Originally published at: Heat dome will bake millions in South and Southwest U.S., setting dangerous records | Boing Boing
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Hot times for humanity.
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Stock up on food. Just say’n.
It will happen here.
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BC had a heat dome in 2021, and they are no joke. Almost 1000 people died, which in a province that only has 4.5m people in it is a pretty big deal.
Be safe, California, and check on your grandparents. 
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Are we taking bets on when Texas’ power grid fails?
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It sucks mightily. If only we had been able to predict this somehow, and take steps to prevent or mitigate it. Oh, wait…
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Texas consumes more energy than any other state and has also connected the most renewable energy resources to the grid, with 773 additional megawatts of solar projects added in June. Yet despite the record contributions from renewables, experts say the grid’s efficiency is diminished by a strained transmission infrastructure that can’t handle the full load that renewable energy can deliver.
This statement caused me to do a double take. I would not have expected TX to lead the nation in renewables, but here we are. The fact that they are squandering it, however, is absolutely not surprising in the least.
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Stay indoors, crank up the AC, drink lots of water and stay safe…
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Texas leads the nation in wind power by a substantial margin - 30% of the wind power generated in the US comes from Texas.
It’s number 2 in solar - California generates a 2.5 times more solar power than Texas.
I keep waiting for Abbott and company to do something stupid to “punish” the people who would dare to not burn natural gas for power…
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He and his party are taking steps against wind power currently.
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The effects of the climate emergency are coming on more quickly than a lot of people (especially right-wing denialists) ever imagined they could.
As others have noted, please check in on elderly people in your neighbourhood who are isolated from friends and family to make sure they have A/C, that it’s working, and that they’re hydrating.
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Not surprisingly the great lakes area has been holding up fine the past few days. Still it’s not all sunshine and lollipops in the habitable zone with how a week and a half ago we had wildfire smoke choking the air, barely missing the rains that flooded out the hudson valley+Vermont and how we’re gonna get close to 5 days straight of thunderstorms that might lead to flash flood watches. But hey at least we don’t have to worry about the temperature killing us until October comes around
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Yeah, I was really surprised at just how many wind farms I saw going through Texas this winter.
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Getting PTSDish feelings this last month.
Above are from June of 2021 and September of 2020, respectively, in my Oregon neighborhood… Thank goodness, no flooding. Yet.
I’d say “I find it hard to believe that there still people who think climate is a Chinese hoax” or “It’s just east coast liberals trying to take away our trucks and grills and gas stoves.”
But they’re out there still, and will probably turn up here, with irrefutable evidence like “If environmentalists were serious about climate change they wouldn’t have opposed nukes in the 70s” or “AL GORE HAS A PRIVATE JET!”
At this point, I’m not sure what would get conservatives on board. Maybe everyone in “The Villages” dying of heat stroke, or a freak Derecho blasting Mar-a-Lago into splinters, or a Grade 6 tornado leveling Branson, MO.
But I suspect if anyone of those happened, they’d blame it on a gay couple moving into town.
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And for all things great and small.
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Americans are suddenly having to learn, really quick, what “wet-bulb” temperatures are (and at what temperature humans are unable to live). I remember a few years back, reading projections about how parts of the world would become uninhabitable due to deadly wet-bulb temperatures as a result of climate change, sometime “in the next hundred years.” It turns out that “a couple years” is indeed within a century, because we’re now getting those kinds of sustained deadly temperatures in the US, India, parts of Africa… And all the indications are that this will be the new normal, happening if not every year, then at least every few years (until it becomes every year).
These temperatures may only happen for a few days a year, but they effectively make an area uninhabitable, as you can’t live there (literally) without air conditioning. (Being well-hydrated, sitting in the shade, not working, etc. won’t help you - you’ll just die more slowly.) As the temperatures go up, it starts killing selectively - the elderly, the ill, physical laborers, the poor (i.e. without climate control), but then everywhere there’s an unreliable grid (e.g. Texas), it’s eventually everyone. (Ooops, our wet-bulb temperatures went up to 94 and power went down for a few days, we just lost… Florida.)
And you’ll want enough to last for the rest of your life, because things certainly aren’t going to get better.
It has happened here (regardless of where “here” is). We’ve had different crops failing in different countries (and sometimes the same crop in multiple parts of the world) due to climate change - that’s going to get worse. The climate predictability that allowed modern agriculture (and by extension, modern civilizations) is going bye-bye.
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Anti-regulation captains-of-industry no longer bribing conservatives in Congress to push their don’t-give-two-fucks-for-the-environment agenda to their constituents.
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i wonder how that’d break down by square acre, or per capita. it’s a gigantic state, so you’d expect even small proportions to reach large total numbers
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Temperatures so hot, the color scale accompanying the map runs out of color, and just turns grey… Like ash.
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