Multiple southern states and a few midwestern states are at “extreme threat” levels of “wet bulb temperature”.
I woke up to TWO lawn mowers going today. It feels like 100 out and its the hottest day of the week. I hate these people!!! I actually wish it would get hotter! Not really though for the sane peoples sakes.
Here in Florida, it feels like you’re swimming in lava right now
This article doesn’t actually mention the values of the temperatures (probably to cover relieve themselves of the responsibility of those details) so I’ll go to their first link, the theHill.com one. They don’t directly give a value in their text either…
Reading that, the exact same thing is happening as that twitter screenshot thread with the map of the southern US color coded for temperatures.
Basically, wet bulb globe temperature is being conflated with wet bulb temperature. Globe is in the sun, the other is not. The thehill.com source uses a chart and description for globe, doesn’t mention the word globe anywhere, then says you can’t survive more than 35C with a link to a study. That 35C/88F is the limit for a wet bulb temperature, not wet bulb globe temperature. Obviously measuring something in the sun is going to give a higher number than in the shade. You can’t say “it’s this temperature” referencing wet bulb globe and also say “you couldn’t survive that temperature” using the “survivability” limit of wet bulb without any sort of qualification/clarification as to the distinction. Obviously it’s hotter in the sun. If that same temperature is reached in the shade it’s that much hotter in the sun.
Sure, we’re all facing extreme climate apocalypse, but this is annoying that the terms are being used as the same thing, and I’d argue detrimental to the cause. When these things are incorrect, it’s just more ammunition for deniers and doubters to point at to justify their continued intentional ignorance.
An earlier version of this article was published in June 2021.
I’m not sure if I should be alarmed that this is happening frequently enough to recycle older articles or comforted that we’ve already dealt with this trouble once before.
Nothing is being dealt with, is the problem. Every year people die to heat related problems. This year there will be a lot more of them. Next year there will be a lot more than this year.
The problem with saturated humidity is that your sweat can’t evaporate to cool you. Unless you directly remove yourself from the hot and humid environment, which is sometimes possible but isn’t always, any temperature above body temperature (roughly 95-98 degrees F) can and will prove fatal over long exposure. Even having moving air blow over you, like sitting in front of a fan, won’t help you if it’s too humid to evaporate sweat.
Without artificial ways of cooling your environment, such as air conditioning, you’re going to be pretty screwed. Many places don’t have access to air conditioning at all, and the places that do have it will be using it so much that they’ll constantly be doing more progressive damage to the environment, which then in turn makes the heat waves worse and snowballs it all to deal with an even worse problem next year. Repeat until mass extinction is achieved.
When I work at military facilities in the US, they use wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) which adds the heating effect of direct sunlight.
We use it to prevent heat stroke. DoD has a system of colored flags that index to the WBGT. Red and black flags indicate that folks working outside need to take breaks at some increased frequency.
