This kind of perfect-storm disaster may sadly become more common.
Climate is warming of course. It’s stressing the power systems in different ways (eg wire expand with temperature and hang lower). When there’s a power outage, there’s no AC nor ventilation to mitigate the hot temperature. Also without refrigeration food rots quicker.
Holy shit. The wet bulb temperature in some coastel parts of India reached over 34 degrees. This is live threatening. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/wp-content/themes/sotp-foundation/dataviz/heat-humidity-map/
Jesus:
temperatures surged to more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in Dhaka. Other cities such as Rangpur recorded a high of 41 degrees Celsius – the highest there since 1958.
Global warming is absolutely crushing certain countries. There’s going to be a lot of dead elderly and young children before all that is over.
Global warming is absolutely crushing certain countries.
it’s pretty likely we’ll see a mass-casualty heat event in that part of the world sooner rather than later. while mercifully this doesn’t seem to be the case here, wet-bulb temperatures are gonna be a particular problem, and likely what does it (especially if it’s accompanied by power shortages or an outage).
a commonly reported threshold is humans can’t survive wet-bulbs of 35°C—which would be 95°F heat at 100% humidity and is already possible in that area of the world, although thankfully still rare—but it’s increasingly clear we also do very badly with substantially lower wet-bulbs:
After analyzing their data, the researchers found that critical wet-bulb temperatures ranged from 25°C to 28°C in hot-dry environments and from 30°C to 31°C in warm-humid environments — all lower than 35°C wet-bulb.
“Our results suggest that in humid parts of the world, we should start to get concerned — even about young, healthy people — when it’s above 31 degrees wet-bulb temperature,” Kenney said. “As we continue our research, we’re going to explore what that number is in older adults, as it will probably be even lower than that.”
and obviously a critical threshold of 31°C is much more attainable in these areas both in the short and long term, which uhhhh yeah, not good!
