through evaporative cooling alone. No matter how much adaption you have to the heat, nobody can exercise and do normal (let alone strenuous) continuous outdoor activity with a wet-bulb of 90°F or so, and ~95°F wet-bulb is about the absolute limit of how much a human can survive longterm (ie., someone could still last an hour or two), even just lying in the shade. No amount of water you drink can help you if the air is at saturation already. So there is genuine concern that parts of the world will literally become uninhabitable without universal mechanized cooling or other extreme adaptive measures (going underground say). And while the general focus is humans, of course every other animal is the same plus or minus some number of degrees.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I lived in the Mojave for 2.75 years. It's 3000 feet above sea level. It took me at least six weeks to stop waking up short of breath. My bra size permanently changed due to my rib cage enlarging due to my lungs enlarging. Drinking caffeine by day and alcohol by night can land you in the ER with heat stroke. No, drinking enough water is not sufficient. At altitude and in high heat, you also need electrolytes (think gatorade). I grew up in Georgia. That thing they say about "It's not the heat. It's the humidity." is spot on. The Mojave gets six whole inches of rain per year. It's just south of Death Valley which is below sea level precisely because it's so extremely dry that what would normally be a deep lake full of water is bone dry. Cool factoid: If you get crazy levels of rain in short order, like an inch or two in a day, all the dry lakes flood for some weeks and shrimp hatch out.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
twobitshifter 6y ago
Weather.gov has a wetbulb globe temperature report. I wonder why this is not used instead of “heat-index”? https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt
- jfengel 6y ago
  Heat index feels familiar. It's a way to help compare weather from day to day, regardless of the humidity, because you have a notion of what X degrees "feels like". It's also a way to make meteorology seem more engaging. The weather forecaster gets to tell you that yes, the hot feels hotter (the same way the wind chill lets them tell you that the cold feels colder). It's not as scientifically useful, but the actual data is available to scientists who care about it. Ordinary people prefer to know how to dress, and the heat index/wind chill are actually OK at that.
keithalewis 6y ago
Is this about the weather or about the articles pumped out by minions of the climate cabal denegrating apostate scientists?
- probablypower 6y ago
  > minions of the climate cabal denegrating apostate scientists Can you elaborate on what you mean here?
  - fallingfrog 6y ago
    I’ve been trying hard lately to try to avoid downvoting comments just because I disagree with them, but a comment that makes no sense or is very badly written is a good candidate for a downvote.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
This is a problem primarily because there are nearly 8 billion people plus national borders. If we were still all "primitive" and sparsely populated nomadic hunter-gatherers, people would just migrate away from these areas and go to more temperate areas that global warming is essentially thawing. But we can't readily do that because that would mean emptying out specific nations and exporting their people to other nations and that ends up being hugely problematic. If it were only climate change, this would be kind of meh. But it's not, so it's not.

31 points by ColinWright 6y ago

_rpd 6y ago

Published May 8, 2020

le-mark 6y ago

Edit nm Didn’t read the article.

fallingfrog 6y ago
Yes but the Mojave desert is dry. I think the article is pointing out that if both the heat and the humidity rise to a certain level, drinking water no longer helps and you get heatstroke.
f6v 6y ago
At some humidity point sweating just doesn’t help.
xoa 6y ago
>if you drink enough water it’s no problem If you learned such a thing you learned incorrectly. Mojave is dry. The article mentions this, but the relevant measure is the "wet-bulb temperature", which combines heat and humidity. The name comes from the technique of wrapping a thermometer in a water soaked cloth and passing air over it, so that it takes into account evaporation. Thus the wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached through evaporative cooling alone. No matter how much adaption you have to the heat, nobody can exercise and do normal (let alone strenuous) continuous outdoor activity with a wet-bulb of 90°F or so, and ~95°F wet-bulb is about the absolute limit of how much a human can survive longterm (ie., someone could still last an hour or two), even just lying in the shade. No amount of water you drink can help you if the air is at saturation already. So there is genuine concern that parts of the world will literally become uninhabitable without universal mechanized cooling or other extreme adaptive measures (going underground say). And while the general focus is humans, of course every other animal is the same plus or minus some number of degrees.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I lived in the Mojave for 2.75 years. It's 3000 feet above sea level. It took me at least six weeks to stop waking up short of breath. My bra size permanently changed due to my rib cage enlarging due to my lungs enlarging. Drinking caffeine by day and alcohol by night can land you in the ER with heat stroke. No, drinking enough water is not sufficient. At altitude and in high heat, you also need electrolytes (think gatorade). I grew up in Georgia. That thing they say about "It's not the heat. It's the humidity." is spot on. The Mojave gets six whole inches of rain per year. It's just south of Death Valley which is below sea level precisely because it's so extremely dry that what would normally be a deep lake full of water is bone dry. Cool factoid: If you get crazy levels of rain in short order, like an inch or two in a day, all the dry lakes flood for some weeks and shrimp hatch out.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

twobitshifter 6y ago

Weather.gov has a wetbulb globe temperature report. I wonder why this is not used instead of “heat-index”? https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt

jfengel 6y ago
Heat index feels familiar. It's a way to help compare weather from day to day, regardless of the humidity, because you have a notion of what X degrees "feels like". It's also a way to make meteorology seem more engaging. The weather forecaster gets to tell you that yes, the hot feels hotter (the same way the wind chill lets them tell you that the cold feels colder). It's not as scientifically useful, but the actual data is available to scientists who care about it. Ordinary people prefer to know how to dress, and the heat index/wind chill are actually OK at that.

keithalewis 6y ago

Is this about the weather or about the articles pumped out by minions of the climate cabal denegrating apostate scientists?

probablypower 6y ago
> minions of the climate cabal denegrating apostate scientists Can you elaborate on what you mean here?
- fallingfrog 6y ago
  I’ve been trying hard lately to try to avoid downvoting comments just because I disagree with them, but a comment that makes no sense or is very badly written is a good candidate for a downvote.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

This is a problem primarily because there are nearly 8 billion people plus national borders. If we were still all "primitive" and sparsely populated nomadic hunter-gatherers, people would just migrate away from these areas and go to more temperate areas that global warming is essentially thawing. But we can't readily do that because that would mean emptying out specific nations and exporting their people to other nations and that ends up being hugely problematic. If it were only climate change, this would be kind of meh. But it's not, so it's not.