Heat Wave to Hit Two-Thirds of the U.S. Here’s What to Expect

Heat Wave to Hit Two-Thirds of the U.S. Here’s What to Expect(nytimes.com)

33 points by QuickToBan 6 years ago | 44 comments

hpoe 6 years ago |

So I get that the infrastructure isn't as well in place to deal with things like this but where I live 100+ isn't that absurd, and that's nothing to say for places like Arizonia which is two blocks away from the sun and 90 is considered cool, with 100+ being a common occurrence. So what makes this particularly bad?

bspn 6 years ago | |

The humidity amplifies the effects of the heat. I remember the first time I travelled to Arizona and was expecting to suffer when I saw the forecast temperatures were 100+, but the dry heat was - I hesitate to say comfortable - but very different from a 90 degree day on the East Coast with high humidity. An extended period of extreme heat + humidity can be brutal on the body, particularly those already vulnerable or without adequate air conditioning.

nickjj 6 years ago | | |

Yeah humidity is no joke.

I'm in NY and when it's ~90f degrees out with high humidity, it's an unescapable heat unless you have an A/C.

I'm in ok shape I guess. I walk 3-5 miles a day in all types of weather ranging from about 10f to 100f degrees but when high temps hit with high humidity my skin immediately glazes over and I know to take it easy. My arms will be dripping wet in less than a minute just standing outside doing nothing with a ~60 BPM heart rate.

Kye 6 years ago | | |

The reaction of someone who moved from a desert to Georgia is always interesting. Everyone has a unique way of processing the huge puddles of water under their car. Sometimes it's "oh yeah, humidity." Sometimes it's panic.

erobbins 6 years ago | | |

It's deceptively comfortable :) You can very quickly find yourself dehydrated and in a bad state.

dhdidhdu 6 years ago | |

If T is above body temperature anD there is high levels of humidity you can’t lower your temperature by sweating. Therefore, your body temperature will raise to match the environment T even if you don’t twitch a muscle.

On the other hand, if it’s dry the human body can sweat away prodigious amounts of heat

rubidium 6 years ago | |

“infrastructure isn't as well in place to deal with things like this“ and people don’t know how to either. It’s similar to blizzards in Georgia. Minnesota is fine with 6” snow. In Georgia it’s lots more risk because of the lack of experience.

It’s bad because people (usually already frail) get heatstroke/overheated and die.

taneq 6 years ago | | |

> people (usually already frail)

This always makes these sort of dire predictions sound exaggerated to me. There’s always a population of (usually older) people who are nearing the end and we seem irrationally unwilling to accept “old age” as a cause of death. Any slight disturbance is then blamed and we get dramatic headlines about “hundreds die in 35C heatwave.”

Retric 6 years ago | |

Heat index is by far more useful than temperature when discussing this. At 90f at 90% humidity is more dangerous and feels hotter than 102 at 50% humidity. 100f at 65% humidity feels like 136f and higher humidity quickly turns deadly.

Or as the article puts it, extreme heat killed 108 people last year.

bradknowles 6 years ago | | |

That's nothing.

A few years ago, in France, over 50,000 people died due to heat stroke and other extreme heat factors.

In the US, many places have this thing called "air conditioning". In France, and much of continental Europe, that's pretty rare.

Heck, in many of the poorer places over there, they don't even have fans.

jointpdf 6 years ago | | |

Yep, and the effects are nonlinear. i.e. increasing marginal danger from every +1F or +5%. Here’s a helpful chart: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bncore/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/h...

gamblor956 6 years ago | |

The East and Midwest is a lot more humid than the West (especially the Southeast), and humid air transfers more heat. Thus, 100 degrees in Alabama's 90% humidity is a lot worse than 100 degrees in Arizona's 10% humidity.

arkades 6 years ago | |

The body takes 2-3 weeks to adjust to a significant increase in heat, and can lose that adjustment pretty quickly. So in places where it’s routinely hot (esp if it’s dry) the physiologic impact is far less severe than in locations where it’s uncommon enough to preclude sustained physiologic adaptation.

leeoniya 6 years ago | |

> So what makes this particularly bad?

humidity. (at least in the midwest).

rhinoceraptor 6 years ago | |

The humidity in non-desert climates means sweating is ineffective, the air doesn't have much more ability to contain water vapor.

tomohawk 6 years ago |

We see a lot more weather hype in the news than we used to. Winter storms have names. We get "arctic vortexes". And normal summer temps are flogged as a massive heat wave.

Someone in the biz was telling me that the reason is that many 'news' orgs would rather have an article about the weather than about a lot of other subjects, so they've steadily increased the number of weather related coverage.

frankbreetz 6 years ago | |

Also extreme weather events are increasing in both quantity and severity. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/...

atoav 6 years ago | |

Well that and the increase of frequency of once-in-a-century weather extremes. And it will get more.

It takes the same amount of energy to melt 1L of ice as it takes to heat 1L of water up to 80 degree celsius. This means currently we have massive amounts of energy beeing absorbed by the melting ice. After that, we will see. Breakdown of the Jetstream? Gulf stream? who knows.

untog 6 years ago | |

...also, climate change is leading to an increase in extreme weather events. Feels a little unfair to blame the media for clickbait hype when this is a heatwave.

I'd always heard that news organisations love weather stories because they're cheap to produce and readers want to read them and find them useful. There's a reason the morning news has a weather update every fifteen minutes, after all.

maxander 6 years ago | |

It serves a purpose, though, since weather is more relevant to day-to-day experience than most news stories. E.g., Boston is going to hit just about 100F this Saturday; that’s enough to potentially hurt someone not expecting it, and there’s probably people who wouldn’t hear about a heatwave if it wasn’t in something like the NYT.

jaytaylor 6 years ago |

Now NYT disables reading from incognito. Lame.

http://archive.is/cF01U

sweetcherrypie 6 years ago | |

Turn off JS and open in either private/regular window:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/disable-javas...

gamblor956 6 years ago | |

WaPo has been doing that for a few months. LATimes started doing that this week as well.

Use Firefox's reader mode. You might need to refresh once or twice to get the full NYT article in reader mode.

mschuster91 6 years ago | |

How do these work anyway? Guess they're running some feature checks as the (probably aged to hell) webview in the HN or reddit app I use always hits that wall.

joemaller1 6 years ago | |

Logging in sort of defeats the point of private mode.

eli 6 years ago | | |

Most people were using private mode to read more articles than they paywall allows without paying for a subscription.

untog 6 years ago | | |

And incognito mode sort of defeats the point of a paywall.

Not defending it, but the motivations are pretty clear here.

kevincrane 6 years ago | |

Anecdotally, I've also found this link helpful if you find yourself hitting NYT paywalls in the future: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription

beezle 6 years ago |

Slow news day? Not like this is the first heat wave to ever hit more than a couple states. Drink lots of water, move slow, go to work early and leave late (its cooler and less people to get edgy with!)

beezle 6 years ago | |

No clue why the angry downvotes - from the subheadline of the story: "Dangerously hot temperatures are predicted from Oklahoma to New England. Here’s the forecast, with some tips on staying safe." I add to their list of things that can help, get downvoted, but people complaining about blocked incognito mode, all ok?