15 ms·

Dangerous humid heat extremes occurring decades before expected (2020)

219 points by perfunctory 5y ago

pierre 5y ago
Minister of the future intro about a heat bubble gave me nightmares. It make me think about how we could prevent death in case of a massive humid heat wave, and how we could do it at a low enough cost, especially in a situation where the grid fail. My best guess will be some tent with high isolation fabric (think emergency blanket) cooled with a tank of liquid nitrogen.
jonahbenton 5y ago
(May 2020)
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
An incredibly "glass half full" take, but it looks like the location of all the places that will be most affected are also the biggest producers - maybe this will be a good thing in encouraging change? Unfortunately I assume it'll take a lot of death before that happens, and even then probably not, but I feel like at this point it's either look for a silver lining or descend into complete despair.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  The trouble is the people most in power to make decisions are personally insolated from the affects of hot humid conditions (quite literally) by cooling infrastructure. If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death, /maybe/ an event like the mass heat death in Ministry for the Future would get some people's attention but COVID has really knocked my expectations for coming together in the face of a collective disaster.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    True, but looking at the map the most populated sections of the United States are marked as danger zones. Though I realize after writing that line that the last few years have taught us that mass casualty events in Florida won't exactly cause dramatic societal change.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      The effect will be blunted because in the US we have AC and a fairly robust national power grid so the number of people affected will be limited to poor and houseless people who we're already very good at ignoring suffering from. We've already had pretty bad heat waves in the past that have caused dozens of deaths in a day but they're diffuse and not in one giant group so they're easy to ignore like COVID, heart attack, and general poverty deaths.
      - soperj 5y ago
        Didn't you just have people freezing to death in Texas because of a power outage?
        rtkwe 5y ago
        Texas is a bit of a special case in the US power grid... They're not a part of it, Texas decided to not connect itself to the national power grid because it wanted to go way further in on deregulation and couldn't do that if it was connected to the national grid and had to follow the rules that came with that. That's why you don't really see huge blackouts very often in the rest of the country, power outages are usually due to direct storm damage and only affect things on a particular line/circuit. Texas couldn't bring power in from unaffected areas to balance the spike in demand so they lost the whole grid, it's harder to have that happen in other parts of the country.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
        > a fairly robust national power grid The local grid particularly in (parts of?) California is everything but robust.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    >If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      Essentially yeah. Look at the proposed alternatives from the right in the US which basically amounted to "If he dies he dies" but scaled up to millions of people. One of the most consistent deflections is that "only the already sick" are dying of COVID which beyond being wildly untrue also has the strains of "it's your own fault you're dying why should I do anything to prevent it?" which doesn't bode well for our response to climate disasters.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      In the United States, I've heard a number of people say they would rather old people die than have their freedoms violated. Their reasoning is people who die of COVID would have died anyway if COVID didn't happen. My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.
roter 5y ago
NOAA has also recently released a mapping tool [0] that allows you to dig down to county level (scroll down to county map) for various hazards. [0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/mapping https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/mapping
Gustomaximus 5y ago
If you haven't experienced high humidity its hard to understand how debilitating it can be. You can't cool down easily doing even mild physical work. I'm in a subtropical zone (Brisbane) and in high humidity weather I do about 30-50% of the physical work I can on a non-humid day I'd estimate. OOften it's best to work outdoors for an hour then cool down for an hour in pool/aircon as if you overheat yourself itcan be hard to get back to normal that day. That said its a good HN opportunity too for entrepreneurs. We see more and more kit like ice jackets that you freeze then wear outdoors etc for outdoor workers. Tech has to kick in here too.
- arethuza 5y ago
  Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock" has "earthsuits" that people wear in hot and humid locations.
  - steelframe 5y ago
    > Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock" has "earthsuits" that people wear in hot and humid locations. Reminiscent of Frank Herbert's stillsuits in Dune (1965).
- falcolas 5y ago
  Ironically, the cosplay space has this covered. They have portable battery powered air conditioners connected to astronaut-style onesies-with-coolant-pipes. Unfortunately they're still manually assembled, so not quite readily available yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE <- Adam savage building one for an astronaut cosplay suit.
  - 0_____0 5y ago
    The takeaway I see here is that we're looking at putting people, on Earth, in environmental suits, because we collectively haven't been able to agree on how (or whether, for that matter) to stop making it uninhabitable.
