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Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

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?

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The humidity amplifies the effects of the heat. I remember the first time I travelled to Arizona and was expecting to suffer when I saw the forecast temperatures were 100+, but the dry heat was - I hesitate to say comfortable - but very different from a 90 degree day on the East Coast with high humidity. An extended period of extreme heat + humidity can be brutal on the body, particularly those already vulnerable or without adequate air conditioning.

The reaction of someone who moved from a desert to Georgia is always interesting. Everyone has a unique way of processing the huge puddles of water under their car. Sometimes it's "oh yeah, humidity." Sometimes it's panic.

Yeah humidity is no joke.

I'm in NY and when it's ~90f degrees out with high humidity, it's an unescapable heat unless you have an A/C.

I'm in ok shape I guess. I walk 3-5 miles a day in all types of weather ranging from about 10f to 100f degrees but when high temps hit with high humidity my skin immediately glazes over and I know to take it easy. My arms will be dripping wet in less than a minute just standing outside doing nothing with a ~60 BPM heart rate.

It's deceptively comfortable :) You can very quickly find yourself dehydrated and in a bad state.

If T is above body temperature anD there is high levels of humidity you can’t lower your temperature by sweating. Therefore, your body temperature will raise to match the environment T even if you don’t twitch a muscle.

On the other hand, if it’s dry the human body can sweat away prodigious amounts of heat

“infrastructure isn't as well in place to deal with things like this“ and people don’t know how to either. It’s similar to blizzards in Georgia. Minnesota is fine with 6” snow. In Georgia it’s lots more risk because of the lack of experience.

It’s bad because people (usually already frail) get heatstroke/overheated and die.

> people (usually already frail)

This always makes these sort of dire predictions sound exaggerated to me. There’s always a population of (usually older) people who are nearing the end and we seem irrationally unwilling to accept “old age” as a cause of death. Any slight disturbance is then blamed and we get dramatic headlines about “hundreds die in 35C heatwave.”

Infants and toddlers are also frail, and regularly die from heatstroke. The probability of this happening increases as temperatures rise.

True, although not to the same degree as seniors by far. I'm struggling to find much data, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950160/ claims +55% male infant mortality rate in Paris and +12% in the rest of the country (females were unaffected, which I guess ties in with male infants generally being more fragile than females) during the 2003 heat wave in France. They don't give baseline rates, though, so it's hard to tell what this means in real numbers.

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.

Yep, and the effects are nonlinear. i.e. increasing marginal danger from every +1F or +5%. Here’s a helpful chart: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bncore/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/h...

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.

It's more like 50k throughout Europe, but that is still awful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave

The East and Midwest is a lot more humid than the West (especially the Southeast), and humid air transfers more heat. Thus, 100 degrees in Alabama's 90% humidity is a lot worse than 100 degrees in Arizona's 10% humidity.

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.

> So what makes this particularly bad?

humidity. (at least in the midwest).

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

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