Floods, Fires, and Heat Domes (the climate change thread) (Part 1)

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Ryan Reynolds Insult GIF by The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

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It’s starting to seem like the world is on the receiving end of this… :grimacing:

Melting Season 3 GIF by The Simpsons

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… that was hard to believe

so I looked up the weather reports and used two different “heat index” calculators

One said 66°C, the other said 67°C :hot_face:

                                  HEAT   WET
   TIMESTAMP  LOCAL TIME  T. D.P. INDEX  BULB

OIBP 170000Z  7/17 03:30  31° 28° 42°    28.7°
OIBP 162100Z  7/17 00:30  34° 29° 50°    30.2°
OIBP 162000Z  7/16 23:30  34° 28° 47°    29.5°
OIBP 161900Z  7/16 22:30  34° 29° 50°    30.2°
OIBP 161800Z  7/16 21:30  35° 29° 51°    30.5°
OIBP 161700Z  7/16 20:30  35° 29° 51°    30.5°
OIBP 161600Z  7/16 19:30  35° 29° 51°    30.5°
OIBP 161500Z  7/16 18:30  36° 28° 50°    30.0°
OIBP 161400Z  7/16 17:30  37° 30° 56°    31.7°
OIBP 161300Z  7/16 16:30  38° 30° 58°    31.9°
OIBP 161230Z  7/16 16:00  38° 30° 58°    31.9°
OIBP 161200Z  7/16 15:30  39° 29° 57°    31.5°
OIBP 161130Z  7/16 15:00  40° 30° 61°    32.5°
OIBP 161100Z  7/16 14:30  40° 31° 63°    33.1°
OIBP 161030Z  7/16 14:00  40° 31° 63°    33.1°
OIBP 161000Z  7/16 13:30  40° 31° 63°    33.1°
OIBP 160900Z  7/16 12:30  40° 32° 67°    33.8°
OIBP 160830Z  7/16 12:00  40° 31° 63°    33.1°
OIBP 160800Z  7/16 11:30  40° 31° 63°    33.1°
OIBP 160730Z  7/16 11:00  41° 31° 65°    33.4°
OIBP 160700Z  7/16 10:30  40° 30° 61°    32.5°
OIBP 160600Z  7/16 09:30  38° 29° 55°    31.3°
OIBP 160530Z  7/16 09:00  38° 29° 55°    31.3°
OIBP 160500Z  7/16 08:30  37° 29° 54°    31.0°
OIBP 160400Z  7/16 07:30  34° 30° 52°    30.9°
OIBP 160300Z  7/16 06:30  32° 29° 46°    29.7°
OIBP 160200Z  7/16 05:30  31° 28° 42°    28.7°
OIBP 160100Z  7/16 04:30  32° 29° 46°    29.7°
OIBP 160000Z  7/16 03:30  32° 29° 46°    29.7°

Heat Index Calculator: Easy-to-Read Chart & Definition!

Heat Index Calculation

https://www.aviationweather.gov/metar/data?ids=OIBP&format=decoded&date=202307170000&hours=25

EDIT: added wet bulb temperatures

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BBC News - South Korea floods: Tunnel horror brings home climate fears

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So many reports on Democracy Now are climate disasters, and now this:

“We actually don’t know exactly how Culex pipiens is surviving the winters in Alberta,” said Soghigian. “We don’t know enough about it.”

The number of invasive mosquitoes moving north is growing, according to Soghigian. Aedes albopictus is another one he is concerned about. That mosquito is known to transmit the Zika virus and Dengue fever. It’s established itself as far north as Windsor, Ont.

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Warning: Horrifying description of what leads to death in extreme heat.

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Umbrellas for everyone.

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Americans have been treated for second-degree contact burns in Arizona as extreme heat caused pavement temperatures to surpass 71C (160F).

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Yeah. I listened to the interview that @PsiPhiGrrrl linked. It’s worth quoting:

AMY GOODMAN: In your new book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, Jeff Goodell, you write about what happens to our bodies as the heat rises above 107 degrees Fahrenheit. You say, “As the heat rises, the proteins unfold and the bonds that keep the structures together break. At the most fundamental level, your body unravels. … Your insides melt and disintegrate — you are hemorrhaging everywhere.” Take it from there, Jeff.

JEFF GOODELL: Well, that’s sort of the end. To begin, you know, our bodies are finely tuned machines that work in a very narrow temperature range. All of us understand that intuitively. If you have a temperature of 100 degrees, you know something’s going on in your body. If you have a temperature of 101 or 102, you’re calling the doctor. If you have a temperature of 105, you’re going to the hospital. We all know this in our lives. But we don’t understand the risks of that, you know, in an outdoor environment and in these kinds of extreme heat events.

What happens when your body gets hot is we only have one mechanism to cool down, and that is sweat, as we all know. When it gets hot, our heart starts pumping faster, and it’s pushing the blood away from our internal organs and away from our brains, which is one of the reasons why you get kind of dizzy or hallucinogenic or lightheaded when we are suffering from extreme heat. And as it pushes the blood away from the internal organs towards our skin to cool off through sweating, it puts an enormous strain on our heart. And so, a lot of the people who are the most vulnerable to heat are people who have heart conditions, circulatory issues, taking medications that are related to that. And your body is in this sort of desperate attempt to dissipate this heat.

And when you’re an outdoor worker and when you are in an environment that your body just can’t sweat enough, either because you’re not drinking enough water and it loses the ability to sweat, or you just simply can’t kind of dump enough heat out of your body to keep your internal body temperature from rising above 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, then the things start happening that you described, which is your — literally, the membrane of your cells begin to melt, the proteins that control the functions of those cellular structures begin to unfold, and your body kind of literally melts from the inside. And it’s a horrible way to go.

And it’s something — you know, most people who die of heat stroke don’t get that far. It’s usually a heart attack or something like that that is the cause of death. But it’s also one reason why heat mortality is dramatically underestimated in our accounting of it, because unlike a knife or a gunshot, there is no kind of heat wound when someone dies from extreme heat. So, a lot of people die of heart attacks or other circulatory problems, and they’re never diagnosed as heat deaths. So, these sort of mortality numbers that you were citing in the opening and that I cite in my book are widely understood to be grossly underestimated.

:sob:

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