andrewclunn 5y ago
Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else.
- refurb 5y ago
  I’m not sure how to interpret the map either. The web bulb temperature of the top 0.1% of hot and humid days over a 38 year period?
  - bart_spoon 5y ago
    Yeah its a very poor visualization. Its difficult to tell if it is showing the hottest wet bulb temperature of an area over the time period, or the most frequent, or what.
    - roter 5y ago
      It is (likely) showing the 0.1% percentile of measured wet-bulb temperatures. i.e. in a given year, we expect 0.1% of the wet-bulbs to exceed this temperature or approximately 8 to 9 hours in a year.
- ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
  Dangerous to give any credence to this tripe. Models like the one mentioned (without references) are created by humans and the parameters they use are arbitrary. Scientists make some assumptions about parameters and run them through the system and get some results. They do this many times and vary the parameters to see what happens. It's the change in results vs the change in parameters that is the interesting stuff. Claiming they can predict the future is dishonest. Why do all references to climate models refer to 'The models or model'? It's like they are supposed to be oracles -- they are NOT. There is not just one or a few. They do not all show the same things. Models are a useful way to learn, but picking one result, not showing any work or stating assumptions, and then publishing click-bait referencing it is not ethical. > Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century. Which Climate models? Oh sorry it's the ONE so I won't question further. It could never be wrong. Do other models show anything different? Oh there are no others I see. What parameters were used? What datasets? There are zero references to any of this in the original paper but that didn't slow down the click-bait climate-fear-porn author who is not a scientist but a corporate communications person. > Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else. As others have said the 'survey data' they do reference seems to be mostly about how many stations a region has. Who funded this? > The study was supported by NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program. Big government looking to get bigger. For my part I have many years experience designing and running HPC scientific computing models in related domains.
tejohnso 5y ago
"Faster than expected" is a common phrase in climate research. For example, the arctic is warming 4X faster than the rest of the planet, antarctic ice melt, arctic ice extent reduction, methane emissions, etc, all happening faster than expected, depending on the source. Someone even put together a namesake blog, fasterthanexpected.com - it's a decent source for a high level picture of what is going on. I say "depending on the source" because there are some extreme doom and gloom types for whom these changes are happening more slowly than expected. However, the difference is negligible. The doom and gloom types might say the end of the world is only 2 years away, which is extreme, but now even peer reviewed research in respected publications are starting to mention very severe outcomes within decades. In previous decades, these publications wouldn't publish anything like that at all, then eventually they began to publish papers that mention these events happening within centuries, and now papers are coming out with very serious consequences being only decades away. The really scary thing is that the likelihood of sudden catastrophic change (eg: methane bombs, Thwaites Glacier collapse) is increasing, which could make the shorter time frame predictions actually come true.
- creaghpatr 5y ago
  That the 'expectations' are wildly off-base when predicting the extent and timing of climate change is a staple of the field.
  - redprince 5y ago
    So much so that it is known for at least 10 years that this is the case. And also why: Fear of being accused of being an alarmist or sounding too extreme. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p... "Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378012001215 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…
swader999 5y ago
I went skiing in minus 34 C a couple of weeks ago. It took a fair bit of thought to dress for it but I was able to last about three hours outside and had a great day. I don't think you can deal with heat extremes as easily.
- odonnellryan 5y ago
  That's without wind chill?
  - swader999 5y ago
    Yeah. Wind chill is a difficult measure to use. Varies a lot, you make wind when you ski fast, it really only affects exposed skin which you don't have at this temp.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  Why I like winter. I can always add more layers. However, in the summer, you can only remove so many layers until it becomes a crime.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    And being naked would not help much, or would make it even worse, depending on how sunny it is.
    - doubled112 5y ago
      Thank you for making me imagine sunburn in some really uncomfortable areas.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    Removing that last layer doesn't gain you all that much in high humidity conditions, and in some situations it's going to cause you sun protection issues.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
ck2 5y ago
Based on the past two years and especially right now, we're not going to do a damn thing about it. Everyone's going to have an excuse or "don't tell me what to do" until it finally kills everyone or destroys the economy. Then it will be too late.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Don’t look up!
  - jmugan 5y ago
    "Your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide."
    - AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y ago
      Broken window economics
