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

nytimes.com

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

#31

Post by frankbreetz »

tomohawk wrote: post #27

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.

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

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

#32

Post by realbarack »

anigbrowl wrote: post #21
realbarack wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay to read the news because I prefer to get information from high-quality organizations that I trust to hire skilled, relatively objective journalists who will work hard to accurately report a story. So much of unpaid journalism is bloggers re-hashing the work of these big(ger)-budget news agencies, often with less clarity and more partisan slant. Not to say NYT, WaPo, WSJ and other high-quality paid sources are p…

All true but most people don't want all their news from one outlet any more.

Yeah. It sucks that there's not a great solution here (at least not one that I know of; I haven't looked to closely at the various buffet-style options). Currently I pay for three subscriptions: one local (Long Beach Press-Telegram) one regional (LA Times) and one national (NY Times).

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

#33

Post by arkades »

hpoe wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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

#34

Post by rhinoceraptor »

hpoe wrote: post #4

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?

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

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

#35

Post by bradknowles »

Retric wrote: post #7
hpoe wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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.

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

#36

Post by maxander »

tomohawk wrote: post #27

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.

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.

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

#37

Post by atoav »

tomohawk wrote: post #27

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.

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.

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

#38

Post by untog »

tomohawk wrote: post #27

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.

...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.

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

#40

Post by untog »

joemaller1 wrote: post #14
jaytaylor wrote: post #3

Now NYT disables reading from incognito. Lame. http://archive.is/cF01U

Logging in sort of defeats the point of private mode.

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

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

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