Forget hot, muggy summers. Start thinking survival.
Scientists are “alarmed about the increasing frequency of extreme heat paired with high humidity,” says a Scientific American article of July 19, 2022 (read it here).
That’s because current heat waves are approaching “the theorized upper limit of human adaptability to humid heat.” This is really bad if you live in the lowlands of India or Pakistan, but it’s not good in Texas, either.
A 2010 study estimated “a wet-bulb temperature … equal to 95° F at 100% humidity, or 115° F at 50% humidity” is the upper limit of safety, “beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature.” But recent experiments suggest that limit may be more like 88° F at 100% or 100° F at 50%.
It’s gonna hit 98° F and 82% in Houston tomorrow. That’s actually worse than conditions in Rawalpindi.
And, oh yeah, enough Greenland ice melted last week to cover West Virginia with a foot of water (that story here).
Republicans denied global warming exists until they couldn’t because it was so obvious. Then they denied — and still deny — that fossil fuels caused it, ludicrously claiming the drastic planetary heating of the last decade is just a natural climate cycle. Today, they — along with coal millionaire Joe Manchin — are preventing our government from doing anything to put the brakes on it.
When catastrophe is knocking on the door Republicans, being who they are, will ask you to trust “free market solutions” to the problem.
I think by then we’re gonna be beyond that.
Frankly, I don’t see any political system, autocratic or democratic, preventing a life-ending climate disaster (see story here). Human nature is too inclined to say, “I’ll be dead before then, so gimme my cheap gasoline.” And few people outside of Africa and Asia eat grasshoppers. (Trout in Montana don’t count; they’re already eating them.)
Meanwhile, it’s going to get very uncomfortable in a lot of places, especially where the electrical grid overloads from too many people trying to run air conditioning at the same time. And if you think air travel is chaotic now, wait until the runways are melting (spoiler alert: they already are). Not only that, rails are bending and roads are buckling (see story here and more photos here).
This may be a slow frog-in-a-blender death. But dead we’ll be.