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    oh shit I accidently looked up..wait..what is that thing...OMG the government's been lying to us!!! You've been lying!! Also beware of Bronteroc's on alien planets...they're pretty but they're not friendly....
photochemsyn 5y ago
Research from ~20 years ago forecast this result, I'm not sure it's entirely unexpected, although the focus in those studies was on air temperature alone: > Because of the loss of life, damage to crops and vegetation in general and the impact on water supplies, these recent heat waves have stimulated much interest in their climatological features, recurrence times, and, especially, whether they are a portent of greenhouse-induced climatic change. For example, Trigo et al. (2005) state that the hot summer of 2003 in Europe exceeded any over the past 500 yr, and Schär et al. (2004) claim that this event was statistically very unlikely, and was also consistent with results from climatic change simulations. Stott et al. (2004) estimate that past anthropogenic influences doubled the probability of the occurrence of the 2003 heat wave. More intense and frequent heat waves are also predicted by Meehl and Tebaldi (2004) and Beniston (2004) on the basis of greenhouse simulations.[1] [1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/20/15/jcli4224.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/20/15/jcli42... In the climate science literature, there's a recent focus on the humidity factor: > Recent studies have pointed to a growing concern on increasing heat stress considering humidity effects as well as extreme temperatures. Kang and Eltahir emphasized the important role of humidity, and pointed out that North China Plain is likely to experience deadly heat waves with wet-bulb temperature exceeding the threshold defining what Chinese farmers may tolerate while working outdoors [15]. By applying 35 °C as a threshold for human adaptability, Pal and Eltahir predicted that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this threshold under business-as-usual emission scenarios [16]. Lin et al. determined trends of heat wave variation and stress threshold in three major cities of Taiwan based on WBGT, and suggested that the heat stress in all three cities will either exceed or approach the danger level (WBGT ≥ 31 °C) by the end of this century [17]. Russo et al. quantified humid heat wave hazards in the recent past and at different levels of global warming using the apparent temperature, showing that humidity can amplify the magnitude and apparent temperature peak of heat waves [11]. There have also been some studies assessing the adverse effects of heat stress on health and labor productivity [18,19]. [2] [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539408/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539408/ Ultimately this is going to result in population migration away from the most severely affected areas, or drastic (and expensive) measures like shifting to living underground in termite-mound-like habitation will have to be implemented.
Shadonototra 5y ago
north will become south, and south will become north i expect a switch in the coming decade it's speeding up https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/earth-magnetic-field-flip-poles-spinning-magnet-alanna-mitchell https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/earth-mag...
hiidrew 5y ago
Recently read a novel, Ministry for the Future, the opening chapter illustrates a heat wave that happens in an extreme humid/heat climate. I was not a big fan of the rest of the book but this opening chapter was pretty alarming, that scenario would be terrifying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
- jmugan 5y ago
  Agreed. The more I read of that book the less I liked it, but that first chapter was amazing.
- gathly 5y ago
  just was about to post that. that opening chapter horrified me. i had to put the book down and come back another time
shrubby 5y ago
Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future. The beginning is cool. Not.
ducleonctor 5y ago
There is something peculiar on the map in the article that caught my eye: The formerly split country of Germany is also sharply split on the map! The western part (BRD/FRG) has significantly more hot humid days than the eastern part (former DDR/GDR). The colored area edge almost exactly matches the border. A political map of FRG/GDR for comparison: https://www.stepmap.de/karte/brd-ddr-ddIwvxHotF https://www.stepmap.de/karte/brd-ddr-ddIwvxHotF Why does this data follow political borders so sharply in this case? Is that effect real or caused by methology error or skewed data? Apparently the basic data stems from the HadISD database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/index.html https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/index.... This file lists the stations (version v311_2020f) in the database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/files/hadisd_station_fullinfo_v311_202001p.txt https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/files/... Many stations in the former GDR seem to be present, for example: 104880-99999 DRESDEN 51.133 13.767 230.1 1931-01-01 2020-02-06 094690-99999 LEIPZIG/SCHKEUDITZ& 51.417 12.233 142.0 1975-07-01 1991-10-31 If the effect is real: Which difference between FRG and former GDR areas causes it?
- ianferrel 5y ago
  One possibility: Western Germany is more industrialized and urban, with higher population and population density. Thermal measurements in the west are more likely to be taken in urban heat islands?
  - ducleonctor 5y ago
    Industry seems to explain some of that effect. Population density doesn't explain it completely, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media/File:Pop_density_of_Germany.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media... Other parts of West Germany also sport lower population density (Lower Saxony in the North, Bavaria in the South). It is absolutely astonishing how strongly human behavior (industry and metropolitan areas) influences local environmental conditions. I guess most cities may (be forced to) change radically.

