Comment by bradford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradford | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I'm annoyed with the use of the term 'wet bulb event' here and elsewhere. Wouldn't it put less burden on the reader to just say "wet bulb 35C"? (That is the temperature that most people seem to be referring to when they say 'wet bulb event'.)

Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page:

"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"

I feel like the terms in use around this are quite abstract and hard to reason about. I like that the wikipedia article converts this to something more useful to intuit for most of us:

> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.

The US NWS, for example, uses heat index commonly. In the US south I seldom see it go much over 110F, and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat.

This isn't just a case of hitting some threshold where we all drop dead, but as temperatures rise it will slowly cause people to migrate to more temperate climates and/or seek out better cooling structures (either actively through air conditioning or passively where that isn't an option).

> and six hours is a long time to be exposed to the elements even at the current levels of heat.

In the air-conditioned US. Much of the world gets as hot, if not hotter, without AC to help alleviate the heat.

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