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Southern US Reaches Dangerous "Wet Bulb Temperature". Here's What That Means (www.iflscience.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Multiple southern states and a few midwestern states are at "extreme threat" levels of "wet bulb temperature".

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

they updated it on july 4th 2023. i think when they originally wrote the article, they were explaining what wet bulb temperature meant. Now they're pointing out the frequency of reaching that threshold...which really sucks...so alarmed for sure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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.