219 points by perfunctory 5y ago

Minister of the future intro about a heat bubble gave me nightmares. It make me think about how we could prevent death in case of a massive humid heat wave, and how we could do it at a low enough cost, especially in a situation where the grid fail. My best guess will be some tent with high isolation fabric (think emergency blanket) cooled with a tank of liquid nitrogen.

jonahbenton 5y ago

(May 2020)

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

An incredibly "glass half full" take, but it looks like the location of all the places that will be most affected are also the biggest producers - maybe this will be a good thing in encouraging change? Unfortunately I assume it'll take a lot of death before that happens, and even then probably not, but I feel like at this point it's either look for a silver lining or descend into complete despair.

rtkwe 5y ago
The trouble is the people most in power to make decisions are personally insolated from the affects of hot humid conditions (quite literally) by cooling infrastructure. If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death, /maybe/ an event like the mass heat death in Ministry for the Future would get some people's attention but COVID has really knocked my expectations for coming together in the face of a collective disaster.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  True, but looking at the map the most populated sections of the United States are marked as danger zones. Though I realize after writing that line that the last few years have taught us that mass casualty events in Florida won't exactly cause dramatic societal change.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    The effect will be blunted because in the US we have AC and a fairly robust national power grid so the number of people affected will be limited to poor and houseless people who we're already very good at ignoring suffering from. We've already had pretty bad heat waves in the past that have caused dozens of deaths in a day but they're diffuse and not in one giant group so they're easy to ignore like COVID, heart attack, and general poverty deaths.
    - soperj 5y ago
      Didn't you just have people freezing to death in Texas because of a power outage?
      - rtkwe 5y ago
        Texas is a bit of a special case in the US power grid... They're not a part of it, Texas decided to not connect itself to the national power grid because it wanted to go way further in on deregulation and couldn't do that if it was connected to the national grid and had to follow the rules that came with that. That's why you don't really see huge blackouts very often in the rest of the country, power outages are usually due to direct storm damage and only affect things on a particular line/circuit. Texas couldn't bring power in from unaffected areas to balance the spike in demand so they lost the whole grid, it's harder to have that happen in other parts of the country.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      > a fairly robust national power grid The local grid particularly in (parts of?) California is everything but robust.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  >If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Essentially yeah. Look at the proposed alternatives from the right in the US which basically amounted to "If he dies he dies" but scaled up to millions of people. One of the most consistent deflections is that "only the already sick" are dying of COVID which beyond being wildly untrue also has the strains of "it's your own fault you're dying why should I do anything to prevent it?" which doesn't bode well for our response to climate disasters.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    In the United States, I've heard a number of people say they would rather old people die than have their freedoms violated. Their reasoning is people who die of COVID would have died anyway if COVID didn't happen. My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.

roter 5y ago

NOAA has also recently released a mapping tool [0] that allows you to dig down to county level (scroll down to county map) for various hazards. [0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/mapping https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/mapping

Gustomaximus 5y ago

If you haven't experienced high humidity its hard to understand how debilitating it can be. You can't cool down easily doing even mild physical work. I'm in a subtropical zone (Brisbane) and in high humidity weather I do about 30-50% of the physical work I can on a non-humid day I'd estimate. OOften it's best to work outdoors for an hour then cool down for an hour in pool/aircon as if you overheat yourself itcan be hard to get back to normal that day. That said its a good HN opportunity too for entrepreneurs. We see more and more kit like ice jackets that you freeze then wear outdoors etc for outdoor workers. Tech has to kick in here too.

arethuza 5y ago
Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock" has "earthsuits" that people wear in hot and humid locations.
- steelframe 5y ago
  > Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock" has "earthsuits" that people wear in hot and humid locations. Reminiscent of Frank Herbert's stillsuits in Dune (1965).
falcolas 5y ago
Ironically, the cosplay space has this covered. They have portable battery powered air conditioners connected to astronaut-style onesies-with-coolant-pipes. Unfortunately they're still manually assembled, so not quite readily available yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE <- Adam savage building one for an astronaut cosplay suit.
- 0_____0 5y ago
  The takeaway I see here is that we're looking at putting people, on Earth, in environmental suits, because we collectively haven't been able to agree on how (or whether, for that matter) to stop making it uninhabitable.

andrewclunn 5y ago

Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else.

