Analysis of six extreme heatwaves found that when temperature and humidity were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people
The paper is here
Anything that doesn’t kill you brings you closer to death in some way if it is hurtful.
Heatwaves push EVERYBODY closer to the edge and for many elderly and people with health issues the edge was already right there.
I don’t care if a city can claim technically zero heat deaths in the immediate aftermath of a heatwave, people die indirectly from the pure body stress of it excaberating other pre-existing issues and the impact doesn’t disappear the next day.
Anything that doesn’t kill you brings you closer to death in some way if it is hurtful.
Uhhh exercise can be hurtful (muscle soreness) and I’m sure we can find other examples
Not that I disagree with the rest of your post. I love a good sauna, but the joy of it is that it ends when I get out (and maybe jump into a pile of snow). A heat wave is just… Taxing
Careful, when I mention this I get downvotes and called a Doomer.
Remember how they solved this in that one book that starts with the sole survivor of a massive heat dome?
That book was The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson and the solution involved assassinations at scale of oil and gas industry executives as well as destruction by drone of all fossil fuel tankers and egregiously polluting cargo ships. Also, massive releases of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, aggressive immobilization of Antarctic glaciers via water pumps, and the onboarding of all central banks to rebase currency according to how much CO₂ you can fix into the ground instead of capitalism’s belief in endless future growth. It is a very optimistic story, but one we’ll have to carry out eventually in some form to at least the degree described in the book.
Assassinations for non-compliant billionaires/oligarchs, which irl would be literally every single one! That was it! Thank you! Sorry for asking but it had been a while since i read that.
That was a surprisingly grisly start to an otherwise extremely disappointing book.
It really was. It had one good idea, though.
Kim Stanley Robinson is elderly now, time for him to put down the quill and pick up gardening. I’m constantly surprised that the people who are the most pro-tech and colonize space and “explore that” are never for the #1 most important thing: anti-aging and life extension research.
heatwaves have always wiped out people haven’t they?
Yeah, when they happen, and above a certain threshold.
The problem is that the “when” is becoming far more common and the baseline is rising ever closer to that “certain threshold.”
This is talking about the weather conditions at which a person is guaranteed to die if they are outside for six hours in the shade (or at night).
Previously climate scientists said this would happen at a wet bulb temperature1 of 35 Celsius, theoretically enough to prevent a sweat-drenched human body from overheating. However, research has demonstrated the threshold is lower and doesn’t perfectly follow a single wet bulb temperature. And the scientific article that the news article is about shows these conditions have already occurred several times, when it was previously thought this threshold had not been breached yet.
Of course people can find shelter in an air conditioned buildings, underground, or under a forest canopy. But billions of people do not have access to these options. At some point they can either die or migrate, and this research shows that point requires less climate change than previously predicted. Combined with climate change occurring at a faster rate than the median expectation, mass climate migration is coming a lot sooner than expected.
1: the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is wet. If the air is dry, evaporation will cause this temperature to be lower than the air temperature, which is also the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is dry.
Droughts and heat vs cold periods and floods.
You get a pummeling of that? TKO.
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