Shitty news yes, but if that temperature means “you die”, why isn’t everyone without AC in that zone dead? Sensationalism does no one’s cause any good.
if you don’t have AC, you need to get creative. you need to avoid being in that kind of heat and humidity, or lower the body temp through means other than evaporative cooling. if you can get underground, the temp will be lower, for instance. or you can get that underground coldness from your tap, and take a cold bath. strap ice packs to your body. whatever, but the situation is desparate.
anyways, there are ways to survive, but a wet bulb temp of 95F (equivalent to a heat index of about 160F) is considered the theoretical limit on human survivability, so it is unsurprising that people have died from this heat wave.
like @Bbshot said, this picture is for wet bulb GLOBE temperature which isn’t the same as the deadly wet bulb temperature in the article. Lazy/uninformed at best, misinformation at worst.
I’ve been without AC in Seville on a rowing competition with +40C, so basically no shade while doing heavy activity. It’s true that we went to drink water and to the shade the moment we unloaded the boats, and that there was a recommendation to stay inside just in case, bu there were no reported deaths in 3-4 days.
This was an extreme, 42C ish, but I’ve been on 32 or 34 and while it’s really uncomfortable (more because of humidity than heat but oh well), it’s not mortally bad.
40C by itself isn’t life threatening if the humidity isn’t as high. The temperatures on their own regarding this heatwave were about 38C, but with the high humidity, the heat index exceeded 49C. I’m seeing a death toll of at least 14 so far.
How do you prep?
Well, it stops being storing things in your basement, and turns into selling your house and migrating to a locale that is not experiencing wet bulb temps that’ll kill you if you lose electricity. It’s very hard to keep an A/C going if all you have is solar panels on your house.
And if A/C goes from being a luxury to being the ONLY reason you don’t die–well, you either need to go somewhere where A/C can be a luxury again, or you pour massive amounts of cash into generating electricity on land you own…which is hard and expensive, which is why we typically rely on cities to set that stuff up for us as a public utility, because it’s cheaper and more efficiant.
With climate change, the rust belt region around the great lakes is likely going to revitalize again, both because the availability of fresh water (avoiding what’s going on around Denver and in California), and the cooler, northern temperatures. Also, old city infrastructure that can be finally updated if the cities start growing again and get a bigger tax base.
People who “prep” with a genuine long-range view of the future will do this sooner than later.
People who “prep” by stockping guns and whatever-the-fuck for a Mad Max type dystopia either get fucked where they live because they’re not actually thinking about survival rationally and don’t realize they actually DO need to sell their house and get somewhere safer, or they decide to migrate at the very last second and end up caught in the morass of other people who only migrate when the frying pan finally gets too hot to stand in.
That is a fantastic link, thank you. I’ve some friends moving en masse out of an area with water problems in the next year or so, and it’s nice to be able to show them something like this.
clearly the author of this tweet has never been camping in the summer. you don’t die just because you’re outside with no AC. if that were true none of this ever would’ve gotten built because AC is a relatively recent invention. the Southeast certainly was hot and humid before climate change; and yes now it’s getting worse, but this take is pretty sensational.
you don’t die just because you’re outside with no AC
At wet-bulb temperatures of 35 °C or above you do, actually, if you’re exposed to them for longer. Your body can then no longer cool by sweating and just keeps getting heated up by the environment. And old people in partiuclar do regularly die due to heat even at much lower wet-bulb temperaturs.
Good thing we have AC