refurb 5y ago
I’m not sure how to interpret the map either. The web bulb temperature of the top 0.1% of hot and humid days over a 38 year period?
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  Yeah its a very poor visualization. Its difficult to tell if it is showing the hottest wet bulb temperature of an area over the time period, or the most frequent, or what.
  - roter 5y ago
    It is (likely) showing the 0.1% percentile of measured wet-bulb temperatures. i.e. in a given year, we expect 0.1% of the wet-bulbs to exceed this temperature or approximately 8 to 9 hours in a year.
ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
Dangerous to give any credence to this tripe. Models like the one mentioned (without references) are created by humans and the parameters they use are arbitrary. Scientists make some assumptions about parameters and run them through the system and get some results. They do this many times and vary the parameters to see what happens. It's the change in results vs the change in parameters that is the interesting stuff. Claiming they can predict the future is dishonest. Why do all references to climate models refer to 'The models or model'? It's like they are supposed to be oracles -- they are NOT. There is not just one or a few. They do not all show the same things. Models are a useful way to learn, but picking one result, not showing any work or stating assumptions, and then publishing click-bait referencing it is not ethical. > Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century. Which Climate models? Oh sorry it's the ONE so I won't question further. It could never be wrong. Do other models show anything different? Oh there are no others I see. What parameters were used? What datasets? There are zero references to any of this in the original paper but that didn't slow down the click-bait climate-fear-porn author who is not a scientist but a corporate communications person. > Looks like the data points have more to do with how many weather recording stations a region has than anything else. As others have said the 'survey data' they do reference seems to be mostly about how many stations a region has. Who funded this? > The study was supported by NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program. Big government looking to get bigger. For my part I have many years experience designing and running HPC scientific computing models in related domains.

tejohnso 5y ago

"Faster than expected" is a common phrase in climate research. For example, the arctic is warming 4X faster than the rest of the planet, antarctic ice melt, arctic ice extent reduction, methane emissions, etc, all happening faster than expected, depending on the source. Someone even put together a namesake blog, fasterthanexpected.com - it's a decent source for a high level picture of what is going on. I say "depending on the source" because there are some extreme doom and gloom types for whom these changes are happening more slowly than expected. However, the difference is negligible. The doom and gloom types might say the end of the world is only 2 years away, which is extreme, but now even peer reviewed research in respected publications are starting to mention very severe outcomes within decades. In previous decades, these publications wouldn't publish anything like that at all, then eventually they began to publish papers that mention these events happening within centuries, and now papers are coming out with very serious consequences being only decades away. The really scary thing is that the likelihood of sudden catastrophic change (eg: methane bombs, Thwaites Glacier collapse) is increasing, which could make the shorter time frame predictions actually come true.

creaghpatr 5y ago
That the 'expectations' are wildly off-base when predicting the extent and timing of climate change is a staple of the field.
- redprince 5y ago
  So much so that it is known for at least 10 years that this is the case. And also why: Fear of being accused of being an alarmist or sounding too extreme. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p... "Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378012001215 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...
- Sharlin 5y ago
  It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…

swader999 5y ago

I went skiing in minus 34 C a couple of weeks ago. It took a fair bit of thought to dress for it but I was able to last about three hours outside and had a great day. I don't think you can deal with heat extremes as easily.

odonnellryan 5y ago
That's without wind chill?
- swader999 5y ago
  Yeah. Wind chill is a difficult measure to use. Varies a lot, you make wind when you ski fast, it really only affects exposed skin which you don't have at this temp.
tcmart14 5y ago
Why I like winter. I can always add more layers. However, in the summer, you can only remove so many layers until it becomes a crime.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  And being naked would not help much, or would make it even worse, depending on how sunny it is.
  - doubled112 5y ago
    Thank you for making me imagine sunburn in some really uncomfortable areas.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Removing that last layer doesn't gain you all that much in high humidity conditions, and in some situations it's going to cause you sun protection issues.
joe_the_user 5y ago

ck2 5y ago

Based on the past two years and especially right now, we're not going to do a damn thing about it. Everyone's going to have an excuse or "don't tell me what to do" until it finally kills everyone or destroys the economy. Then it will be too late.

dougmwne 5y ago
Don’t look up!
- jmugan 5y ago
  "Your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide."
  - AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y ago
    Broken window economics
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  oh shit I accidently looked up..wait..what is that thing...OMG the government's been lying to us!!! You've been lying!! Also beware of Bronteroc's on alien planets...they're pretty but they're not friendly....

photochemsyn 5y ago

Research from ~20 years ago forecast this result, I'm not sure it's entirely unexpected, although the focus in those studies was on air temperature alone: > Because of the loss of life, damage to crops and vegetation in general and the impact on water supplies, these recent heat waves have stimulated much interest in their climatological features, recurrence times, and, especially, whether they are a portent of greenhouse-induced climatic change. For example, Trigo et al. (2005) state that the hot summer of 2003 in Europe exceeded any over the past 500 yr, and Schär et al. (2004) claim that this event was statistically very unlikely, and was also consistent with results from climatic change simulations. Stott et al. (2004) estimate that past anthropogenic influences doubled the probability of the occurrence of the 2003 heat wave. More intense and frequent heat waves are also predicted by Meehl and Tebaldi (2004) and Beniston (2004) on the basis of greenhouse simulations.[1] [1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/20/15/jcli4224.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/20/15/jcli42... In the climate science literature, there's a recent focus on the humidity factor: > Recent studies have pointed to a growing concern on increasing heat stress considering humidity effects as well as extreme temperatures. Kang and Eltahir emphasized the important role of humidity, and pointed out that North China Plain is likely to experience deadly heat waves with wet-bulb temperature exceeding the threshold defining what Chinese farmers may tolerate while working outdoors [15]. By applying 35 °C as a threshold for human adaptability, Pal and Eltahir predicted that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this threshold under business-as-usual emission scenarios [16]. Lin et al. determined trends of heat wave variation and stress threshold in three major cities of Taiwan based on WBGT, and suggested that the heat stress in all three cities will either exceed or approach the danger level (WBGT ≥ 31 °C) by the end of this century [17]. Russo et al. quantified humid heat wave hazards in the recent past and at different levels of global warming using the apparent temperature, showing that humidity can amplify the magnitude and apparent temperature peak of heat waves [11]. There have also been some studies assessing the adverse effects of heat stress on health and labor productivity [18,19]. [2] [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539408/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539408/ Ultimately this is going to result in population migration away from the most severely affected areas, or drastic (and expensive) measures like shifting to living underground in termite-mound-like habitation will have to be implemented.

Shadonototra 5y ago

north will become south, and south will become north i expect a switch in the coming decade it's speeding up https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/earth-magnetic-field-flip-poles-spinning-magnet-alanna-mitchell https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/earth-mag...

hiidrew 5y ago

Recently read a novel, Ministry for the Future, the opening chapter illustrates a heat wave that happens in an extreme humid/heat climate. I was not a big fan of the rest of the book but this opening chapter was pretty alarming, that scenario would be terrifying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

jmugan 5y ago
Agreed. The more I read of that book the less I liked it, but that first chapter was amazing.
gathly 5y ago
just was about to post that. that opening chapter horrified me. i had to put the book down and come back another time

shrubby 5y ago

Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future. The beginning is cool. Not.

ducleonctor 5y ago

There is something peculiar on the map in the article that caught my eye: The formerly split country of Germany is also sharply split on the map! The western part (BRD/FRG) has significantly more hot humid days than the eastern part (former DDR/GDR). The colored area edge almost exactly matches the border. A political map of FRG/GDR for comparison: https://www.stepmap.de/karte/brd-ddr-ddIwvxHotF https://www.stepmap.de/karte/brd-ddr-ddIwvxHotF Why does this data follow political borders so sharply in this case? Is that effect real or caused by methology error or skewed data? Apparently the basic data stems from the HadISD database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/index.html https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/index.... This file lists the stations (version v311_2020f) in the database: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/files/hadisd_station_fullinfo_v311_202001p.txt https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisd/v311_2020f/files/... Many stations in the former GDR seem to be present, for example: 104880-99999 DRESDEN 51.133 13.767 230.1 1931-01-01 2020-02-06 094690-99999 LEIPZIG/SCHKEUDITZ& 51.417 12.233 142.0 1975-07-01 1991-10-31 If the effect is real: Which difference between FRG and former GDR areas causes it?

ianferrel 5y ago
One possibility: Western Germany is more industrialized and urban, with higher population and population density. Thermal measurements in the west are more likely to be taken in urban heat islands?
- ducleonctor 5y ago
  Industry seems to explain some of that effect. Population density doesn't explain it completely, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media/File:Pop_density_of_Germany.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media... Other parts of West Germany also sport lower population density (Lower Saxony in the North, Bavaria in the South). It is absolutely astonishing how strongly human behavior (industry and metropolitan areas) influences local environmental conditions. I guess most cities may (be forced to) change radically.